Hi everyone! I'm working on my own engine...and a question raise in my head: what kind of tool does artists use and what functionalities do they need to create game content easier and faster? I know that programs like 3D studio, Maya,... are used to create the meshes and maybe animation, set up the texture...but then? What do you need? Thank you! Gabriel

You will probably also need Photoshop which is a general purpose 2D graphics editor.

If cost in an issue for you these are excellent open source alternatives:

• Blender for 3D (this has become my tool of choice regardless of cost).


• Gimp for 2D.
  

3DS max, maya and photshop are the standard software, I believe. You won't need anything else to create game art.

Vector graphics programs such as Adobe Illustrator or InkScape are often useful as well.

Zbrush and Mudbox are popular for generating high poly versions of meshes to generate normal maps off of.

Another big issue involves other pipeline issues. Okino's PolyTrans is one example of a toolset developed to help facilitate getting assets from one tool to another.

More important than the off-the-shelf tools are the in-house tools and customizations developed and deployed in each organization. These are the tools that get the raw assets into (and out of) the content pipeline, massaging it into runtime-friendly formats if necessary. Off-the-shelf shrinkwrapper products alone do not constitute a production pipeline.

It's these tools that really make or break the development process, because the more time and effort it takes for an artist or designer to see content changes reflected in the game, the more he or she will delay doing it.