I've been a big Destiny fan since even before it came out.  

I followed the heck out of the world development team and I still praise Bungie studios for having benchmarks in a variety of things from world development to MMO / game art pipelines and so forth.  I also may have gotten a few people into it just solely to research and get exposure to how a studio executes art pipelines while making massive worlds.

Long story short my husband is my Fireteam most of the time and we like to rock Destiny 2 together.  We even picked up Thorn one year at PAX West (you'll see it in the process pictures).  This year for my husbands birthday I wanted to do something different and so we settled on the idea of leveraging our 3D Printer to make another prop gun, Austringer.  It was 2 weeks out from his birthday when we identified this as a cool project and pretty quickly I took the dive to make his birthday my due date.

Warning: This is the largest, most complex print I've tried up until this point, and the first one I've primed and painted.  

We have a Creality Mini? CR-10... I think and  I was going to use the real-world dimensions but my printer and will power negotiated me down to something similar sized to the Thorn which works out!  

I wound up doing a full-sized test print (after doing 1/5th sized print) and sliced it in half.... not the 'proper' way.  Have I mentioned that I didn't key it ...because again I just got so excited with this project.  

3D Printing

This took 15 hours for one side - the little last bits also were between 6-8 hours additionally for printing!

Sticking it Together & Fixing Bad Choices

The overall sanding for the base form... was a lot!  If you ever prep a prop to 3D print please make sure to create key points and ways to fit it together accurately!!

Priming, Sanding, Painting

Taped the Hammer and used it as the hanging point... DO PRIME AND FILL!  See below why.

On the Left = How the Priming pass went (notice the stringy bits and overall just rough aspect... This is going to be compounded unless you sand!)  The right after I got done sanding it down felt like a real product made by someone who knew what they were doing lol. ;)

Little details got painted and such ahead of the final weapon body.

Base Black Layers

Golden Gun! -- It took a while to tape everything up but it was well worth it!  

GEMS...

The Gems were a constant worry and my biggest concern for the whole thing from the start.  I printed them off in their own plates to retain as much quality as possible and it might be easier to paint.  The Gem was already shaped and 'set' in the original STL file and it was a mess to separate it all out and seal and prepare for print.  This section makes me a little sad but in the end the gems came out better than they felt while making them lol.

I spent the whole time experimenting with paints... Because the gems are PLA and opaque I had to get creative with my painting solution.  I eventually landed on layered acrylic paints thinned with water or clear elmers glue.  A dash of glitter in some of the layers and a few top coat layers of glossy nail polish.  If I had to do it again I would have very much treated those bits as if I were painting a mini table top figurine.

This was a really fun project and I am really looking forward to taking the lessons learned into my next 3D printing project.

Last time I went over Artboards in Photoshop and how to expedite icon set designs for an app release and this time I want to share how I'm currently using Artboards in Photoshop for other production / release / marketing materials.  This time I'm sharing information on setting up Screenshot / ASO sets.

ASO Goals

The goal of ASO, or App Store Optimization is to maintain a consistent product sample to potential users from the store to the initial launch of the app.  Other important goals are to also give users a sense of what they can achieve / do with the app and on the side providing some (very) loose narrative is nice to add too!  Often times however this type of art comes at the end of a release / has to rely on new builds and so screenshots / imagery might come with a tight deadline attached.  Efficiency AND quality are important here and often times it's hard to hit both given the placement of release materials in the production process.

ASO for iTunes ( now called App Developer Portal? )

Releasing iOS Apps on multiple Apple devices requires the ability to create bulk imagery and image sets fairly efficiently.  For a typical legacy product of course we support iPhone 5 and up, iPad, and iPhone X has it's own needs for screenshots and release materials.  Our standard is 5 screenshots per device set so creating the ASO for 1 product release alone is 15 App Store screenshots.  We have other internal guidelines and requirements but let's move onto the production process I leverage to bulk content create screenshots.  For more on App Store needs visit here: https://help.apple.com/app-store-connect/#/devd274dd925 

Requirements:

• Consistent Across Devices (Branded for the in-app experience)
• General iPhone Screenshot set
  • 5 Images for the Set
    • 1242 x 2208 pixels for portrait
    • 2208 x 1242 pixels for landscape
• *OPTIONAL - iPhone X Screenshot set
  • 5 Images for the Set
    • 1125 x 2436 pixels for portrait
    • 2436 x 1125 pixels for landscape
• General iPad Screenshot Set
  • 5 Images for the Set
    • 2048 x 2732 pixels for portrait
    • 2732 x 2048 pixels for landscape

*OPTIONAL iPhone X : App store lists this as Optional - There is a heated debate on what performs better though.  Do the research yourself and or let me know in the comments what your experience might be on this!!!  Apple likes developers who use their features and tools and adheres to what they lay out guideline wise though - if the goal is to get featured using and designing for their most recent devices and features will help. (This is my personal experience, again feel free to comment if you have other experiences!)

The Setup:

Here are some screenshots of a setup that let me pump these out in record time.

iPhone Example

iPad Example

Object-Based Design:

You'll notice 1 Artboard per screenshot and at this high of level you'll see the (slightly) boring aspect of screenshot creation which is making them look consistent and reusing certain elements.  Depending on the game or product though you can really have a lot of fun with these and the experience helps inform you a lot more about what the BRAND of the product is all about through collaboration and team work!  Here's the List of things you want to keep as SMART OBJECTS and to isolate these elements for easy reuse and scalable marketing content creation.

• Device Screenshots
  • Often times things aren't captured 'just right' or the image will need level adjustments and editing to present the 'Best Face' of the app isolating the original capture as a smart object will also let you 'Relink' to other screenshot .PSB's so if you are playing around with Copy pairings or different concepts for a screenshot.  Super Useful!
    • A note on 'Best Face' of the app adjustments: There is a huge opportunity when it comes to editing screenshots and the biggest is finding what can be cross pollinated back to the app experience itself.  In these screenshots I realized that my original Background was not 'bright' or 'saturated' enough in a way that felt as lively as the screenshots called for.  The result is I went back and adjusted the background imagery in the game to match my adjustments I had to do for the screenshots!  The same happened with the Card Backs in the game - not holding up against everything else art team and I did a quick adjustment pass to in-game assets to match our vision of what 'colorful' and 'fun' Card Backs might look like.   
• Copy / Text Objects
  • 
    Copy and Text for ASO isn't something that is typically concrete - Future proofing your file setup and then also getting a quick font treatment and design dupe'd across all of the artboards is made a lot easier with Smart Objects.  If your copywriter comes back with requests of changes or your studio wants to A/B test Copy or Font Treatments (colors etc) this is really handy to isolate the strings too!
• Additional Marketing Assets (Banners in this Set)
  • The Blue Banner prominent in all of the screenshots is what I'd consider a 'marketing' asset - these types of assets are usually designed solely for use with Ads, screenshots, videos, websites, social media and more!  The assets have to have the same look, feel and tone as the Brand but sometimes aren't generated by the same team.  
  • Isolate these assets into smart objects & try to keep an eye on the following:
    • Variants on the same asset - A file per variant will save you headaches in the future / enable you to swap in and out as needed (see the Pinkish Banner vs the Blue Banner in the screenshots for ref)
    • New or A/B Test opportunities : Banners might not be the most exciting element but they help the legibility of the Copy... We could pull new backers for copy in to do test sets of something more exciting if we want to try to increase our performance or push the limits of what we can do here.

Other items could be Logo's, FX, Icons, Buttons basically it depends on your screenshot and what your studio is regularly using in their marketing strategies... Building and having a library at your disposal is basically the end lesson with these blog posts of mine.  Smart objects and artboards allow us to build a library of scalable PSD designs to generate bulk production assets in an efficient, pain free way!

I've been responsible for leading improvements and process for my art team for the last few years on various mobile titles and typically this means inside of Unity or looking into new tools revolving around game production.  One thing smaller companies need from an art team though will be marketing and media assets... This can make things very stressful when a sprint or release is going public and mid-sprint you have someone remind you - 'Oh and by the way we need release media like App Icons and Screenshots'.  More recently I've found some new pipelines that I think any artist who has to deal with media can appreciate and use.

Example 01 : App Icons (or rather let's just resize something simple)

All of the products we maintain for the company are iOS supported - Some involve Android but the one core need was iOS, since this is series of game products this meant App Icons were needed for releases and updates and tests (if we ever had the time for them lol).

Here's a Screen of a PSD I've setup for specifically iOS App Icons using Adobe Photoshop:

(App Icon WIP is courtesy of an awesome artist I work with Laura Franke)

This Artboard PSD can export a full iOS AppIcon set for a product in a matter of a few clicks.  This allows us artists to then focus on creating the source App Icon Art at full Resolution (in this case 1024x1024).  The primary need is to make sure that the file is setup so that anyone else can use it & to name your Artboards so that you know what goes where in Xcode. (You see mine listed as the straight Points @ X scale format that Xcode uses as descriptions in the app icon area.)

* Smart Objects are KEY to this setup

It may be a little frustrating but if you haven't started to use smart objects in a production environment I highly recommend making it priority.  The setup above took us from a few hours of work and a lot of errors to basically error free and to half an hour tops (not counting app icon image adjustments or new visual app icon needs).

Each of the art boards are using the same PSD file linked via smart object and are just scaled to fit the desired canvas sizes.

This is it for now - I am setting up another production PSD file for Screenshots in a production environment so I'll do another post when that's ready to go over my learnings and the final setup.

Cheers,

Brittany