CSE 490 - Tech Art for Game Development

Assignment #2: Understanding pipelines for games

Vet a production pipeline

Scenario:

You are a Character Technical Artist tasked with adding automatic/dynamic secondary animation to hanging accessories on a player character. Your art lead asks the following:

“Character customization is very important to our game. You can pick up various pieces of gear, accessories and weapons throughout each level. We want at least 256 unique items to be collectable in the first release and there will be subsequent DLCs in which we add more unique items. Our animation lead had this great idea – these new items should animate automatically based on the player’s motion to emphasize the unique silhouettes of all the players in the world. Is there a way to do that? How feasible would it be to add this to our character pipeline?”

Summary:

Follow the existing pipeline in either Unreal or Unity. Write a technical evaluation of this pipeline that outlines (for a studio technical lead audience) how feasible you believe this pipeline would be to repeat multiple times throughout the project. Pitch an idea to improve the existing pipeline. Write up possible improvements to the existing pipeline, draw or use screenshots to make ideas clear. Feel free to pitch an entirely new pipeline or secondary tool if you think that would be the best solution. Mock up any new UI additions or changes.

For turn-in we will be using Collect-It on catalyst. You can find it here. You will need to log in with your UWNetID. Each week you will be submitting your files to the appropriate assignment. For this assignment, you will be turning in the following:

What to turn in:

• Minimum of a full-page document (may be as many pages as necessary)
Must contain:
• Concise descriptive paragraph giving the technical evaluation of the existing pipeline
• Bullet point all list items
• Several sentences describing feasibility of repeating the existing pipeline many times throughout the project
• A mockup of (at least one) of the following items:
• Improvements that could be made to the existing pipeline
• A supplementary tool to improve the pipeline
• A completely new tool
• An alternative pipeline
• A paragraph that describes how your new pipeline meets each of the pipeline pillars – iteration, flexibility, automation, and future-proof/scalability

Your files are due in by Tuesday 8/8 at 11:59 PM.

Grading Rubric (out of 100):

• 25 – Clarity and conciseness of technical evaluation
• 10 – Feasibility decision
• 65 – Pipeline improvements
• 10 – Clarity of ideas
• 15 – Supporting illustrations and diagrams
• 20 – Does it improve the pipeline (reduce complexity, reduce time)?
• 20 – Meets pipeline pillars - future-proof /scalability, flexibility, iteration, automation

Additional Resources:

Unreal Tutorials

Option 1 – Using physics

How to apply to a character:

1. Add dynamic static mesh object to scene
2. Add constraint
3. Parent to player character
4. Set constraint parameters

Option 2 – Using the animation state machine

Option 3 – Using ragdoll

Unity Tutorials

Engine physics