 This show is brought to you by these awesome people. Hey there you beautiful people! Today's highlights. Making building assets manageable. Batman joins Joker. And a true story about project management. Welcome to the BNPR show. A celebration of stylized and non-photoreal rendering. Let's start with something fresh, but kind of the same. So light, samey fresh, or freshy same. Anyway, we are still dealing with NPR. We will be discussing art styles and the workload to make them manageable. Specifically for games, the amount of work needed to populate the world is huge. So imagine the workload to make a static scene in a room, but for hundreds of rooms, and stack that on with game design, programming, plus the unnamed and unseen amount of work dealing with the fans, marketing, contract, and all that stuff. At some point, the workload and stress of making any game is just impossible for mere mortals. In fact, there is a famous quote about game development. Making games is impossible. Let's modify the quote for us here though. Making thousands of assets is impossible if we are not wise and crafty. Here are some of the steps that indie game developers use to make making games and great looking artwork manageable. There are three main parts for most 3D assets, and they are 1. The shading. This includes texture, lighting, and shading. 2. The mesh. This is the geometry and the level of details on the mesh. And 3. The animation. This includes rigging, weight painting, and the animation itself. We will focus more on the first two since they are more visible and easy to show. Here is how some of the most famous indie game developers handle asset creation and styles. The game Ooblets is mainly developed by a two person team. With the amount of assets in this game, one may think they are gods for creating this cute game. To prove that, there are serious design considerations for the art style. Let's use this frame from version 0.8 of the game for this discussion. There are no tiny details. In fact, every detail has a certain size limit and frequency. It can be said that the details are chunky. You will hear chunky a lot in this video. All characters and objects are built from simple shapes with minimal modification. You can see the primitives which all objects are built from. For texture, all assets include a soft gradient. Talking about soft, the shadows are soft as well. To unify everything, a medium to low contrast color palette is employed. In the game Here Comes Nico, the models are clearly very low poly. The same chunky model details are everywhere. No small details that can become meaningless from a distance. For textures, the detail on the ground textures are sparse. In fact, there are no details in the chunky grass, foliage, and tree trunk. And best of all, the characters are just planes. That's the absolute minimum for characters. There are few other games with characters as planes, and we're sure you can name some of them. Speaking of planes, the ultimate in plainness is the game Doordong. The backgrounds are created from planes of watercolor paintings. This style holds close to the power of watercolor being an art form that requires speed to execute. Many iterations of the same background can be made in a very short amount of time. Hence, the backgrounds can be made rapidly without the need to worry about complex 3D meshes for each object. The character is in 3D. There are two types of textures on her. The first is the layer of static texture, then followed by a simple interactive texture for the paper feel to make her fit the painterly background. What if you want even less? The ultimate frugalness in art style is the game Button City. The whole game is shadeless, but with a very pleasing color palette. The required skill to work in shadeless is the control of color contrast. Button City developers are a tiny group of pros, and it shows with the colors they picked. A color-trained eye can pick beginners from the masters very easily. To know the difference, you might want to get this e-book. When everything is shadeless, the object silhouettes become very important. If all the objects follow a certain design language, then everything will fit well into the scene. Haven Park is a game made by one person. In this game, the color contrast is very high, the texture is darker, and the gradient is subdued. Object details are chunky. For example, the flowers are just solid colors with no other details. This design language unifies everything in the game. The size of every object and the camera placement gives this game a toy model vibe. That alone exudes an appeal that many will like. What if you have full control of color and the math of the colors? You might be someone who creates a game like the Gecko Gods. The focus is on the lines, silhouette, and colors. Filters are used to get the lines, then textures are applied to them. With good color math, these lines blend very well with the environment. The character stands out because it uses a different hue than everything else. And that is one way to create contrast, but will not work with colorful scenes. To create dynamic contrast, you really have to master colors. In the game Sable, the dark lines and interesting hues are the selling point. The charm is the design language similar to the work of the late French cartoonist Mobius. The game is situated in the desert and everything is sparse. Creating huge areas is much easier. Points of interest often have more prominent hues. Again, color is playing a major role. With all the dark lines, objects with dense details in the distance can become a black blob. So they remedied the distant lines with atmospheric color tinting. When you can create all the assets and the numbers are getting big, some sort of asset management will be required. And no, we don't mean purely relying on the upcoming asset manager, since you will not always be working inside Blender. Time for a short real story. This happened to one of our friends. We'll call him Bob for the show. We don't want to reveal his real name, but this true story is worth sharing. Bob worked in a huge production with thousands of assets created by his team. When it was time for Bob and his team to update their progress to the client, they just do what most Blender artists do. Just send them the raw files and move on with more work. The production halted a few hours after the client got those files. The now furious client met everyone at the office and laid it out unfiltered. There is no logic to the arrangement of the files. A scene cut is next to the props and every random bit from another scene and the cuts. The files are not properly named. They are not sure where the entry point is to even look at the progress. When they open a blend file, everything is named something like plain.051 or this.a bunch of numbers. You get what I mean. So the client delayed the payment of the progress until they sorted out the naming and the project structure. It took them weeks to get the project back in production and get paid. All those costly man hours to fix problems that we often overlook. Thus, in 2015, we wrote quite extensively on project management, how to organize a project, file naming conventions, object naming conventions, and how to work in a team. Please find the link to the post in the show notes and learn from Bob's mistakes. Wrapping up, to make asset creation manageable for bigger projects, make sure your skills are aligned with the artwork style. If you don't have the skill to make this style, please work on mastering the skill or lowering the artwork specification. The style must be simple enough not to stress you out. Chunky details is the name of the game. A nice color palette and good contrast will help your artwork stand out. Don't take learning color lightly. Great models have less impact without great colors. Make sure your style is consistent. We don't want artwork styles too different from one to the other. And remember to give your objects sensible names and organize your files. It's good to learn this early. Most of these games presented have some form of demo available. Please check them out. Okay, let's lighten up from the serious talks. Feast your eyes and heart on these gems. Escape is the thesis animation created by Tyra or Tyra and Jin Zhou. Modeling was done in Maya and rendering in Eevee. The BNPR community helped a bit with the look development and that's very cool. The end result has a very well done mood and color. Big Top Burger Expo is an animation by Worthy Kids. Most food trucks want to be the best but are just so so. One food truck wants to be the very best from the other end. It's a lifetime experience eating their food and the doctor says I don't eat food. Into the nightmare ZSJL Fanfic is an animation by Zytus. In his desperation to bring things back, Batman forms an uneasy alliance with the clown. The style in his animation really fits the mood. Well done. The bulk of the usual stuff not shown in the show is available in the show notes. They are the tutorials, news, and tons of animations. Yes, this month we have a ton of NPR animation. And this show was made possible by these awesome people. Please thank them kindly. Before we go, one final question. How do you project manage your files?