Cheers!
Blue -- Daniette Mann -- is our art director, and the artist handling these items.
Step 1: Before Any Art
She has a variety of ways of working, but the best result is going to happen if you give her some existing visual references to look at, as well as statements of anything you particularly want, like color themes or whatnot. If you want it to evoke some sort of emotion ("I want it to feel like an evil Borg mass" vs "I want it to feel like a really heroic and fragile work of mastery"), then that's also useful.
Basically it's not any particular set process for the start of this., but more a matter of what you want to say to get things started, and she may have some followup questions if things are not clear.
Step 2: Thumbnail Sketches
This isn't something that we always do internally, because a lot of times my attitude with Blue is "give me this overall feel, but surprise me with the details," and that lets her creativity come out the best. But when we have something specific that we're aiming for, typically having a set (or two) of half a dozen thumbnail sketches for concepts is a good idea.
These are super quick for her to do, and are just little doodles to get at some aspect of the design. Maybe it's focused on color palette, maybe shape, maybe both. These are extremely fast, so going a couple of rounds with these to get the idea down with the backer is probably the best idea if the backer has really specific things in mind.
Step 3: Modeling
Blue can chime in here about what might work best in terms of giving the most opportunities for (reasonable) feedback from the backer during the modeling process while at the same time not making the modeling itself overly arduous. But hopefully the thumbnail sketches were specific enough that this comes out pretty close to what is desired on step 1.
Step 4: Coloring/Texturing
At this point she'll paint it, and give you some screenshots from Maya. Note that it will look very flat and unlit in this fashion, and won't have any of the fancy things like emissive glows or normal/bump maps, or the rim shaders that are actually in the game. So it will look cool, but you'll likely think "wow that doesn't look like the ones in the game, though." Once you're happy with how things look here, then it gets turned over to me.
Step 5: Shaders
She'll hand off the fbx file for the model, and the textures for use in the material to me. I'll then create normal maps for it, and set it up with my shaders in the game itself. As part of that, I'll be setting the emissive and rim colors and sizes, and the severity of the normal maps. This is very much a "massage it until it looks right" sort of process for me, and it's kind of subjective. If there's an overall color theme you have in mind, then it's good if I know about it going into that. One overall color will wind up being most noticeable on the ship from a distance thanks to the rim lighting, especially when the ship is in shadow.
At that point you can take a look at it and see what you think. If you're wanting to fiddle with it yourself, then probably you'll be able to download our public package off of a git repository and load it up in the unity editor and play around with the values in my shader itself. That's a lot more work on your part and is in no way required, but there's only so many rounds I'm willing to go with tweaking colors on the shader directly, so if you have super specific feelings on it this would be the way to go.
Step 6: Game Integration
At this point you have a ship visual that you're happy with, and I'll turn it over to Keith. I'm not sure 100% what his plans are with this and would rather not speak for him, so I'll let him respond to your remaining questions as part of this. Blue will also come along with some more thoughts on step 3 here, when she gets a shot.
Thanks!
Chris
