One of my earliest responsibilities at Bungie was to capture Icons from 3D models of authored. This was a much disliked job, often delegated to new Visual Designers as part of their training. But in it I saw an opportunity to force multiply, reduce cost, and make the pipeline better.

My fist step was to use the existing pipeline for a release (Destiny 2: Forsaken) to better understand the workflow and pain points. At the end of development of that release, I wrote an analysis and an, “ideal case,” a wish list to describe the perfect icon pipeline. This ideal effectively would:

• check for any newly checked-in assets to the depot
• fire off a nightly script farm to
  • Automatically capture models
  • output raw images
  • process images losslessly
  • create game objects from the processed objects
  • link the image game objects to investment tables in engine

As a backup to this, I included a host of lower hanging fruit QoL improvements. As is frequently the case, the scope of the fully automated solution was untenable so I narrowed the ask down to 4 primary areas of focus:

1. Tool stability
2. Comprehensive coverage of item archetypes
3. alpha channel output
4. A full pass at all the archetype’s settings, Photoshop actions, and XML files to hone the look to perfection.

Working closely with production (Mariana Sulcs) and an extremely talented Technical UX designer (Xavier Durand-Hollis) we built it out in time for the next release.

For the next year, I was the sole owner of this system, adding new archetypes the the capture scripts (JavaScript), creating lighting setups for them (proprietary tools), continuing to hone and polish the automation framework (Photoshop Actions). As the primary user and maintainer of the tools, I was able to debug and extend them, adding a novel a save function to the capturing tool (C#). When I needed something done, which was technically out of my grasp, I would again work with production and external teams like Tech Art. Tools, Lighting,

1. Lightbox presets for large storefront icons of exotic ornaments, set up MTX store icon lightboxes, extended the UI Icon Manager and Gear Browser capture behaviors (e.g., adding the Glaive archetype), and owned icon automation support and implementation. This work reduced manual artist time and standardized how in-game icons were generated at scale.