17.3IntegrationinaProductionEnvironment 301
near the extremities of a bone. Keep in mind, though, that some people tend to
prefer this look since it clearly defines the presence of an articulation.
Finally, the generated mesh might appear a bit flat, with undefined features,
if every bone has the same effect on the density field. A possible improvement to
this is to add a simple “influence” property to every bone and manually increase
the influence of some of them (such as the head of a humanoid character to make
it appear rounder). This is, however, a purely aesthetic improvement and other-
wise affects the system in no way.
17.3IntegrationinaProductionEnvironment
Placeholder systems are usually far down the priority list, or nonexistent, for a
production or technology team unless very heavy prototyping is required for a
game. Therefore, the gain of creating such a system often does not seem to be
worth the risk of disrupting an already stable pipeline. In this regard, it is im-
portant to reduce the footprint of this new system by eliminating as many poten-
tial risks as possible, and this means reusing as much of the existing
infrastructure as possible. This begs multiple questions: In which part of the re-
source pipeline should the placeholder be created? Who should be the person in
charge of creating it? How can it be integrated into existing pipelines? These
questions, unfortunately, do not have a single clear answer and mostly depend on
your own production environment. We do, however, attempt to give some an-
swers by taking our articulated placeholder model as an example and discussing
how and where it should be integrated in an existing engine. Hopefully, this
should give you an idea of the things to look for and the things to consider when
integrating a placeholder system in a production environment.
WhoMakesIt,andWhereDoYouMakeIt?
One of the most natural questions to ask is, “Who makes the placeholder?” The
answer is straightforward: “As many people as possible.” What truly results de-
pends on where you decide to integrate the placeholder into the assets pipeline
and what the production rules are for your team or studio.
Taking the articulated placeholder as an example, if it is added too far into
the asset pipeline (for example, if it is generated exclusively in code at run time
based on an animation skeleton), then you limit the placeholder creation to the
programmers. This obviously doesn’t help in decoupling the work since the re-
sponsibility of creating placeholders falls on the shoulders of a small part of your
team. The opposite case, generating the placeholder at the beginning (e.g., as a