Sunday, January 06, 2013 – 95 views
— by spacekatgal
The following is a cautionary tale of what NOT to do while working in a professional videogame pipeline. I'm sharing this, not to pick on the person that did this, but to illustrate why the ability to think several steps through the pipeline is your top priority in making hires.
The following is a piece of trench geometry made by a former Giant Spacekat employee. Trench Geometry here. Looks pretty good, right? The polycount isn't excessive, and the materials look solid. But, if you take a closer look at the approach this person used, you can see shortcuts taken - shortcuts that will cause lots of extra work for the next person in the pipeline.
If you look at the floor, do you see the grating? Grating texture map here. Here is the shortcut this person took. Never, ever, EVER do this. They simply mapped a portion of the space to a tiny square texture, and let the rest of the UV area run off the side. Maya wraps this area around repeatedly, but Unreal will not. As a result, your lightmaps will crash, and Unreal will announce invalid UV cords. In short, doing this properly would have taken this person 15-30 more minutes. for the next person in the pipeline - diagnosing the problem and repairing it will take much, much longer.
In another shortcut, you can see how this person did not UV the black areas of the trench. Here is the shortcut this person took. And seriously never, ever do this either. See how it's just a squiggly line? The black areas are literally mapped into a line. Again, this will cause the pipeline to crash in the next step when lightmaps and UV cords cannot be determined.
If you are serious about working in videogames, DETAILS MATTER. I cannot stress this enough. Mistakes are inevitable, but your teammates have to trust you to do your work as completely and error-free as is possible.
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