Dekogon's founder Clinton Crumpler on making models for AAA games and VR

Dekogon Studios is a collective of top artists in the gaming industry. We got the chance to talk to its founder, Clinton Crumpler, who told us what Dekogon is focused on now and shared some insights about the 3D modeling industry.

Clinton, tell us a bit about how Dekogon Studios came about and what you do.

Dekogon is an artist collaborative group, our work is created by a collective of multiple contributing top-talent artists from across the gaming industry. Dekogon artists work within the game development industry and have multiple years of experience shipping AAA quality games such as Gears of War, Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, God of War and many other blockbuster hits. With our combined experience, Dekogon artists generate game ready assets for any studio to use in building their own unique game worlds.

After teaching and working with many artists throughout my personal career, I wanted to find a way to work with talented like-minded professionals to create exceptional game art. Dekogon was founded to give back to the artist directly for hard work and dedication to the craft. Artists share the profits among all contributing artists to create a fair work and fair pay collective group. When buyers purchase assets from Dekogon they are contributing directly to the artists who created the assets – allowing all of us to continue to make great quality work for the marketplace!

Dekogon has hinted at releasing high-quality artwork for VR and game usage on CGTrader. Would you like to tell us what can we expect?

Yes, all the work we produce is meant to be used for AAA game development work. Many of our assets have individual parts such as knobs, dials, and switches for easy VR usage, and almost all of them are textured at 2k resolution or higher. We strive to produce top quality assets, maintain PBR compliance, and optimize construction for easy in-game implementation of our assets into any game engine.

While there are many talented artists creating works for Dekogon, each asset is reviewed for quality and consistency by the management of Dekogon to ensure top quality of each asset. Our main development focus for textures and assets is use in Unreal and Unity game engines, to appeal to the larger audience of game developers and studios, but all our work is presented in easy to use formats such as fbx and obj for use in multiple game engines. Our work is also released in themes to help studios find similarly constructed and groupable assets to create their own custom scenes and environments.

What trends have you noticed in game development? How should designers adapt to these trends? As a long-time member of our community, what advice would you give to other designers looking to sell their works on CGTrader?

Understanding the needs of the market is key to performing well on CGTrader, as well as on any other marketplace. Right now I feel strongly that VR and PVP open worlds are huge booming markets and ones that we are happy to contribute to. Many of our assets are created with these trends in mind and our work has found itself into many of those types of games. We work to keep game developers happy about using our assets. Polycounts, texture resolutions, optimization, and other factors are vital to keep in mind when developing for these types of gameplay markets.

What main developments do you see in the 3D marketplace?

When most 3D markets emerged, the greater part of development was aimed at traditional animation work. Now AAA game development artwork is coming to full strength within many 3D Marketplaces. CGTrader has phenomenal work from up and coming artists, with much of it being PBR compliant and ready to be placed in an engine. Now that tags specifically help buyers find out which type of product they are buying, assets like the ones Dekogon makes are easily found as game type assets. Feature filters are becoming more important as multiple types of 3D assets are being used across multiple industries.

Dekogon's works have been featured in many games. Do you have a project you are most proud of?

It's hard to pick just one! In the past few years, our work has found its way into multiple games, such as Player Unknown Battlegrounds, Miscreated, Observer, Stay Close 2, Asemblance, Robo Recall, Escape from Tarkov, The Lighthouse, Last Year and many more! Our super talented artist team has worked personally on Gears of War, Call of Duty, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Metal Gear, Doom, Darksiders, Halo, Wolfenstein, Killzone, Worlds of Tanks, and many others, to give you an idea of the top quality we are able to deliver in our work!

What are your plans for the future? Any major projects coming down the line?

We have a whole year of content planned for release. We currently have 2 sets available on CGTrader: Retro 80’s Props and Construction Props. A new set will be released each month with about 20-50 assets in each set. This will allow developers to build whole environments and get all the props they could possibly need from a themed set.

Some of the sets you can look forward to this year are:
Modern Hospital
Art Deco
Antiques in the Attic
Dive Bar and Restaurant
Mid Century Modern | Futurism

We tend to observe emerging trends and assets that games are in need of to best suit our marketplace audience. We are also always open to suggestions from studios or individuals!

Thank you, Clinton!

You can follow Dekogon Studios on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/dekogon/