Why not use the game engine for concept images?asked by Zimler
TL;DRConcept ships aren't built in-game yet, and concept models ignore engine efficiency, whereas in-game ships need engine-correct work, so the two workflows are kept separate.
Because as concept ships, they have not been implemented in the game yet. They have not been built and modeled out in-game.
It depends on the artist as well. Some artists are super clean. There's no right or wrong, everybody just works differently. Somebody might build the same ship and it'll be one million polygons or tris. Another artist might build it and it'll be 200,000. But the ship team, they're spending time on creating something that works for the engine. All the bevels are correct and the shaders are correct and parallax occlusion maps and lighting. There are so many technical issues.
I'm remembering the rivets on the second generation Freelancer. In concept art, you don't have to worry about efficiency. You just have to worry about it looking good. But the second version of the Freelancer, maybe it was the third, I don't remember, but it had all the rivets along the lines and each rivet was like tens of thousands of tris because it was just created really dirty really fast. And unfortunately, when it came time to implement it in game, they took the rivet from the concept model and just said, oh good, I don't have to make a rivet. And at one point, because of that concept rivet that was in the actual hangar model, the Freelancer had a greater resource footprint than the entire Idris, because of all the duplicated rivets. It was crazy. It's a vastly different workflow creating concept ships versus in-game ships, and there's a reason they're separated.