Department 03 Environment · Character · Tech Art · Animation

Art &
Animation.

Claude will never paint your texture or key your walk cycle — that's the point. It exists to delete the other half of your job: import settings, naming passes, LOD setup, budget checks, retarget bookkeeping, and every "can you fix the 200 assets that…" ticket. You make the art. It runs the pipeline around the art.

00 — WHAT CHANGES

Three shifts in your day.

A

Bulk work becomes a sentence

Renaming 300 assets, fixing compression on a texture set, regenerating LODs for a folder — one instruction, minutes, zero clicking through property panels.

B

The content folder polices itself

Naming, placement, budget, and reference rules run as an automated lint pass — so review feedback is about your art, not your prefixes.

C

Tech art stops being a bottleneck

The routine 80% of tech-art tickets — import configs, material parameter sweeps, "why is this asset pink" — get answered or fixed by Claude directly.

01 — YOUR SKILLS

The playbooks you'll use most.

Under the hood these run editor Python or drive the MCP — but you never see that. You describe the outcome; Claude handles the machinery and shows you what changed before anything is saved.

Browse all Art & Animation skills in the Library →

asset-lintThe content folder's immune systemskill
What it does

Audits any folder against studio rules: naming prefixes (T_, SM_, M_, SK_…), texture sizes and compression, missing LODs, orphaned or broken references, assets living outside their home folders. Reports first; fixes the mechanical stuff on your go.

Run it before submit and nothing bounces. Run it on the whole project monthly and tech debt stops accumulating in the dark.

Try it
you › Lint /Game/Environments/Chapter2 — full report. Auto-fix naming and folder placement; flag anything over texture budget for me to look at.
you › Find every texture in the project above 2K that's only ever used on props smaller than a meter.
editor-opsBulk asset operations, no hand-clickingskill + mcp
What it does

Mass edits across assets: apply our import presets to a batch of new meshes, set LOD distances by asset class, swap a material parameter across a hundred instances, rename to convention with references intact. Everything previews as a change list before it runs — and it can screenshot results in the editor so you see the visual effect, not just the log.

Try it
you › I just imported 40 rock meshes into /Game/Env/Rocks. Apply our env-prop import preset, generate 3 LODs each, fix names to convention, and show me the before/after list.
you › Bump roughness 0.1 on every material instance under /Game/Characters/HEX_Vann and screenshot her in the lookdev map.
perf-profilingKnow your budget before review doesskill
What it does

Our per-platform frame budgets, and how to check your work against them: draw calls, shader complexity, texture memory, overdraw. Claude captures the stats in your level, tells you what's over, and — usually — which specific assets are the reason.

Try it
you › Profile the market scene from the player path. Am I inside budget on the base console target? Rank whatever's over by cost and suggest the cheapest wins.
source-controlBinary files without the heartacheskill
What it does

Art files don't merge — which makes source control higher-stakes for you than anyone. Claude handles the ritual: check who has what locked, stage your changelists with clean descriptions, and untangle the "I have 60 files checked out and 4 are someone else's" moments.

Try it
you › What do I have checked out right now, is any of it locked by someone else, and can you split it into one changelist per asset zone with descriptions?
verify-in-editorSee it in context before you submitskill + mcp
What it does

After a batch operation, Claude loads the affected assets in the editor, checks for errors and pink materials, and screenshots them in the relevant map — so a bulk change never silently breaks fifty props two levels away.

Try it
you › After the LOD pass, open Chapter2 and screenshot the vista from the tower at LOD distances — I want to see if anything pops.
02 — BEYOND THE PIPELINE

The rest of the job gets faster too.

01

Reference & boards

"Pull together visual reference for brutalist architecture reclaimed by desert — materials, lighting moods, real-world examples with sources." A structured starting board in minutes, before you open Pinterest.

02

Feedback, decoded

Paste a messy review thread; get back a clean, prioritized punch list per asset — with the contradictory notes flagged so you can resolve them with one question instead of three meetings.

03

DCC scripting on demand

Need a Blender or Maya script to batch-export with our naming and axis conventions? Describe it. Claude writes tool scripts for your DCC the same way it writes editor Python.

04

Learning the technical half

"Explain what's actually expensive about this shader like I'm an artist, not a programmer." Claude is the patient tech-art mentor every art team wishes it had on tap.

Feed the system

Your standards belong in the skills.

New texel-density rule? Changed the LOD policy? Don't just announce it — say "update asset-lint with the new rule and open a PR." From that day on, every asset anyone submits gets checked against it automatically. Standards you write down once get enforced forever. See exactly how →

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