Exercise: your first game-ready prop

Your first game-ready prop is a small object taken all the way from reference to a working asset in a game engine, inside a fixed budget. This page is a full project brief: goal, constraints with numbers, stages with checkpoints, how to present it, and shipped work to study before you start.

The aim is to go once through the whole the game asset pipeline under real limits, so that every later project starts from experience instead of guesswork.

#The brief

Goal. Make one prop that could ship in a third-person or first-person game: modelled, unwrapped, baked, textured, imported with LODs and collision, and presented with a short breakdown.

Choose an object with a story. Jared Sobotta, a principal environment artist at Naughty Dog, asks juniors to skip the barrels, crates and red brick walls everyone makes, and to build around one interesting focal object instead, such as an antique phone on a cluttered desk (CGSociety: How to Create a Stunning Portfolio with Jared…). EMC3D's video on junior portfolios gives a whole chapter to "Pick A Charming Hero Prop" (YouTube: What Is The Strategy For Creating A High…). A field radio, a brass lantern, a toolbox with a dented lid or an old camera all work. Pick something you can hold, with a few hard-surface parts and one or two soft or worn ones.

#Constraints

Write these numbers at the top of your project file before you model anything. They are the brief's choices, set from the published examples cited in each row.

#Stages

#1. Reference and brief

Collect reference of the real object from several angles, plus close-ups of materials and wear. See gathering and using reference. Write one paragraph: what the object is, who used it, for how long, and in what conditions. That paragraph decides the wear later (environmental storytelling).

#2. Blockout

Block the primary forms with simple shapes at real scale (units, scale and axes). Check the silhouette from three angles before adding any detail. Put the pivot where a level artist would expect it, usually the centre of the base.

#3. High poly or sculpt

Decide the workflow first: a high-to-low bake, a mid-poly model with weighted (custom) normals, or a mix. For the hard parts, use subdivision surface modeling with support loops or booleans plus bevels; for worn or soft parts, digital sculpting. See hard-surface modeling and sculpting damage and wear.

#4. Low poly

Build the low poly to the budget, either by retopology over the sculpt or by simplifying the high-poly cage. Spend triangles on the silhouette and on curves that catch light; flat panels need very few (see polygon and triangle budgets). Use hard edges only where the UVs split.

#5. UVs and texel density

Cut seams where they will be hidden or where hard edges already are. Straighten islands that are rectangular in the model. Set every island to the target density with a density tool, then pack (UV mapping, UV packing and padding). Repeated parts, such as identical screws, can overlap in UV space to save texture.

#6. Bake

Bake normal, AO and any masks (curvature, ID) from high to low. Use a bake cage or exploded bake to stop parts projecting onto each other. Check the result in a real-time viewer and fix every artefact before texturing; see baking, tangent space and MikkTSpace and fixing baking artefacts.

#7. Texture

Texture to physically based rendering rules: a base colour (albedo) map without lighting in it, a roughness map that tells materials apart, and a metallic map that is black or white for almost every pixel. Start from smart materials if you like, then hand-paint the story: edge wear where hands touched it, dirt where it sat. Jeremiah Estrellado of Massive Entertainment stresses "consistency within your work", including bevel sizes and material response across assets (Massive Entertainment: My Top 5 Portfolio Tips – Art).

#8. Engine, LODs and presentation

Import into an engine, apply the material, set up LOD1 and LOD2 and the collision, and check it under at least two lighting setups. See export checklist, level of detail and real-time lighting.

#Presentation

A prop breakdown shows what a reviewer needs to judge your skill, in this order:

1. Beauty shots in context, three to five angles. Put the prop in a small scene or on a plain backdrop with a scale reference.
2. Wireframe over the shaded model. On Polycount, KatharinaSuhany asked a junior for wireframes "to display edge flow" (Polycount: Environment Artist Portfolio Tips).
3. Texture sheet and UV layout, with the density written on it.
4. Numbers: triangles per LOD, texture sizes, material count.
5. Captions of "no more than two or three sentences", as Blizzard's Dion Rogers advises (Activision Blizzard Newsroom: Land a Job in Video Games with More Portfolio…).

See making (and reading) an art breakdown for the full method and planning a portfolio piece for where this prop fits in a portfolio.

#Shipped work to study

Spend an evening with these before you start. For each one, write down the object's likely triangle range, how its texture is shared, and what the artist chose to show.

• Baked bevels instead of unique bakes. Matthew Trevelyan Johns's The Last of Us Part I trim pipeline shows props such as a food cart whose models keep hard edges and 90-degree angles, with bevels coming from the normal map of a shared trim (ArtStation: The Last of Us: Part I...Trim Pipeline). It shows the alternative to a unique bake, worth knowing even if you bake this prop yourself.
• Props built for reuse. Jon Arellano's God of War Ragnarök kit-assets breakdown for Asgard notes that many props were kitbashed and that many were concepted and created by artists across several studios (ArtStation: God Of War Ragnarok - Kit Assets).
• Props that recur across a game. Adrien Thierry's Dishonored 2 Clockwork Mansion post shows the props he modelled and textured, with captions such as "Big pipes you can find in many other Dishonored 2 levels." (ArtStation: Clockwork Mansion maintenance areas). A prop is often used far beyond the room it was made for.

#Further reading and watching

• hero assets, props and filler, polygon and triangle budgets and texel density: the handbook pages behind this brief's numbers.
• exercise: a trim sheet: the next step, texturing many objects from one sheet.