Same pipeline, wrong lane
Spent the last two days fighting a 2D asset pipeline for the app assets - castle, menu, node icons, the pieces that will give the app its look and feel. Kept getting close, then losing it at the last step. Midjourney doesn’t want to give you flat art. It wants to give you a painting.
Regrouped, and the answer was already sitting in the vault. Midjourney for the shape, Meshy to build it out in 3D, then crunch it back down to a sprite. I’d already proven that recipe. I just didn’t reach for it here, because I’d boxed this lane in my head as “app interface” and started flat in 2D and stayed there. Trying to go directly from Midjourney to a pixel editor was just beating my head against a digital wall.
Checked it against people who’ve actually shipped this way first. Thomas Vasseur, the solo artist on Dead Cells, ran the same pattern: build it in 3D, render it small. At the 2D scale, I don’t need a ‘perfect’ 3D model. The assets that are intended for the sprite world can be ugly but functional. His own words - they’d make a real 3D artist’s eyes bleed. Shipped anyway.
Same lesson, different lane. This time it only cost two days instead of a month.