The 3D Handbook
Part 10 — Production
Chapter

Working on a team

Read these pages in order, or jump to the one you need.

  1. Performance and profilingTopicHow to measure where a frame's time goes, tell a CPU-bound scene from a GPU-bound one, and use Unreal's stat commands and Insights, Unity's Profiler and Frame Debugger, RenderDoc and PIX to find what to fix.
  2. Frame budgetsKey termThe time available to produce one frame, 1000 ms divided by the target frame rate. Everything in the game, art included, has to fit inside it.
  3. Texture memory (VRAM)Key termHow much graphics memory textures take. It is plain arithmetic, width times height times bytes per pixel plus a third for mips, and it adds up quickly across a level.
  4. The technical artistTopicWhat technical artists do, as described by studio job ads, GDC Technical Artist Bootcamp speakers and shipped-game breakdowns; the skills the role asks for and how it varies.
  5. Draw callsKey termA request from the CPU to the GPU to draw something; their number, driven by objects and materials, often limits performance before triangles do.
  6. OverdrawKey termShading the same screen pixel more than once in a frame; caused mostly by translucency, alpha-tested foliage cards, particles and stacked decals, and checked with shader complexity, quad overdraw and overdraw view modes.
  7. Naming conventionsReferenceHow game projects name assets and folders; Epic's recommended prefixes, Allar's community UE style guide, Unity's and Godot's advice, texture suffixes, collision names and folder structure, with the points where the guides disagree.
  8. Source control for artistsTopicWhy game teams version their files, why binary art assets need locking instead of merging, and how Perforce P4, Git with LFS, Unity Version Control and Diversion handle it, with sourced pricing and the trade-offs between them.
  9. Art bibles and style guidesReferenceWhat an art bible or style guide contains, when it is written and who uses it, with published examples from Valve's Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 guides and the technical sections environment teams add.
  10. PhotogrammetryTopicBuilding 3D assets from overlapping photographs; how capture, processing, de-lighting and cleanup work in a game pipeline, with DICE's Star Wars Battlefront and Quixel's Megascans as worked examples.