Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chris Bam Harrison

Just like a sponsored article, only nobody paid me anything.

This pastweekend, I attended the Global Game Jam here in Melbourne.

As a UX Designer by trade, game development isn’t a perfect fit for my skillset. Of course, UI and HUD work isn’t too steep a learning curve. 2D art assets are a stretch, but I can do them. 3D is where the challenge really comes from.

Mass Effect was a lot more popular than it is now, I guess. I’m not bitter, you’re bitter.

I’m lucky enough to have worked on a few small game projects previously. In 2012 I hit it relatively big with a Warcraft-themed Civilization V mod, but it didn’t have any real 3D assets, just a few reskins and a lot of 2D art.

I was really into JJ-Abrahams lens-flares back then.

In 2014, I tried my hand at doing some real 3D work. If anyone’s ever tried to pick up Blender, you’ll know it’s not the easisest learning curve. I managed to make a low-poly spaceship.

Glorious, I know. Simply stunning talent.

Earlier this year, I tried again. Made a robot, rigged and animated it. This is simple stuff for a 3D artist, but for me, it took almost two weeks to get to the point where my little robot friend (His name is SPUD) could move properly.

I tell you all of this because I want you to understand my relationship to 3D work — it’s not good. Not terrible, but not good. So going into this Game Jam as the solo artist on the team didn’t seem like a great idea.

The theme of the jam was Transmission, and the idea we came up with is a little wacky: What if, thousands of years in the future, humanity is extinct but has left behind millions of AI worker drones. And, what if, without humanity to serve, they start mimicking the behaviours of humans.

And, what if, you were an undercover police officer sent on dates with those robots to determine which ones are mimicking humanity best.

It seemed so crazy, it might just work. (Spoilers: It really, really didn’t work)

So my job was to create some drones, and somewhere for the dates to take place. Simple enough! Except my 3D skills are atrocious. That’s where AssetForge comes in…

Enter AssetForge

I stumbled upon a guy called Kenney earlier this year when I was looking for some basic low-poly assets for a side project. Affectionately known as ‘Asset Jesus’ in the GameDev community, Kenney puts out thousands of free 2D and 3D assets every year for developers to make use of.

As it happened, around the same time I stumbled up upon him, Kenney released AssetForge.

AssetForge is a super basic tool for quickly generating game assets. You build a model using some basic ‘blocks’ (essentially prebuilt meshes) that snap satisfyingly together, and then export to OBJ or FBX, or generate 2D sprites.

I wanted them to have relatively harsh silhouettes, and I knew they needed to be low poly. Even more importantly, I needed something that I didn’t need to UV Unwrap or attach to a skeleton, because we simply wouldn’t have the time.

I started with a simple emergency services drone:

<a href="https://medium.com/media/f828be74cf6afadf5891dcada07c5ed8/href">https://medium.com/media/f828be74cf6afadf5891dcada07c5ed8/href</a>

This is roughly an hours work boiled down into a minute, and hopefully demonstrates how efficient AssetForge can be for basic 3D objects.

Within a few hours, I’d created a full set of robots for our game:

Each of these robots were exported as FBX files with materials, and AssetForge also allowed me to generate full sprite-sheets of each one. This came in especially handy for building out UI elements that featured the models.

I also built a small diner environment for each of the robotic dates to take place in:

Just like the robots, this was exported as an FBX model and easily brought into Unity.

AssetForge isn’t without it’s issues. It can’t perform any boolean operations on your meshes (In simpler terms, can’t combine two cubes to make a rectangle). This means the models you generate are slightly less efficient, and will see some weird behaviours when lit certain ways (Edge shading, for example, doesn’t really work).

There’s also some relatively basic functionality still missing. While cloning and undoing were added in the recent 1.3 update, an object list is still absent, along with object grouping. You also can’t import AssetForge models into another file, which was a challenge with my project — I had to manually keep track of scale to make sure my models were consistent.

I had to put this GIF somewhere so I could use it as the thumbnail. Sorry.

Despite these though, there’s some real speed advantages to AssetForge over something like Blender or Maya. More importantly, the ease of use and simple interface means that you spend far less time on technical execution, and can instead focus on simply being creative and trying new things.

AssetForge has found a place in my everyday workflow as a simple, easy way to create 3D assets or simply mockup 3D objects when necessary. It’s not the only tool you’ll ever need, but it’s a great start for beginners looking to make something in a fun, easy, and fast way.

You can get AssetForge here.

Please note: This article isn’t endorsed in any way. In fact, the creator of AssetForge doesn’t even respond to me on Twitter. But I had a really remarkable experience using it, and I wanted to share what I’d discovered with others.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

Assetforge is a great tool for simple, quick 3D assets was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Assetforge is a great tool for simple, quick 3D assets

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