Mursion Art Designer

Display, configure, and ship new art configurations on the fly

Why

Initially, Mursion's 3D art configurations were mass-deployed as extensive presets, per industry and setting. Example: Corporate Conference Room with almost 100 combinations of corporate perspectives, 1-5 avatars per scene, each in business attire. And repeat, for every industry/setting type, or custom client contract.

Naturally, this ends up being restrictive & repetitive; requiring manual updates from the Art team - the only users with the tools and knowledge to create new configurations. As the Operations Team designed scenarios and reviewed artwork with clients prior to requesting updates - they should have the power to launch new art work as-needed, from a rolling release library.

Objectives

Launch new art configurations faster, to reduce contract timelines
Pair scenario design with art design, and offload operational work from artists
Create a database of art assets, with meta information for filtering, customization, and configuration
Launch a visual library of Mursion artwork, that can be updated quickly without any software deployments
Lay the groundwork for library APIs to be used across entire product suite
Create a foundation to eventually empower client users to customize or design their own experiences

Components

1. Designer Front-End

Source & display 3D artwork, create visual builder, add filtering logic, connect submission forms to live pipeline

2. Backend Service

APIs to query 3D artwork assets, modify art-project configurations, trigger build pipelines, and create tracking tickets

3. Asset Library

Local application to import 3D assets from Unity3D, define meta rules & interdependencies, configure default settings, and upload images

Challenges

How to define asset info for display, filtering, and correct assembly of all asset types
How to represent a Unity assetbundle in a web application, with custom definitions
How to keep the library up-to-date with fixes, improvements, and releases
How to import, edit, and submit from the existing library of art-configs
How to distill all of this information to Operational users, without art-pipeline knowledge

Architecture

All of the new supportive products needed to build on top of the existing art pipeline, with minimal overhead as to avoid any disruption of delivery. While not the ideal solution, it did still reduce the design timeline from weeks to same-day. This was achieved by giving powerful new tools to the designers in direct contact with clients, and supporting various automation components to offload all of the manual work involved.

In the Works

More to come soon!

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