Part Auditing Tool for Asset Review
Professional - Senior Technical Artist - Kerbal Space Program 2
Summary
The Parts team conducted regular asset reviews, with Art Direction and amongst themselves. Each Parts-Artist (‘Partist’) had their own way for rendering assets; in the editor with different scenes, or in their favorite 3D tool with specialized lighting setups, or sometimes simply taking a screenshot from a viewport.
This created issues in reviewing the asset. After some consideration, it was decided that we could utilize a quasi-lookdev tool that had already been developed, but update it with review-specific presets and controls so Partists could create consistent imagery of their parts-assets when they’re ready for review.
The Work
Utilizing the Unity Editor and our game project particularly helpful to ensure the rendered images were representative of in-game lighting. The tool and UI were written in C# directly in the Unity Editor.
I setup a new preset camera to create a composition was would better represent proportion and illustrate objects.
Although lighting setups were primarily from in-game locations, these were refreshed and approved by Parts-team leadership for review renders.
Quality of life features were added such as environment visibility, rim lights to contrast silhouette, simpler and easier to control camera, light, and object controls.
When the Partists were happy with their composition, they could snap a screenshot of the current view, or snap a series of screenshots that would render orthographic views in addition to their composed image.