Creating Assets

Hello,

I was wondering what your favorite software is for creating/designing assets for games. Things like a ship and enemies in space invaders(unity tutorial). Or if you were to design the flappy bird, bird. I have Maya, and the Adobe Creative Cloud. I want to stream line and design Basic 2D/3D images for import into projects as characters or environment.

Thanks.

 

Now days I would do everything in Blender. Then if I wanted to make a 2d sprite of a character, I would just render the model in the desired perspectives. I would use Blenders animation and rendering system to "automate" the build of the character assets. I would send them right to the input director of a tool that makes sprite sheets. If I couldn't find a sprite sheet generating app that worked exactly like I like, I would write one myself. I would probably write it in Python in Blender. It would take me two evenings of work. (depending on how bad my day job kicked my but that day)

I have toiled long hard hours with 2d animation software, and you are better off going 3d here ~always~..

 

Maya is great for 3d assets and animation. If you want to make Flappy Bird style pixel art, Photoshop is great. You can make a low resolution canvas, like 64x64, and paint pixels. You can then enlarge it afterwards using nearest neighbor to preserve the hard pixel edges.

 

For 3d, and for high-detailed 2d, I recommend Blender unless you have the money and know how to use Max/Maya. The 3d works pretty well with Unity, and for 2d, you can do so many things with Blender that you can't use directly with Unity, especially in the material/texturing department.

For lower detail pixel art, I would usually use Cosmigo Pro Motion. Many people also use Graphics Gale. If you know how, photoshop is great too, but it doesn't have dedicated frame based animation, rather is stuck with layer based stuff(unless I'm wrong, which wouldn't be the first time). Pro Motion has great tools for animation and pixel art. For example, you create the palette you want, and you make gradients within that palette. Then you can select a brush tool that works like dodge/burn but keep within the gradients you decided. It also has great tools for building tilesets. You can have a 32x32 tile for example be set to show repeated to make it tileable yourself, and you can draw on any of the repetitions, edges, wherever. Then you can use that in a tile map. The tilemap project allows you to create a "level" and draw tiles on it as you see fit. You can then link positions to tiles you have, and you can draw new tiles in a given position, for example to blend grass with sand, or corners. Then you can grab those tiles and put them in your "level" to see how they work together.

Yup, the 2d pipeline is quite advanced, and so is the 3d pipeline. The best part is that there are still great free tools for all of these things, though usually you can do things easier in paid tools assuming you know how to use them and can buy them.

 

My favs are blender, illustrator and Photoshop at the moment. Between them I can pretty much do anything I need asset wise.

 

If you have Maya at your disposal, use it. Blender is okay for rendering out 2d assets, but I wouldn't use it for making 3d assets. There's some things you can't do in Blender or have to use workarounds for( custom vertex normals, vertex alpha, limited fbx pipeline, ect ), while in Maya it "just works" out of the box.

 

Blender & Photoshop currently. However I'm hoping in the future to get to work with Maya or Max.

 

Well, not that I'm a Blender fanboi(though I use it exclusively because I don't have access to Maya or something else like that)...but Blender is fine for most 3d assets and most people. The features you mention, some exist in Blender, and some don't. A lot of the problem is in getting the information from Blender to Unity.

Custom Vertex Normals, it is true that this one has yet to come into Blender, though from the latest developer meeting notes it should be coming within a point release or two. Honestly though, I'd have to see a real use case for this because I've never seen one. I know what it is, just now how I would truly need it in an indie game. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it has a use, just that I want to know what it is in order to learn something(you know, advance my knowledge).

Vertex alpha, while it doesn't directly exist in Blender, I saw in this very forum someone created a Blender exporter to fbx that added it, along with vertex colors. It has to use a separate vertex color channel though, so it is a workaround of sorts. As far as using the feature, I can much more see where this is useful, though realistically it might be better to use an alpha channel in a texture as as part of the fragment shader do the alpha transparency like most people do it.

FBX pipeline, not much to say here. It generally works fine for most things. It even supports blendshapes, though you have to do it a certain way(which is basically what you are saying...workarounds).

 

I was originally a Maya user.
And I still use Maya once in a while too.
But most of the time, I use Blender for making my 3D art projects, models and assets etc, for a game project/other, that I'm currently working on.
I also use Photobean,............sorry, I mean Photoshop and Gimp for making my
2d textures too.

 

Custom vertex normals are commonly used in trees and foliage models where you have a lot of flat planes intersecting where it would otherwise create ugly seams where they intersect. See http://ericchadwick.com/img/tree_shading_examples.html

as for fbx, yes exporting mostly works, but importing fbx isn't so good(from when I last tried it). A lot of people may want to modify a model from another software or from the asset store or whatever.

I agree though that Blender is should work fine for most indie artists, as long as your game doesn't have trees.

 

Hmm....I've never created trees or foliage so I haven't run into that. And yes I agree, you can't really import FBX models that well into Unity from what I've heard.

EDIT***

I meant to say to import well into Blender doesn't work well, not Unity....OOPS. We were talking about Blender's FBX import/export.

 

Unity's FBX import is fine - most problems come from the application doing the exporting, and the layout of the data.

Houdini for instance, swaps UVs around, and Modo has it's own concept of edge/vertex smoothing.

If you're jumping between applications, especially using multiple apps to output artwork into a single project, this can make things complicated if you haven't nailed how each works, as you'll get inconsistencies in your imported data.

It can be a pain in the backside, but that's standards for you (nobody adheres to them as expected)

 

I must be doing something right in my quest to use graphics for my motive to further my understanding of C#. I end up here in this forum realizing that even the most simple of things necessary for Unity, are not always free or adaptable for where we are at in each step of the programing journey. The last post here was from 2014. I just checked on the Blender web site though and am currently downloading it as I write type this.

 

Cool! Glad to see you're thinking realistically and planning ahead.

Also, welcome to the Unity Forums.
And best of Good luck!