I wanted to give the community insights into our building design pipeline. When I, as the designer, conceptualise a building, I use AI to concept ideas against some very clear design guidelines. This allows me to quickly iterate on building ideas.

Those design concepts get sent to our 3d artists who use AI research tools to create building blueprints that maintain the IP consistency and design thinking I have started with and add the detail they need for the manual 3d work that comes next.

That leads to a more traditional 3d art pipeline where high-poly modelling is done in Maya, and then the high-poly model is painted manually in Substance Painter and baked into a low-poly model with the high-poly details intact in the textures.

And thus, a game ready 3d building emerges for you to place on the game map - while you build your city.

We have deeply integrated AI into our pipeline since 2019, not to mass-generate AI-slop, but rather to do deeper concept iteration and engineering thinking on assets to become an additive tool in our artist pipeline - instead of replacing the artists with it. It's the harder use for AI, but the one that yields the right results that empower the team, as a great tool should always do.

New story trailer and feature spotlight is out: