Unreal Marketplace megapacks - Leartes Studio Q&A

In this Q&A with Oguzhan Kar, Artist and Owner of Leartes Studio, we discuss the processes and teamwork behind creating their incredible Megapacks, particularly their latest Cyberpunk Megapack. We discover how quality and efficiency is maintained across their remote team and how they tackle challenges. They also share some tips and tricks for those of you looking to get into selling your own asset packs on the Unreal Marketplace.

How do you manage a team that is entirely remote? How do you keep a consistent quality across the whole project?

We have our core team consisting 5 people, Creative Director, Art Director and Lead 3D Artists who have the important role to organise all technical and operational stuff while production. We use documentation websites for our briefs and team management software to keep consistent quality among all of our remote team members work.

When a team member is struggling with part of the pipeline what do you find is the best way to help them?

In situations like this, as Leads we do our best to support the team member with our technical knowledge. If this struggle is about the concept, we do overpaints to reflect our ideas better to the team member or if the problem is technical, mostly our Lead Artist (Serdar Urkmez) solves the problem or directs the team member to useful sources to overcome this struggle.

Did you do any research on what to create for the Unreal Marketplace? If so, what did you find and how did that influence what you made?

Before starting a new marketplace project with the team we are doing our research about what developers need and what we are able to create with our current skillset and experiences. Additionally when we have a concept in mind, then we are already researching what is currently on the marketplace and what value we may add to the market with our package. Speaking about our brand new Cyberpunk Environment Megapack, we have seen some Cyberpunk Environment Packs on the marketplace and even though some of them have really good quality, we couldn’t see any all in one solution pack for developers. So this directed us to create such a large pack so that developers can create their own levels and maybe even games all with this one big pack.

For this asset pack, how did you plan for such a massive amount of content and ensure everything delivered is to the same quality?

To create such a big pack with high and consistent quality the first step in our workflow approach was to create accurate pieces of concept art. Our Art Director (Bora Helvacioglu) created concept art for Modular Buildings / Vehicles / Props so those concepts helped us to describe designs in our minds to artists. Then with documentation apps we shared our artistic and technical briefs with artists and checked out their work every few days to ensure quality and direction of the work was being met. This whole approach helped us to maintain similar quality through the entire project.

Do you have any tips for creating assets for the Unreal Marketplace, what to make or even just to help a new person get their first asset on the Unreal Marketplace easily?

Yes for sure, I have some tips for Unreal Marketplace creators. I recommend to create not only good looking packs but also functional and easy to use packs. As far as I see from my experiences, developers really love functional packs which include modular assets, customisable material instances and different features.

How did you plan for efficiency and optimisation as you created the scene? What were some things you found an easier or alternative way to produce?

Optimisation was one of the biggest challenges for us while creating the Cyberpunk Environment Megapack. Since the pack has 650+ meshes and our Showcase Map has even more, we were aware that it would be hard to optimise. We had thought about it with the team (brainstorming) and we found that the idea of merging assets / asset groups would help us to lower the drawcalls in the map. We have merged Building Modules, Street Props, Structures etc. in a way to get less drawcalls and more FPS. Also we have made detailed set dressing meshes in sublevel and made it is possible to hide this sublevel to get better performance.

Has the team ever struggled with motivation? If so, how were you able to recover the motivation and inspire the team?

Our team members are very motivated to their work but sometimes we were bored from doing similar work for the same project since the project took 6 months and it was not possible to share anything from the project with anybody. In such times we have tried to spice up our workflow by changing our artists tasks and even giving a few days or a week of free time to rest. It was a challenging and long project and we are happy to be able to finish it with the quality and functionality we had planned.

When taking new artists on board, what have you found are the best ways to teach the pipeline and set expectations? What do you do when an artist is either breaking pipeline or failing to meet expectations?

For each of our projects we assign a Lead Artist or Artists depending on the size of the project and adapting new artists to our workflow is one of the missions of the Leads. We share all of our informing materials and briefs with new artists, we use Discord channels for communication and different management / documentation apps as mentioned above. So having all of that makes things easier while working with new artists. Our first idea is to support artists with help, we understand that any artists may have some problems in their home/social life which can cause delays or problems in work. We try to tolerate it as much as we can and support artists in such situations but if delays or problems are caused by bad intentions for us it is not possible to continue working . If we see an artist trying to improve his/her skills but is struggling with the workflow we try to do our best to help them.

With such a large scene, how did you approach it? Was it done in sections or all at once?

We did not want to separate the level into smaller ones because we wanted to see the whole background in wide views in our renders and showcase video. Also we wanted to give huge city feeling in the gameplay experience. So our idea is shaped into combining our modules and creating facades of buildings as one single mesh, creating modular facade meshes for less drawcalls, and we have made detail set dressing meshing into one separated sublevel, with that approach we are able to reach 60-70 fps in our Showcase Level.

What is the task structure like? How do you ensure artists are reaching the desired quality and staying on time?

Since the project has a lot of meshes and we needed to create them all from scratch we had to find efficient workflows to create this environment in the planned time frame. We separated tasks into groups rather than separating tasks like individual assets, for example: one artist created a set of cyberpunk structures, one artists made a set of benches etc. so it worked well to get uniform design in such sets and less effort on time / work management.

As you have been working how has the workflow changed from the first scene to the current ones? What were the biggest changes and how have they helped the workflow?

We have created almost all of the models before starting to create scene and level design, so the first maps were only test maps for testing assets technically. Our level design process didn’t change a lot but rather grew in terms of detail and size. After completing the level design we’d set up camera angles for our renders / showcase video then work on the lighting. Eventually after following those steps we reach the final results.

What were some of the shortcomings/mistakes the team/pipeline had? How did you overcome them and/or adjust to work around them?

We have spent quite some time at the beginning of projects deciding concepts. Firstly we tried using reference images or concept art for buildings and making them modular but we recognised it wouldn’t work that way. Then we decided to create unique concepts showing exact placements and dimensions of modules and it worked much better. With the process of producing assets and the scene we also had some issues to overcome such as optimisation, but after some brainstorming and applying needed optimisation techniques we had mostly solved those issues.

What is something that you have learnt and/or improved on since starting Leartes? Is there anything you still want to improve either as an artist or a Lead?

What I personally learnt since we have started working on Leartes is that in this industry there is something to learn and improve your knowledge / workflow every day. In all of our products we are aiming to reach better quality but all the time there is something to improve and learn. Another thing I understand is when you really give your time and effort in your work and create something unique and high quality then people are modest to appreciate your result and effort. I think this is the best part about our work, seeing peoples reactions after a long time of hardworking.

Where do you find your inspiration?

I am consistently seeking for new projects in Unreal Marketplace, Artstation, some ideas from Pinterest. I check out old design books for inspiration or even movies and computer games. I follow news/articles and new portfolio work from the Experience Points community. I really recommend the Experience Points Discord channel for Environment Artists to get feedback about their work or new design ideas.

Where do you seek feedback?

Since we are not able to share any progress shots on social media before the work is done, the only place to get feedback is the Leartes Discord channel. We have a nice working atmosphere there with our freelance artists and we are always giving feedback to each others work.

Any additional advice or tips you would like to share with our readers?

I recommend them to be patient while working in their projects and not release the project until it is exactly what they want. I know there are a lot of great artists following Experience Points so what I can recommend to them is to keep up the great work and learn something new everyday.

What can we look out for in the future?

We really like to create Megapacks which developers can take and find almost everything to create their own levels/games or even VR experiments with. We would like to continue creating these Megapacks for lots of different concepts. We have some new concepts in mind and we would like to create polls on our social media accounts to decide on the concepts for our next Megapacks.