assets/docs/assets.md

# Asset Guidelines and Considerations

When making assets for games, there are many technical requirements and considerations that must be factored in to making said assets.

## Topology/Detail Density
When working on a model, there are a few questions you must ask yourself:
- How close to my camera will the model get?
- What proportion of my screen will this model take up?
- How many of these will be present at any given time?
- When, where, and in what context will this model be shown?
- Does this model need to deform? Where?
- Does the model move in-game? How fast?
- How will the topology impact shading?
- How will the topology impact the sillohouette?

Use these answers to your advantage:
- If a prop never gets close to the camera, it doesn't need much modeled detail!
    - Contrarily, if a model takes up lots of screen space, it probably needs some extra detail to properly fill it out
    - If the model is static and non-deforming, Unreal Engine may make some use of LOD to hide the unnecessary stuff for you. This is not guarunteed.
- Enemies need a low polycount since many are on screen at once
    - Contrarily, we only have one Insurrectionist, and he is close to the camera, so it is okay if he's a bit more detailed
- If there is topology that does NOT impact the sillohouette, it is not necessary in the low-poly
- There is no need to keep and texture topology that will never be seen. Delete it!

## Texturing
The same questions as above also goes in for texturing.
- If a model takes up a lot of screen space, it's likely going to need a higher texture resolution to accomodate, or it'll look low-quality.
- If a prop is exceptionally small (like the size of a character's fist), you could likely use a 512px map and be fine.

If you are uncertain what resolution you should use, go straight for 4K or 2K, and we can painlessly resize the textures with IronPress
(assuming that you followed the proper [Naming Conventions](../README.md#material-maps)).

Ideally, even if a prop is broken into separate "parts," **keeping all related-parts on one texture set**:
- Reduces file-system overhead
- Reduces how many textures we have to import and manage
- Optimizes rendering

## Scale
As we are working with asset packs grounded in realism, keeping scale consistent is important to the player's immersion and believability of the scene.
In some cases, however, we may be required to push this in one direction or another for gameplay purposes specifically.

Here are cases where we would want to exaggerate scale for gameplay purposes:
- **Doorways** - Do not want the player's camera to bump against it as they move through
- **Walkable platforms** - Players may accidentally stumble off of thin platforms
- **Objectives (buttons and such)** - Player should be able to easily spot things of interest


Regardless of if scale needs to be exaggerated or not, doing research on what conventional sizes for objects may be helpful.
Context is key in these cases as well.

For example, some pine trees may have an average height of 10 meters, whereas most oak varieties may have an average height of 20 meters.
What does this mean for the size of our models when we're in a taiga versus a savanna?