First pancake always is...

I have been working on some statues for an asset pack that we plan to put in Unreal Marketplace. Seeing as there were no asset packs that focused on statues specifically, we decided to give it a shot. What I personally wanted to do was to develop pipeline that would allow fast asset creation and iteration without sacrificing quality.

Here are some early screenshots. Assets are in low poly, in engine, default lighting setup and very basic shaders. Posed anatomy models provided by Tomas Narbutaitis.

Initial plan was to make 3 statues with 3 damage variants, making it 9 statues in total. As the work went on it changed to 4 statues with 2 damage variants, 8 statues in total. Idea behind the first approach was that once you had properly done base sculpt, making damaged variants would be rather fast and easy. In the end it didn’t prove to be much faster than actually making completely new assets from scratch. You still had to spend pretty much the same amount of time low-polying, unwrapping UVs etc., “damaging” pristine statues still took quite a bit of time as you had to be quite careful to make things looks natural.

So that changed to 4 statues instead. I felt that this would probably be more beneficial in the end because you would get more varied assets in the end. While I think work could have gone faster (I spent over 2 weeks) overall I think it turned out to be pretty good. Good models, good textures, not many roadblocks so in the end everyone is happy.