Decal Tool and Pipeline

Professional - Senior Technical Artist - Kerbal Space Program 2

Summary

Decals for Parts were deemed important because they would enable our Parts-Artists (‘Partists’) to break up repetition in our Trim Sheet materials, by adding decals to arbitrary spots of any parts model.

Decals had not been utilized on parts yet, so it was not part of the content creation pipeline. I designed and developed a workflow for Partists to place decals non-destructively in 3dsMax.

The Work

I developed a workflow and pipeline that delivered assets from 3dsMax to Unity and processed all artist-placed geometry cards into Unity runtime decals.

The decal placement tool and UI was developed in 3dsMax with mostly Python and some Maxscript. The FBX was setup to deliver specific data for Unity to recognize and process simple geometry cards into Unity-engine built assets.

The video here demonstrates the workflow going from 3dsMax all the way to the Unity Editor.

The workflow was inspired by the decal process id Software utilized starting with DOOM (2016).