Investigation into Pipelines and Asset creation for Unreal Engine 3

In the games industry today, studios and developers strive to increase productivity within their development team. However, due to the highly competitive nature of the games industry, up to date information about current techniques and pipelines is closely guarded as a company secret under NDA’s which many employees have to sign in order to work on a project.
This is not only a hindrance to the industry’s growth as a whole but also makes a study of the processes and decision making involved in asset creation within modern studio pipelines a whole lot more difficult.
Fortunately some studios and freelance artists are willing to offer information about what has been adopted in the industry as good practice when generating content for the current and next generation of games.
The goals of this research dissertation are to take what professionals regard as good practice and use it for analysis via the creation of content using the pipelines employed in industry today. Suggestions on ways to improve the pipeline and techniques will be made.
The end product of which should showcase what is possible using today’s preferred techniques and pipelines along with how long it takes to create assets using this method and draw conclusions on whether there are feasible ways to improve it to either increase quality in production or speed up creation or both.