Art Is A Mess: Developing A Content Pipeline for A Video Game
Veräjänkorva, Antti (2020)
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2020083119984
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2020083119984
Tiivistelmä
The topic of this thesis was to research how to improve exporting process in a video game content pipeline and implement the improvements.
Games have numerous visual assets which all must be exported. Doing that manually every time is time consuming. Optimizing the export process can significantly save time and automating the exporting process makes exporting easy and simple. The faster the exports, the more iterations can be done and number of iterations equals better quality games.
In order to create an export tool which work also in batches and is stable and automatic, the tool alone will not be enough. There must be a supporting system or a base system to provide additional meta data for the asset so that the computer can autonomously execute the export process without human interaction.
The base system was written first in order create required meta data. The base system was written mostly with Python programming language and some smaller parts were written with Mel and Batch languages. All data was stored in JSON data format.
Using meta data provided by the base system, a fully automated export tool which does not require human interaction was written in order to export asset to the game. The export tool was written into two content creation applications, Blender and Maya. In both applications, export tools were written with Python programming language.
Creating the system included research, solution proposal and implementation of it. Research heavily relay on interviews since there is not much of descriptions of similar systems as written articles. However many companies do create similar system and best to find information about them was to ask from the people who made them. There was three interviews in total and interviews confirmed that companies do create similar systems and gave lot of implementation tips and tricks.
The base system and exporter completed during this project successfully improve the efficiency of the export process by nearly 6 000 %. The base system improved data quality and reduced the number of human made mistakes. Automated exporting also improved working quality for artists by removing flow breaking manual exporting.
Games have numerous visual assets which all must be exported. Doing that manually every time is time consuming. Optimizing the export process can significantly save time and automating the exporting process makes exporting easy and simple. The faster the exports, the more iterations can be done and number of iterations equals better quality games.
In order to create an export tool which work also in batches and is stable and automatic, the tool alone will not be enough. There must be a supporting system or a base system to provide additional meta data for the asset so that the computer can autonomously execute the export process without human interaction.
The base system was written first in order create required meta data. The base system was written mostly with Python programming language and some smaller parts were written with Mel and Batch languages. All data was stored in JSON data format.
Using meta data provided by the base system, a fully automated export tool which does not require human interaction was written in order to export asset to the game. The export tool was written into two content creation applications, Blender and Maya. In both applications, export tools were written with Python programming language.
Creating the system included research, solution proposal and implementation of it. Research heavily relay on interviews since there is not much of descriptions of similar systems as written articles. However many companies do create similar system and best to find information about them was to ask from the people who made them. There was three interviews in total and interviews confirmed that companies do create similar systems and gave lot of implementation tips and tricks.
The base system and exporter completed during this project successfully improve the efficiency of the export process by nearly 6 000 %. The base system improved data quality and reduced the number of human made mistakes. Automated exporting also improved working quality for artists by removing flow breaking manual exporting.