Assets and the art pipeline

Every 3D game requires some multimedia assets, whether it's 3D models, image files, sound clips, video clips, or music. This book focuses on the development aspect—how to tie assets and code together and deploy the game. Being able to write source code only takes you halfway there: to develop games, you also need to go through the art pipeline.

By art pipeline we mean the creative process of creating 3D models, composing background music, and so on. The art pipeline runs in stages parallel to your coding milestones:

  1. Lay out concept art, either digital or on paper, to get an idea of what you need; you do this in parallel to planning your Java object model.
  2. Insert mock-up art in alpha builds: these sample files don't look and sound like the real thing yet. They are merely placeholders in the right size and format that help you debug your loading code.
  3. Insert drafts in beta builds that are close to the final look and feel that you want; this helps you beta test and iron out the kinks.
  4. Include the final artwork in the release builds. Typically, assets are converted to data formats that are optimized for the target platform.

Including sounds and images in your game means that you either need access to a multimedia library, or you need to create your assets using external tools.

The jMonkeyEngine SDK does not include any multimedia editors. This is because a game engine should not prescribe the artist's choice of design software. You are free to create assets in any third-party tools that you fancy and have access to. Just make certain that you can export the artwork in formats that jMonkeyEngine supports.

The following external file types are supported by jMonkeyEngine:

If you have not chosen your multimedia tools yet, the following are some suggestions of popular editors that support the formats mentioned earlier:

All of these are examples of software that is available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux; all three are open source, and you can download and use them for free.

There are many more free and paid design tools available if you do a search. Whichever software you choose to create your assets, consult the respective manuals for details on how to use them. 3D modeling in particular is not a trivial task, but it's definitely worth learning.

Now that you have the design and development tools installed, you have everything you need to create your game.

But what do your users install to play your game?

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