Making video game assets is a multi-step process in cooperation with all disciplines in game development, whether in AAA or the indie scene. An artist in a large studio is a single cog in a machine: one artist makes concept art, another illustrations, 3D models, rigs, or animations. A developer outside of the AAA space is likely to need help with assets, and they’re going to need more help finding the best tools for making assets or where to look for cheap ones. Start by learning the step-by-step process for making an asset in a larger studio. Read on for an artist’s perspective on the steps that go into the asset creation process, both for those curious and those looking for resources to get started themselves.
What are assets in game design?
Assets in game design are any file, piece of art, or code that goes into making a game. Every game developer works with assets. A composer, sound designer, or foley artist works with sound files, which are assets. Programmers and occasionally designers work with code, another type of asset. Every product from the artists is an asset too: 3D models, sprites, skeletons, animations, textures, and UI elements.
Creating game assets is a long and difficult process. The whole team must work together not just on their own assets but to make sure they are cohesive and fit the game, since each asset in turn goes into a larger level, quest, mechanic, or character. A level is made out of 3D models, textures, music, sounds, enemies, and many other individual assets, for example. The 3D artists must work with the texture artists to ensure the character looks correct, which in turn is the result of a brief the character designer created, a character designer who works with narrative designers, writers, and voice actors to bring to life.
How to make assets for a video game?
Make assets for a video game by cooperating with designers and refining assets until they’re polished and ready for production. A game-ready asset isn’t a single polished asset but the result of planning, discussion, illustration, roughing out, and optimization for a real-time experience. Assets are something all developers work with, but I’m only able to speak to my art background here.
The asset production process is likely to look different for your game. A small indie game only needs a small team of 2-3 artists in some cases. The tools, however, are similar in AAA and indie work: Photoshop, Blender, or Maya for visuals, and Unity or Unreal are increasingly popular game engines. The difference with a larger team is that they need to communicate with each other effectively, and different management strategies are necessary as a result.
A different solution is to outsource some of the assets when a studio needs help meeting a deadline or an indie studio doesn’t have the staff to build their solutions. The advantage of outsourcing is having enough hands to get assets out the door when a deadline is looming. Studios like Gearbox have used asset creation companies like Keywords Studios to finish their most recent release, Borderlands 4. The disadvantages, though, are similar to having a large team in the first place. Communication is a challenge when working with an external team, so there needs to be a clear pipeline for reviewing assets and communicating feedback to the other company.
The steps for an animated AAA asset proceed from ideation to completion with reviews all along the way to make sure the designers and artists are in agreement. Teams follow the steps below to bring assets from ideation to production.
- Brainstorm ideas with the team
- Sketch multiple concepts for the prioritized ideas
- Review the sketches with the team
- Illustrate the refined concept
- Approve illustrated concepts
- Model the blockout of the asset
- Refine the topology and create textures for the model
- Rig animated assets with tech artist
- Animate the asset
1. Brainstorm ideas with the team
Brainstorm ideas with the team to generate a rough set of assets and descriptions for game artists to build upon. The meetings at this stage consist primarily of designers, since they decide how to make the game fun, engaging, and clear. Designers have an idea of both some of the visual requirements and what types of creatures, characters, and environments need to go into the game, but they need to discuss the ideas and come up with a way to communicate that vision to the art team. Designers end the brainstorming process by listing off the types of assets they need: characters, creatures, props, environment artwork, and so on.
A well-organized team ought to have an artist present even at the early brainstorming stages. Getting all the artists on in a large, AAA team isn’t feasible, but an artist is going to have the best idea of whether an idea for an asset is going to work. They know the limitations to what they’re able to model, texture, rig, and animate, so they’re able to ground the discussion and make sure the designers walk away with a workable idea. Having one senior artist at minimum is going to make sure the designers’ ideas are achievable.
Brainstorming isn’t one type of process, but each studio has their own methods, style of management, and culture. Brainstorming happens in dedicated meetings but also through informal chats between designers. Artists don’t become involved until designers are ready to discuss the best ideas and decide what needs more exploration.
Many designers are present at the brainstorming session, but senior designers have the final word. Once the team has come up with a set of ideas, the senior leads are there to decide what to prioritize. Having a clear idea of what’s essential and more prio is important for the artists, too, since they’re the ones who need to know what to work on first.
2. Sketch multiple concepts for the prioritized ideas
Sketch multiple concepts for the prioritized ideas for designers to get their eyes on before continuing. The goal is to spend as much time reviewing in the early phases so detailed 3D modeling and animation work is saved for well-planned assets. Artists create several sketches quickly, starting off with 2D sketches before going into 3D. Smaller studios without the extra manpower often go straight into a 3D concept, which is creating a simple, sketch-like model directly in 3D software. The concept is the same whether in 2D or 3D, though: get a quick set of ideas in front of the team.
Creating a selection of artwork to be rejected has the potential to be demoralizing, but it’s easier for designers to pick from an existing list than come up with something new. Three options means designers are able to better articulate their thoughts through examples, since they’re able to point out exactly what is effective and ineffective about each one. The same process happened in designing characters for Star Wars, where artists created a number of sketches, George Lucas picked the best, then the artists developed those ideas. A team of artists working together on the initial project lets their imagination run wild until the final design is locked in. The artist who used the top of a sanitizer bottle as a reference came up with the final design of General Grievous that went into production.
3. Review the sketches with the team
Review the sketches with the team to make sure everyone the designers and artists are in agreement about the core details going the same direction before entering production. A set of options means designers are much better able to articulate what works about a design and what doesn’t. If the artist has misunderstood what the designer had in mind, designers are better able to say exactly what the design’s must-haves are. Artists are also able to communicate what the tech limitations are and any other constraints on the team.
Reviewing artwork multiple times with the designers before finalizing assets makes the game feel like a cohesive experience rather than a collection of unrelated ideas. Portal’s design team learned through playtesting that the visual language of the game’s assets determined how clearly the game taught the player. The game used to have one red button for activating any device, but players always looked for a cube to put on every button, even when it wasn’t necessary. Keeping one type of button for cubes and another type for one-off events made sure players knew not to go down that rabbit hole searching the area. This visual consistency between art and gameplay requires artists and designers to approve artwork together before it goes into production.
4. Illustrate the refined concept
Illustrate the refined concept so the team has a single vision to work with. The asset isn’t ready to go into full production yet, but the 3D artists need a detailed brief to work with which gives guidance on the object or character’s style, key poses, and views from different angles. Creating a reference version for the other artists is the job of a concept artist.
A concept artist creates their concept drawings based on the best sketches and notes the design team has prepared with the artists up to this point. A concept artist still doesn’t create a final or polished artwork. Rather, the concepts capture all the relevant information in one place for turning the experiments up to this point into a polished product. A character is drawn from multiple angles and with their most characteristic poses so an animator and 3D artist is able to bring them to life. A prop in the environment like a chest or is drawn in all its states, open and closed. The goal is to create a reference for the modelers and artists that keeps the style cohesive and fits the parameters set by the rest of the team.
5. Approve illustrated concepts
Approving the illustrated concepts is the responsibility of a lead or senior designer in that area. This final approval stage involves far fewer individuals than the brainstorming process. The hard work of making sure the right design language is used and the asset has a coherent direction has already been done, so here it’s up to lead designers and senior devs to greenlight the concept so it’s able to go into full production.
6. Model the blockout of the asset
Model the blockout of the asset, which means creating a rough, sketch-like outline. The goal is to get the major proportions and elements right before investing in fine detail, texturing, rigging, and animating. Starting with cubes and spheres and similar low-poly shapes gives the artist a chance to make adjustments before making a game-ready asset.
Each level of review makes sure the final artwork is cohesive, as failing to plan early is going to result in more work down the line. Michelangelo’s mistake painting the Sistine Chapel shows what goes wrong when you don’t plan. His failure to plan, as gorgeous as it ended up, resulted in mistakes still visible on the chapel’s ceiling to this day. He made the mistake of painting several panels in his first session without blocking it out and seeing how it looked. Instead, he painted them fully on the scaffolding from just a few feet away. The composition looked pretty good until he climbed down to the ground to take a break. What looked excellent up close was way too small to make out from the ground, so he only realized partway through that he needed to make his figures much bigger.
Technical artists are a key part of planning and ensuring an asset is solid before going into production. A tech artist reviews the blockouts at this stage to make sure they match performance standards before moving on to polish. A technical artist is responsible for the art workflows. They support the tools that bring a concept to finished artwork, and have a holistic view of how modeling, retopologizing, texturing, rigging, animating, and getting the asset into the game engine works. A technical artist has more or less direct involvement in creating assets, depending on whether they emphasize the technical part or the artist part more. The role varies from studio to studio. In either case, the technical artist bridges the gap between the art and dev team, making sure the artists have the tech they need to do their jobs.
The process of review is the same at each step, ensuring members of the team are in communication and creating consistent work. Leads and directors review the asset again before it leaves the 3D blockout stage for full polish. While not necessary, getting feedback from the artist who created the original concept is helpful as well. She has a clearer idea of what the final result ought to look like, since she created the original references with the team already.
7. Refine the topology to shippable quality
Refine the game asset to shippable quality, which means giving it the fully detailed 3D model and textures. Creating a full-detail asset means more than creating the most detailed mesh as possible, but optimizing it for its final use-case. A character on-screen like Kratos is going to have a much more detailed mesh than a tree in the distance.
The details of how to create a model, how many triangles it ought to have, and the right way to model for animation is going to depend on the medium and art style your studio uses. A mobile game or a highly stylized, cartoonish game is able to get away with simpler models than a AAA game. In all cases, artists focus more attention to places that are going to deform in the final animation and moving organic figures that are close to the camera. A model without a well-considered edge flow and surface topology is going to run into issues in a real-time game environment. Poor topology reflects light in strange ways or causes artifacts when smoothing, since faces are unnaturally bunched together or are otherwise difficult to render. A well-considered topology is important for animation, too, because an organic surface needs to look natural when bending, squashing, stretching, twisting, and performing any other action when animated.
Topology looks a little different depending on which of the two major types of 3D modeling in use for this asset: hard-surface modeling or organic modeling. Organic modeling is used for surfaces which move and bend like human and animal characters. The artist considers the shape of the edges around deformation points so the creature moves in a believable way. Hard-surface modeling means creating shapes that don’t deform, but the topology is still worth considering since there are many types of hard surface. Hard-surface models range from simple shapes like rectangular doors to smooth, curved surfaces like a robot or a car. A well-considered topology ensures the lighting works correctly, so it’s important to take seriously even though the surfaces don’t deform.
Artists then create levels of detail (LoDs) for a model at the final, shippable build stage. 3D models are a lot for computers to process, especially in a real-time environment like a video game. Artists optimize the model by creating several versions of each model. The engine then has the ability to swap to a lower quality model when the asset is far away or out of view. All types of assets have multiple LoDs, from characters to props to environment art. The lower quality models have fewer triangles, lower resolution textures, but still retain the same general shape. The goal is for the other levels of detail to be similar enough that the swap is unnoticeable at a distance. A model has up to 5 different LoD models, although the specific number goes down if there are fewer objects on screen or if the model isn’t visible from very far away.
8. Rig animated assets with the tech artist
Rig for animated assets with the tech artist. A rig is a skeleton that lets an animator pose the character’s body. Since Half-Life, 3D games have had skeletal animation, allowing for mouth movement during dialogue and more lifelike animations. Rigging involves adding bones and creating blend shapes, although a full tutorial on rigging is beyond our scope and there are many other terms and topics to learn related to rigging.
Rigging the 3D model makes sure it deforms in a predictable and repeatable way. An animator isn’t a 3D modeler, so they want to be able to control the model like a marionette. A rig attaches bones and marionette strings to the model so the animator is able to pose the character or creature with ease. The alternative is selecting parts of a model and moving them individually, like selecting every finger joint and rotating individually to make a fist. A well-made rig is going to simplify those processes and make actions like bending limbs and closing hands automatic. The type of actions to rig for depends on what the concept is, too: an artist rigging a character for an action game is going to create a rig that lets the animator close their fist on a weapon, for example.
Rigging makes specific, complex movements easier for animators to deal with. They simplify a process like lifting a leg to moving a single target instead of dealing with three, four, or more bones just to move one part of the model. This functionality extends to other specific actions like blinking, smiling, stretching, tensing up, and other actions which cause specific pieces of the model to deform, most often the face. Shape keys, or morph targets, are a strategy useful when rigging a model for creating target poses. The artist makes them by getting a snapshot of a part of the body with different deformations. In the case of a character’s face, they capture different emotions: anger, surprise, sadness. They’re able to attach each of these targets to a bone, letting animators select the correct expression for their animation without trouble. These preset shapes attached to bones are called blend shapes and make the animator’s job much simpler.
The involvement of the technical artist depends on the process, but they are the ones who decide what rigging tools the team uses and what other add-ons and workflow improvements take place. They’re the source of truth for best practices, and any blockages in the workflow or missing tools need to be brought up with a technical artist so they’re able to find a solution.
9. Animate the asset
Animate the asset, as games are an interactive medium which requires motion. 3D assets that require animation include characters, doors, destructible objects, and most visible assets which are interactable. Physics and simulated destruction make an environment feel interactive, but pre-animated assets are still common and necessary for more complex movement. Taking an example of a game character, an animator must create animations for each of the actions they’re able to perform and tell the game how to blend between them.
Animators pose objects and capture the poses at key points to create animations using software like Blender or Maya. Think of what a traditional animator does. They create “key frame” poses which show the main contours of an action. A senior animator creating a running animation, for example, only creates the keyframes: a frame of standing still, then at a full run, then skidding to a stop. A junior animator is then given the job of filling in the frames in-between those key poses to make a full animation. The brutal work of filling in all the frames between key poses is left up to the computer these days, which moves characters between poses automatically.
Animation for a game is interactive, so making animations flow into each other is a lot of work. A character that hits the jump button is sometimes jumping from a run, at other times a walk, a roll, or a stagger. Game engines like Unity come with State Machines for editing these relationships between animations. If a character needs to transition from walking to running to sprinting, the state machine tells the game what order a character goes forward and backward through those steps.
What is the best software to create game assets?
The best software for creating game assets includes Maya, Blender, Zbrush, Mudbox, MotionBuilder, Photoshop, and GIMP. Each piece of software comes with a tradeoff of price for quality: a solo dev on a budget is likely to use Blender and GIMP instead of Maya and Photoshop.
Maya is an industry-standard tool for modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating 3D models. Maya is useful for creating particle effects and physics simulations as well, which are an important element of polish for games. The software’s popularity in film and TV for nearly 30 years has resulted in a robust set of rigging and animation tools, which is where the software excels. It’s a paid software, which makes it exclusive but also well-supported with modern features. Maya is important to know because it’s an industry standard at this point, but the software has seen increasing competition since its release. Blender is an alternative that has increasingly encroached on Maya’s dominance.
Blender is a free software which does much of the same work as Maya: 3D modeling, texturing, rigging, animating. The software is feature rich and lets the user work on the entire asset creation pipeline from start to finish. The modeling and sculpting tools are professional class options for refining a game-ready 3D asset. Out of the box, the software is on par with Maya in many ways, but the fact it’s open source means there are over 600 add-ons available too. 92 extensions for animation alone are on offer, allowing the user to modify the UI, implement camera shake, and generate pose libraries for characters.
ZBrush is a professional-grade sculpting tool for adding extra details to a basic 3D model built in another program. The tool is common in game art and the movie industry, and it’s a standard for sculpting in much the same way Maya is for modeling. Artists use brushes to pinch, etch, smooth, nudge, and sculpt models similar to a sculptor with clay, and the software performs much better than the tools in Blender since the software is designed for sculpting specifically. The program includes Polypaint for painting the model during or after sculpting: the advantage is that the artist is able to further modify the model and its UVs and ZBrush makes sure the paint stays in the same spot. ZBrush is a paid software at $33.25 a month on the annual plan, which is worth the price if it’s affordable but beyond the budget of some individual artists. Maxon offers a pared down free version on iPad and a two-week free trial for the full software for those looking to try it out.
Mudbox is a standalone sculpting tool, like Zbrush. Sculpting software mimics the tools a real sculptor uses in order to make 3D modeling more intuitive and accessible to artists who don’t have in-depth technical knowledge. Virtually every action in Mudbox is accomplished through brushes that the user aims and drags around to deform, crease, smudge, flatten, and otherwise modify the model. The software comes with primitive objects for sculptors as well: users have the option to start with a flat plane, sphere, cube, or more advanced shapes like a head, body, or car. Compared to other Autodesk software, the tool is relatively cheap and accessible at $10/month, with discounts for annual (and triennial) subscriptions.
MotionBuilder is a standalone animation application. MotionBuilder is worth learning for artists looking to get into the AAA space, but it isn’t a common tool otherwise. The price and niche usage make purchasing MotionBuilder in addition to Maya and other software undesirable for smaller studios, especially when Maya has robust animation tools of its own. However, the value for AAA studios is MotionBuilder’s compatibility with Maya, since Autodesk creates both programs. Pros with access to both switch between MotionBuilder and Maya as best fits their workflow.
3D images and animation have multiple solid solutions, but for 2D image editing Adobe’s Photoshop has been the dominant solution since its release in 1990. Photoshop is useful for editing images, combining them, layering them over each other, and painting over them with digital brushes, masks, and transformation tools. Despite the number of tools, what its function boils down to is editing pixels. The primary application is creating textures for 3D objects, but the software is capable of creating illustrations and concept art as well. Photoshop is a paid tool, though, and the $22.99/mo price tag is out of reach of individual users on a budget.
GIMP is the free alternative to Photoshop that’s much more accessible to an independent developer. The software is useful for basic image editing, but Photoshop is an unquestionably better alternative if price isn’t a factor. GIMP is open source and built by volunteers, which means it lags behind Photoshop in terms of standard features and support: the user interface, selection tools, and performance are all less refined than Adobe’s software. Machine learning has begun transforming some of Photoshop’s tools already, but it hasn’t reached GIMP’s toolset yet. GIMP also goes without CYMK color (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, Key (Black)), which is the way printers blend colors and a key feature for professional image editors.
Where to get free game assets?
Get free game assets in online marketplaces like Unity’s Asset Store, Unreal’s FAB marketplace, and itch.io. Free assets come with pros and cons, but the value for a designer is in quickly prototyping before replacing with better assets or editing free assets directly. Online storefronts let indie designers build their portfolio through game jams or side projects without needing to learn how to make game art.
The Unity Asset Store has over 5,000 free assets at the time of writing, split between 2D, 3D, and audio resources. Unity is such a common engine given its value for creating cross-platform games and years of community investment in creating tutorials and resources for newcomers. The store isn’t going to include something for you if developing for Unreal, Godot, or another engine, but the engine is a popular choice for beginner devs and the high number of free assets is a big draw for those getting started.
FAB is Unreal Engine’s equivalent to the Unity marketplace. FAB isn’t platform dependent: it includes resources for Unity and 3D models for third party software like Blender, Maya, 3DS Max, and Zbrush. The store makes accessing new free items easy, as there’s a tab on the front page with temporarily free assets which rotates every two weeks. The store has 21,000 free products between all offerings, making it a solid choice for a developer on any platform to check out.
itch.io has no restrictions on uploading content, so it’s a desirable place for finding a wide variety of assets. The site has 43,000 free assets at the time of writing, from 2D art to fully animated 3D models. Users are able to sort entries between Unity, Unreal, and Blender files, or select the file extension they want if it’s a 2D asset or a different 3D format.
Free assets come with caveats to keep in mind that make them difficult to use for commercial projects. Free assets aren’t only lower quality than paid assets, but they tend to lack user support. An artist who has put their assets out on the store for free isn’t getting the money they need to go back and fix mistakes, make sure the asset works on new versions of the software, and respond to user concerns in a timely manner. Each free asset also has its own terms of use that it’s up to the end user to keep track of. The standard licenses in the Unity Asset store tend to allow re-using the asset without attributing the original author and using it for commercial projects, but this isn’t always the case and is worth paying attention to.
Discord servers for game developers have places for members to share assets, whether their own assets or to call attention to sales and deals. Game development is impossible to do alone, and finding a community is like gaining 10,000 extra hands. The Funsmith Club’s game-dev-resources, IGDA’s open-resources, and Game Dev League’s free-resources are channels for finding assets and links to other helpful resources for developers. The same servers are places to find collaborators as well, whether working on a game jam or a professional project.
How much do game assets cost?
Game assets cost up to thousands of dollars, especially if contracting with a game asset creation company. There are two ways of looking at the question: how much a game asset costs to purchase, and how much it costs to create. Some readers are looking to find assets for your game, but others are looking to post their creations to online asset stores. The topic is enough for its own article, but here are a few answers.
The pricing of a game asset depends on who created it, how big of an audience the asset has, how long it takes to make, and what it costs to support after release. The time to make and skill of the creator are more obvious factors; a professional 3D artist and a beginner are going to create different levels of quality in an asset. A detailed 3D character in a game studio is going to take months of production, so the studio effectively spends tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on an asset.
Pricing in an asset store is going to depend on the factors above as well. A common assumption is that niche and obscure assets are going to cost less, but this isn’t usually true. An asset with a large audience like a set of modern interiors or medieval swords is going to reliably draw in a larger audience than, say, a bat swarm particle effect, so it’s able to get away with a cheaper price per download. The creator of a bat swarm effect knows their target audience is small and the asset isn’t likely to get a lot of sales no matter what, so the asset is still going to be priced at-value. Sales on asset stores are common, too, so pricing high gives a better sense of value when an asset inevitably goes on sale.
A freelance artist posting their own assets doesn’t need to spend much more than their time to get into selling assets. Selling assets on a store involves a fee toward the seller and transaction fees to payment processors, but there aren’t any other barriers to setting up the store than time. itch.io is the best option in this case, since there are no mandatory fees to the site other than payment processing. The seller has complete control over what percentage goes to itch.io per sale. The Unity Asset store takes 30% off transactions and the FAB marketplace takes 12%, so each balances the exposure and popularity of the marketplace with higher publishing fees.
