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I feel like we need a "library" of freely available hi-res textures and models that can be adapted for a given game. From what I understand, a huge part of the development costs go into the art, and having a huge library to draw from seems like it would mitigate that somewhat.

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It's not that simple. There is more to a game artist's job than just creating a generic model and texture. The art has to be in a specific art style, it has to be within a certain budget, it has to be made in a certain way to work in the game engine. The textures have to be made to work with the shaders that it will be using and look good in the game's lighting system. Physics might need to be setup. Destruction states. Lightmaps generated. It might need to be created so that it can be rigged and animated. There are places like cgtextures.com for textures, and there are artists who turn those textures textures into the art you see in the game. You can't replace the game artist.

Believe me, I'm not trying to replace game artists or belittle their work in any way. I'm just musing about whether or not there is a way to streamline an artist's job, to make it easier for them to create content. Which, when phrased that way, seems like it is more an issue with the available tools rather then the library of previous works.

Most companies have lots of in-house tools and scripts they have written to help artists do their job. A company like Bungie will have people dedicated to working on tools for artists. The positions are called tech artist or tools programmer. Some companies have much better tools than others.

Great, yet more games that look exactly the same. That is not the answer.

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