Elvenar Fantasy City Builder

The Elvenar Pipeline:Improving artist's lives

Before Markus joined the Elvenar team, artists were burdened with manually manipulating the thousands of images for the hundreds of assets available in the game! 3D assets were rendered as 4K images and then painstakingly reduced and cut into tiles by hand. With new levels and new buildings constantly coming online, this process was fraught with the potential for errors!

Porting this game to mobile added the requirement for multiple sizes of the same asset and Innogames could see that their existing process would no longer be possible.

The Elvenar art team continues to rely on the asset pipeline that Markus developed, allowing them to enjoy more fulfilling lives doing what artists should be doing - creating art.

Tech Notes

Using Python, C# and the GraphicsMagick library, Markus developed a pipeline that has completely eliminated the artist's handwork, freeing them to create more assets and animations while removing the errors inherent in the existing manual process.

Each hi-res animation is analyzed frame by frame to track changes over time. The changed areas are then isolated with their positions recorded and then reassembled into a sprite atlas. The atlas is stored in a Unity asset bundle ready for use in the game.

The pipeline was designed to generate atlases in multiple resolutions suitable for the entire target range, from HTML5 web browsers to handheld devices.

Click on the Elf Factory below to see the sprite atlas for this animation