I’ve posted a number of topics around content creation from art production standpoint. UEFN appears to abstract and make accessible many things, and it’s easy to see UEFN moving toward being a successful “Fortnite experience building platform”. What’s not clear based on the current touch points or the communicated vision, is what successful art production abstractions look like? How can the bar for entry be lower for art content creators?
It’s easy to imagine KPIs like:
- Material instance parents that allow creators to extend the world of Fortnite
** With the same level of runtime efficiency, build and platform reliability, and memory efficiency
** With the same or better level of visual fidelity (stylistically and from a feature perspective) - Tools which encapsulate tedious ingest, post import mutation, and configuration tasks. Or even higher level creative tasks (like modular architecture displacement based on TextureData assignments)
The platform currently doesn’t offer creators the ability to reach the visual bar established by the game itself, and it’s not clear how much of the platform vision is weighted towards quality art content creation (as opposed to experience / gameplay mechanics creation). I certainly understand that the platform shouldn’t be too prescriptive, but at the same time, if high quality content is to be desired then art production workflows must be more accessible. Disparate creative workflows and content implementations within a single platform run the risk of slowing down creators of all kinds. Of course, give folks the ability to customize at a low level, but also provide them with a path of least resistance. My questions are:
What are the golden path for art content creators for each discipline? What does it look like to add custom weapons, props, and modular architecture to Fortnite in a seamless way without compromising expected features and visual fidelity? We must be able to customize the world in a way that leverages both custom and existing content working in harmony.