In NOA Games we always spend lots of time for adding content to our games. It’s our main goal, making lots of content and supporting our games for a long period of time.
But if have had just a little bit of experience in this field, I’m pretty sure you already tired of adding these contents to your game.
There is a chance you asking your self “Is there any other way to import my contents into the Game engine?” today we gonna answer this question.
Short Answer: Yes!
Long Answer: Yes but you have to make what you need to do this in an automated process.
For Shadow Racer game we have to handle lots of cars, body kits, rings and other things, Making these are one thing, but importing is a whole another thing. It’s a very technical thing and everything should be right in order to not breaking the gameplay.
So we made a Validator and auto Import system for importing our contents into the game. It has many pros for us, It’s fast, It never has errors in making prefabs and the most important thing is you don’t need to be an expert in unity3d to import content.
As an artist with no experience with Unity3d when you creating a car model and 10 different body kits for it you have to go to a programmer or game designer and ask him/her to help you with importing those models into the game, but validator broke the pipeline.
It gives the artist an easy way to import, just drag and drop FBX into the panel and choose type is it main body or a body kit and tool will generate the prefab output.
But what does it do really?
It check body and dummies/objects names and hierarchy and if it’s not right with our standard will say where you did it wrong and how can you fix it, check mesh for errors, count polygons and estimate how big is it and do you need to remove some vertex or is the texture too big.
It also checks the boundaries of a car and adds colliders with right sizes, adding scripts and set values and getting it ready to tweaked by game designer and not making those from the ground up.
So in the end, what does it do? It makes our pipeline more efficient, it save lots of time so we can use that to make even more content. And it doesn’t allow any error at all, the human cannot see errors but validator always sees it and say how to fix.
So maybe it’s time for you to make your own tool and get used to it.