Help me understand assets.

DaffyDux

Hi everybody!

First-time poster, long-time lurker, big MMORPG fan.

AoC has captured my imagination and I have been following the project for some time. I recently qualified in a design-related field and have been using Blender and Unreal Engine for interior renders, so can appreciate how much time and effort goes into creating digital assets.

I'm curious how Steven and the team go about creating assets for the game, the development pipeline and the aspirational amount of assets Intrepid plans on creating for Alpha, Beta, etc.

I have been thinking about Armour sets and the number of assets needed...

As I understand (and please correct me If I am wrong) there will be 3 "types" of armor in Ashes.

Light/Cloth
Medium/Leather
Heavy/Plate

Each armor type will have 5 tiers; T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, and have 8 components; Helmet, Shoulder, Chest-Piece, Wrists, Gloves, Belt, Pants and Boots. There will be options for 2 genders. (denoted through different Chest-Pieces) and there will be 6 levels of rarity; Poor, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary. (Which will be denoted through different Icons rather than differences in a 3d asset)

There will be 9 races in AoC; Kaelar, Vaelune, Dunir, Nikua, Ren'Kai, Vek, Empyrean, Py'Rai, Tulnar. Each requires its own version of the 3 armor types (Cloth, Leather and Plate) at 5 Tiers, compromised of 8 components (Helmet, Shoulder, Chest-Piece, Wrists, Gloves, Belt, Pants and Boots) with an additional chest-piece to represent female armor.

That means that for each race there needs to be (5x8)+5 = 45 assets for each armor. x3 for each type means a total of 135 assets for each race. x9 for each race = 1215 assets.

I understand that a lot of these assets would only be minor iterations on each other. There isn't much (If any) difference between a Dunir, T2 Leather Gloves and T3 Leather gloves for example.

Am I thinking about this correctly? Does this make sense?

If so, I wonder how many assets AoC has created so far and how many it wants to have at launch?

Thanks if you have stuck through my ramblings. Look forward to posting more in the future.

Daffy.

Ludullu

From my understanding you're correct and that is the exact reason why mmos are such big and difficult games to develop. They take a ton of time even outside the sheer amount of design you gotta go through to make them interesting. And you listed just the armor assets. There's a whole world (if not several) of other assets the game needs.

And as Narc said in his video on monthly streams - Intrepid really have to push the idea of each sellable cosmetic as one of the assets that they need for the game.

Tyranthraxus

Aye - it would appear you already have more insight than the vast majority of players ever will.

In developing their own assets (the alternative is buying rights & sets of assets from online sellers), they're in the midst of a massive undertaking. In addition to the things you've mentioned, they've also got to make 4 sets of *every* building - to accommodate the seasons (though a lot of games just have 1 set for spring/summer/fall, and a 2nd for winter). In previous years, such detail may not have been as-noticeable - but the UE5 engine is just on another level, and NOT adjusting buildings for the 4 seasons will certainly stand out as noticeable, to players.

Good luck to you, and indeed, to us both; yours truly has been trying to get in hours - hour-by-hour, day-by-day - in learning the UE5 game engine. It's certainly a god-send in terms of saving on coding, and its built-in dynamic lighting systems saves on so much extra effort, versus Unity and other platforms. Game-development is one of those rare fields where your qualifications are measured in what you can show that you can do; Paper degrees are often meaningless to knowing companies and development teams, in finding new hires and interns.

Azherae

DaffyDux wrote: »

Hi everybody!

First-time poster, long-time lurker, big MMORPG fan.

AoC has captured my imagination and I have been following the project for some time. I recently qualified in a design-related field and have been using Blender and Unreal Engine for interior renders, so can appreciate how much time and effort goes into creating digital assets.

I'm curious how Steven and the team go about creating assets for the game, the development pipeline and the aspirational amount of assets Intrepid plans on creating for Alpha, Beta, etc.

I have been thinking about Armour sets and the number of assets needed...

As I understand (and please correct me If I am wrong) there will be 3 "types" of armor in Ashes.

Light/Cloth
Medium/Leather
Heavy/Plate

Each armor type will have 5 tiers; T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, and have 8 components; Helmet, Shoulder, Chest-Piece, Wrists, Gloves, Belt, Pants and Boots. There will be options for 2 genders. (denoted through different Chest-Pieces) and there will be 6 levels of rarity; Poor, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary. (Which will be denoted through different Icons rather than differences in a 3d asset)

There will be 9 races in AoC; Kaelar, Vaelune, Dunir, Nikua, Ren'Kai, Vek, Empyrean, Py'Rai, Tulnar. Each requires its own version of the 3 armor types (Cloth, Leather and Plate) at 5 Tiers, compromised of 8 components (Helmet, Shoulder, Chest-Piece, Wrists, Gloves, Belt, Pants and Boots) with an additional chest-piece to represent female armor.

That means that for each race there needs to be (5x8)+5 = 45 assets for each armor. x3 for each type means a total of 135 assets for each race. x9 for each race = 1215 assets.

I understand that a lot of these assets would only be minor iterations on each other. There isn't much (If any) difference between a Dunir, T2 Leather Gloves and T3 Leather gloves for example.

Am I thinking about this correctly? Does this make sense?

If so, I wonder how many assets AoC has created so far and how many it wants to have at launch?

Thanks if you have stuck through my ramblings. Look forward to posting more in the future.

Daffy.

While everything you say is true, the specifics of how a given piece is defined, particularly as a mesh, shouldn't be viewed as 'an asset'. The various tools available now mean that the process is moreso based around finding a base that will deform correctly when applied to another model, applying, and fixing things that don't look right.

Tweaking animations to prevent clipping and strange deforms is a lot more work than asset creation in the way you may be thinking of.

I'm not the artist/modeler in my group so I'll leave it to her to expand further if it matters, since beyond this sort of thing, I have to ask her for feasibility of certain designs anyway. But based on what we know, and what other games generally spend their time on, it's obviously still a lot of work, but it might not make sense to perceive it as a staggering amount, or even a particularly large bulk of work compared to some other things.

I won't even attempt to address other assets, as those are really up to the amount of depth in the shapes required, but the streams have art sections that show off the systems for those as well. In general, I've seen full scenes done in about 24 man-hours, and full armor done in 8-10 from scratch, 2-3 from mesh to original.

Someone will be along to correct me if I have misquoted the numbers.

GrandSerpent

Azherae wrote: »

DaffyDux wrote: »

Hi everybody!

First-time poster, long-time lurker, big MMORPG fan.

AoC has captured my imagination and I have been following the project for some time. I recently qualified in a design-related field and have been using Blender and Unreal Engine for interior renders, so can appreciate how much time and effort goes into creating digital assets.

I'm curious how Steven and the team go about creating assets for the game, the development pipeline and the aspirational amount of assets Intrepid plans on creating for Alpha, Beta, etc.

I have been thinking about Armour sets and the number of assets needed...

As I understand (and please correct me If I am wrong) there will be 3 "types" of armor in Ashes.

Light/Cloth
Medium/Leather
Heavy/Plate

Each armor type will have 5 tiers; T1, T2, T3, T4, T5, and have 8 components; Helmet, Shoulder, Chest-Piece, Wrists, Gloves, Belt, Pants and Boots. There will be options for 2 genders. (denoted through different Chest-Pieces) and there will be 6 levels of rarity; Poor, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary. (Which will be denoted through different Icons rather than differences in a 3d asset)

There will be 9 races in AoC; Kaelar, Vaelune, Dunir, Nikua, Ren'Kai, Vek, Empyrean, Py'Rai, Tulnar. Each requires its own version of the 3 armor types (Cloth, Leather and Plate) at 5 Tiers, compromised of 8 components (Helmet, Shoulder, Chest-Piece, Wrists, Gloves, Belt, Pants and Boots) with an additional chest-piece to represent female armor.

That means that for each race there needs to be (5x8)+5 = 45 assets for each armor. x3 for each type means a total of 135 assets for each race. x9 for each race = 1215 assets.

I understand that a lot of these assets would only be minor iterations on each other. There isn't much (If any) difference between a Dunir, T2 Leather Gloves and T3 Leather gloves for example.

Am I thinking about this correctly? Does this make sense?

If so, I wonder how many assets AoC has created so far and how many it wants to have at launch?

Thanks if you have stuck through my ramblings. Look forward to posting more in the future.

Daffy.

While everything you say is true, the specifics of how a given piece is defined, particularly as a mesh, shouldn't be viewed as 'an asset'. The various tools available now mean that the process is moreso based around finding a base that will deform correctly when applied to another model, applying, and fixing things that don't look right.

Tweaking animations to prevent clipping and strange deforms is a lot more work than asset creation in the way you may be thinking of.

I'm not the artist/modeler in my group so I'll leave it to her to expand further if it matters, since beyond this sort of thing, I have to ask her for feasibility of certain designs anyway. But based on what we know, and what other games generally spend their time on, it's obviously still a lot of work, but it might not make sense to perceive it as a staggering amount, or even a particularly large bulk of work compared to some other things.

I won't even attempt to address other assets, as those are really up to the amount of depth in the shapes required, but the streams have art sections that show off the systems for those as well. In general, I've seen full scenes done in about 24 man-hours, and full armor done in 8-10 from scratch, 2-3 from mesh to original.

Someone will be along to correct me if I have misquoted the numbers.

Yes, this is all more or less correct. If character models have relatively similar overall proportions, armor created for one race can be deformed to fit another without the artist needing to do anything beyond tweaking the asset to prevent clipping or visible distortion due to differences in proportions.

All the pieces of a single set of armor would also probably be designed and modeled at once, then split up into separate files. So, it's probably more accurate to think of a full set of armor, rather than a gear piece like "Mithril Boots" or "Leather Tunic", as an asset.

So, while producing the quantity of content needed for equipment in an MMO is still a massive amount of work, it's not necessary as much as it might initially appear. In AAA game development, the work is also usually split up between multiple people. Concept art, modelling, material design, and processing the asset into something usable in-game might all be done by different people, or teams of people.