Developer Diary | 3D Art!

My name is John and I’m the 3D artist for Hearts of Iron IV here at Paradox! For this week's Dev Diary, I will be giving you all a behind-the-scenes look at my role in the team and our process for making the 3D art for Hearts of Iron IV.

My role is to create and manage all the 3D art in the game! Not all 3D art is created by a single individual, however. To save time we also have help from various talented outsourcing partners to make sure we can have as much juicy art ready for release as possible!

During this diary, there may be some terminology that may or may not be familiar to you but I will try and make sure that everyone can enjoy reading this and get a glimpse into the 3D art for Hearts of Iron 4.

Creating, tweaking, and managing all this 3D art is a lot of work but it is also a fun and rewarding process so let’s not waste any more time and get right into it!

Receiving art requests

First of all, I will receive a bunch of 3D art requests from our awesome content designers that will provide me with some general information as well as some reference images and useful links to help explain what they want to be added to the game. Doing research and finding material is time-consuming work so this is very useful to get things started.

You never know what can end up being requested. There were a lot of interesting vehicles and uniforms during World War 2 so this helps keep things interesting!

To manage all of these requests we use Miro which is a useful tool to manage a lot of images and text. These requests will be added to my 3D art board in Miro where I will sort them by things like priority and country. From here I will decide which units to work on. I will place the assets that I want to outsource on a separate board where they can be gradually reviewed along each step of the creation process. I will usually provide them with more technical feedback when it comes to the 3D art and our content designers will give input on how the asset looks from a more historical standpoint.

Finding references

These are the types of images that I look at when I’m making a 3D model!

For 3D art, you generally want to have as much reference material as possible so I will usually try to add some additional reference images from the information I have been provided if needed. To understand things like angles, scale, and movement better, watching videos can also be incredibly helpful. If there are any vehicles or uniforms that still exist to this day, then this will provide greater image quality and it can also be good for color reference. It’s important to be aware of re-created paint jobs and modifications that may have been added after the war. Finding good references can be hard at times, we always try our best to stay faithful to the reference material but time is always limited so it can be easy to make mistakes. Being very meticulous and delivering a lot of assets in a short amount of time is definitely a balancing act!

Blockout

The process of creating 3D art can differ a bit from artist to artist or depending on what it is that you are creating but usually, I will begin