Marco Diaz - Assets planning and integration

Every good piece of a project is well planned! Now I’m not going to discuss concept art here and planning out aesthetic since that was long done and not something I worked on. What I mean more here is specifications of the engine, figuring out dimensions, placements, and standard units

First thing I did was create a 16x16 pixel cube in Block Bench (the tool we’re using to model our assets) and export it as a glb (binary format of glTF). This format makes for easy importing and use. Its also important to note that the texture on the cube serves a technical purpose, having every face unique and labelled with its axis in block bench means that when it gets imported ill be able to instantly know if something went wrong. When moving 3D assets between programs with different coordinate systems its common for assets to become flipped or rotated, by having this cube I can know what to expect in advance. In this particular case it was useful in realising that Godot’s forward direction is -Z and not +Z, meaning that for models to be implemented correctly they need to be modeled facing backwards in Block Bench. Additionally, the texture has a pixel grid on it, this is to measure how scaling is affected between programs. This informed me that the default conversion of BB units (Block Bench units, also 1 pixel in size) to Godot units is 16:1. We needed nicer units for each pixel, so we changed the conversion to 20:1 in the import settings, making each pixel on a texture exactly 0.05 Godot units.

My modeling workflow usually involves starting in Block Bench because of its easier blocking, fixed pixel scaling, and nicer vertex snaping. If the model is simple Ill do the whole thing here and then texture with Aseprite. For more complex shapes Ill get the block out and proportions the way I like in Block Bench and then export it over to Blender as an OBJ to use its more advanced tools. Then send it back over to Block Bench (again using OBJ) to do the UVs there. For pixel art textures UVs in Block Bench is far easier.

And here’s some results!

And that’ll be all from me, hope you learned something and enjoyed reading the log, see ya!