Im a solo dev making Grauwacht, a dark fantasy game where guilds build a castle together, fight raid bosses and hunt beasts on a shared 3D map (Android and browser). Every beast has a painted portrait in the bestiary. The 3D models on the hunting map were made earlier and separately, and for eleven beasts they simply didn't match. The Ice Elemental was a blue crystal block, the Ifrit a rock golem. Players looked at the painting, went hunting and found something else. Nobody complained directly, but it made the world feel stitched together. So I rebuilt those eleven from their paintings. A few decisions mattered more than I expected. The painting is the source of truth. If painting and model disagree, the model changes. I first cut a clean full body reference out of each painting, because smoke, sparks and loose debris in a painting turn into strange extra parts in 3D. No live 3D on the phone. Every motion (idle, strike, death) is rendered once into a small image loop. The game plays loops instead of rendering models, so the map stays smooth on cheap phones. Size by measured height, not by image size. Every render has a different amount of empty space around the figure, so scaling by image size makes beasts jump in size. The game measures the real height of each figure and scales from that. Test angles before every full render. Some new models came out facing backwards. A quick test from several angles costs seconds, a wrong full render costs an hour. And one I only found today. After a raid win the Ore Griffin vanished instead of lying on the ground, because the resting position of the new death animations was never measured again. Now a test checks it on every build. Total for all eleven was about two days and a few dollars of rented GPU time. AI disclosure. The paintings, the 3D models (made with Tripo) and for the two legged beasts also the rig and the motions are AI generated. I chose, fixed and placed them, and the render scripts and the game code are written together with an AI assistant. Game design, balancing and the guild systems are mine. Free to play, no account needed in the browser https://grauwacht.com/start?von=reddit-indiedev2 How do you keep 2D art and 3D models in sync when one side changes?   submitted by   /u/Curious_Ad5417   to   r/IndieDev [link]   [comments]