After sending briefs, this is an example of a deliverable for the first round of OS work if we weren't doing concepts in house. We did Intermediates in batches to speed up the workflow without being overwhelming on either side of production and feedback.
After the first round of concepts, I would choose one of the provided options, give feedback, and add sketches or additional reference as necessary.
If we were doing concepting in house I would provide the concept sketches in addition to reference alongside the technical briefs. This batch was later in the dev cycle and we already figured out a cadence so we didn't have to rely on full turnarounds.
After approval the modelers would create the low poly meshes and send them over. I would adjust the meshes in Blender for feedback. All of these assets had strict tri count limits because they would be reused thousands of times during gameplay.
I would periodically check the assets in our test environment to make sure that units, scales, and other details were correct. Sometimes small things slip through the cracks, but they are often easily fixed!
The final assets from our OS partners would be the materials. Often these underwent a single round of revisions after which I would adjust the materials as needed in house. This workflow ended up being much quicker that perfecting everything via feedback.
Intermediate assets were all normalized by hand in terms of scale and material in engine to ensure visual cohesion across all assets while maintaining a unique silhouette and identity for each resource.
I also created several of the intermediates myself, starting with concepts and reference while working closely with our designers to ensure that the ideas fit their specs. This was critical as intermediates got more abstract and "sci-fi" later on.
Finally, after the props were complete, I would render them out in a proprietary tool in Unity and adjust as necessary in Photoshop to make the UI icons. These were some of the last resource icons to go into the game so they went pretty quickly!
I was responsible for managing our outsourcing partners in the creation of hundreds of Intermediate and resource assest over the course of development on Techtonica. I wrote technical briefs, communicated on timelines, provided feedback, and integrated deliverables into the game. We are super thankful to our partners for creating such a huge part of the game and being so easy to work with!
I also created several of these assets by hand when time constraints limited our scheduling. Ultimately, most of these assets underwent revisions across development as style and rendering pipelines were adjusted so digging into Blender, Substance, and Photoshop was routine for me on each one of these pieces.
