How do they make all this JUNK that is in games?

Watching E3 video of Crew 2 and seeing just the incredible amount of stuff in there, the amount of variable height terrain all covered with trees and complete cities with pretty much everything in the right place... Where TF did it all come from?

I know there is a thing called SpeedTree that can procedurally populate trees. But like buildings with all the right textures and ones that match real cities like in Watchdogs 2: how do they do it? What kind of tools are they using? So for games like this you could go out and scan a bunch of real world textures. And if you need a bunch of objects, eg. a table and chairs you could send somebody out to the nearest furniture store to laser scan them. Is that what they do?

Then you got games like Uncharted 4 where the architecture is all basically fake. So does NaughtyDog have a sweat shop full of geometric modellers just cranking stuff out? :(

Does every game that needs a bunch of stuff, say items to fill a house, need to build them itself or is there a common bank of this stuff companies can just buy like they can with sounds?

My mind is blown by the amount of detailed stuff in modern games. I have a difficult time not just pointing at the screen with both hands yelling "Look at all that shit! Look at all that shit!"

From what I have heard it really depends on what it is they need. If it's really generic, like hay bales and wooden barrels for Skyrim. There are companies out there with suites of that kind of stuff. Kinda like buying a bunch of stock photos of women eating yogurt or men eating salad.

However each company out there is different and they handle these types of things differently.

3DSMax/Maya/Zbrush licenses + big-ass studios with hundreds of employees + 60+ hour work weeks for years on end. It's pretty nuts.

There are other techniques (photogrammetry, etc.), but to my (limited) understanding a lot of it just comes down to hours and hours and hours of work.

The primary studio will usually only work on set piece art, while most of the simple work is done elsewhere. There are a bunch of royalty-free content packs out there, but most major studios will outsource the 'grunt work' to studios in countries where people are, sadly, underpaid.

In most cases, character models are the most labour-intensive work, and will usually be done by a senior artist at the primary studio. The quality has to be high because they're always on screen and they can take months or years to complete.

Textures are usually made from a combination of photo reference and digital painting. As game engines have evolved, this process has become more and more complicated, with the need for normal, specular, occlusion and glow 'maps' which are textures that define how the model reacts to light sources (shiny armour and the like).

So yeah, mostly sweatshops. :(

I imagine that a lot of that work gets outsourced to places in central europe and Asia?

It does yeah. The demand for that kind of art has skyrocketed with modern games. Ubisoft does a lot of that for example.

This is why Ubisoft has 10 studios working on a single game at any given time. The other studios are just asset generating machines.

Also, SpeedTree is dope because it uses fractal math to generate beautiful foliage and saves you from the mind-numbingingly boring task of making trees. It gives you an alarming degree of control over the complexity and look of the tree. Need precisely 32 branches? SpeedTree has got you.

Yes, Asset generation is the brunt of the work hours put into games, and the reason why development teams have just exploded in size as graphical fidelity has increased. It's why a 10 man team can make a 2d sprite platformer while it takes hundreds of people to make games like GTA.

The total amount of unique items in a game usualy seems higher then it actualy is. I think that "dressing up" a game world with detail is real craft in itself. Humans have a real knack to spot repetition so to avoid players noticing the same objects over and over again they have to be very creative with how and were they place things.

I love that such a specific piece of software exists, and that it probably made someone a boat load of cash.

Here are a few sources to get an idea of what it takes to make game environments. It's a long process involving a lot of people from a lot of disciplines and a lot of different software as others have mentioned already. Of course all of this differs based on the type of game, studio priorities, available tools etc but this will give you an idea of what it takes. Take all the components listed below add in a few dozen people and hundreds or thousands of hours and then your close to getting the full picture.

http://halo.bungie.net/inside/publications.aspx the powerpoint for Level Design in Halo 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwZyGoxqh2Y&list=PLhn8HxtWs4QhSylHQsVDtMNTgQfBQxPO0

And lastly bringing it all together to make a scene.

For smaller more important areas they usually design the entire thing, for more broad areas they sometimes do procedural generation from a set of pre-made assets and other times they use a bunch of pre-made assets and hand place them etc. Or they do a combo of all 3 and make big set pieces unique and then place the pre-made stuff around to fill in the spaces

Yes, that was who I sort of had in the back of my mind. Whenever I see a game with like, 40 studios in the credits I assume some of them were just generating assets.

It's one of those things that reminds you that the games business isn't so different from any other, I guess. It doesn't make sense to hire a guy in Austin with the skills you need for your most complicated assets, and then pay him to make mugs and tables.

As people have said the assets do take a shitton of work to build, but on the other hand a lot of the time those assets aren't, like, manually placed by someone unless it's part of an important setpiece. Most modern engines have brushes that let you paint things grass, dirt, trees, and random bits of debris.

Some clever coding can also make things easier. For example, if you're making a sandbox game set in a city you can build the basic level geometry and write a script to place things like traffic lights where roads intersect, or streetlights at every x interval in y zones.

Environment artist or designer writes a list of the "junk" objects required in a scene, asset creators get to work modelling and texturing mug's, tv's, house plant's, ash tray's, furniture etc, whoever is putting it all together into a level can resize or otherwise edit the objects to fit the scene.
What i want to know is if in-between projects (if there is such a thing) if modellers are constantly making junk objects for potential use in future games, to create a library of objects to save time.

Yes studio's in India and other countries with low labor costs are making TONS of assets for big game companies. I know Guerrilla outsourced A LOT of the modeling for Horizon, except for the 'hero stuff' like the machines and main characters. I'm sure companies like Ubi have libraries filled with assets that they re-use for games as well (or use as a base to retexture/remodel for the next game).

And since games are getting bigger and more detailed at the same time they rely more and more on procedural generation. Not every bush is placed by hand anymore, nowadays it's more like an artist painting brush strokes (forests here, river there, etc.) on a map and the engine filling in the details.

@cikame: I don't know that many if any create libraries for whole objects that are game ready, but they certainly will create things like bolts, screws, and other model details that get a lot of reuse so that when they do create the asset they can save some time in the high poly modeling process. They might also have a library of lower poly models used in sculpting for similar purposes. These are generally used for what's called kit-bashing. Same goes for textures, they'll likely have a library of surface types and sub categories (Metal, painted metal, rust, etc) so they can save time for the texturing process. These texture libraries are useful in programs like Substance Designer and Painter to speed up the texturing process for specific assets.

In Left 4 Dead 2 the piles of bodies weren't created by manually placing the bodies but by using physics to make piles and then creating a static, reusable pile from that.

When a developer and a computer love each other very much...