GCI Media Guide

This is a compacted version of the Media Guidelines page for people wanting to create media for Google Code-In.

License

• All contributed media should be dual licensed with the GPL v2+ and GFDL v1.1+ license. What does this mean? (artist retains copyright, (and thus also the option to release the art later under additional licenses), but the GPL licensed version remains open, and can be used and modified by others as long as they make their modifications available).

Content Creation System and File Formats

• GCI artists should use the OpenSource Blender program to create their models.
• Submissions are accepted in the .blend format.

Number of Polygons:

• 2000 to 4000 triangles for characters.
• 400 - 900 triangles for items, depending on complexity.
• UV Layout & Templates: UV layout should be 1 to 1.
• For paintovers and reusable textures bake down the textures to the destination UV.

Scale

• 1 unit = 1 meter.
• Human is 1.8 units in Blender3D (very very small).

Textures

• Texture sizes are to be at 1024 x 1024 pixels.
• Images sizes are reduced and compress automatically by scripts upon delivery.
• Image width and height need to be powers of two. For example, 1024x1024 and 2048x512 are both ok, but 1024x300 or 2048x1002 are not memory efficient. In addition older cards will not display the textures if they are authored in powers of twos.
• Make optimal use of texture space in when laying out UVs. The current bottle neck in games are textures not polygons.
• Maps needed for a complete asset are the following;
  • Diffuse Map = name_of_asset/D.png
  • Specularity Map (optional) = name_of_asset/S.png
  • Normal Map with a Displacement Map in the alpha channel (optional) = name_of_asset/N.png
  • Normal Maps are swizzled X+Y+Z.

Examples And Texture Templates

Note: Because our media server just died of old age, you will have to refer to the read-only mirror at http://jade.worldforge.org/svn_mirror/ which is currently built up. If any of the paths I talk about doesn't exist yet, it'll be there in a couple of hours.

In the art/ directory you will find the original artwork, that is the source for the client-specific in-game media files. The existing tree models are in art/3d_objects/plants/trees/models and the textures are in art/3d_objects/plants/trees/textures. Every tree texture should be based on the art/3d_objects/plants/trees/textures/template/tree.png texture template. The texture template is what the UV mapping should happen with. A good example of a texture using this template is the texture of the existing oak model, see the in-game texture used at http://jade.worldforge.org/svn_mirror/3d_objects/plants/trees/textures/oak/D.png

Submitting the Artwork

We'll have to figure that one out still.