Chapter 2: Deliverable Types

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Environment Concept Art Deliverables — Types, Purpose, and Best Practices

Environment concept art is a communication toolset. Each deliverable answers a different question for design, art, and production: what a space should feel like, how it works, how to build it, and how it will hold up under gameplay. The following guide explains the core deliverable types—thumbnails, keyframes, callouts, and paintovers—along with many others you are likely to encounter, when to use them, what they typically contain, and how to hand them off cleanly in both indie and AAA contexts.

Thumbnails (Ideation Studies)

Thumbnails are small, fast explorations of composition, scale, and spatial rhythm. They exist to test ideas cheaply before anyone commits time to modeling. Effective thumbnails map the player’s eye flow across a frame, try multiple camera heights, and probe different distributions of mass and negative space. In practice, a sheet of thumbnails might cycle through six or more variations of the same beat—narrow canyon, open basin, angled switchbacks, or a cliff‑side village—each implying different traversal routes and focal hierarchies. The most useful thumbnails include tiny notations about mechanics (“ledge grab,” “sniper perch,” “safe drop”) and rough value grouping that suggests where lighting emphasis will land. Thumbnails should remain loose enough to invite iteration and specific enough that a level designer can already imagine where blockers, cover, and landmarks will go.

Keyframes (Mood and Moment)

Keyframes are polished images that lock the emotional and narrative read of a place at a particular moment. They answer questions like, “What should it feel like to arrive?” or “How does this plaza look at dusk during the festival?” A strong keyframe harmonizes composition, lighting, color temperature, and material response to communicate tone without words. It often chooses a playable camera height so that the shot doubles as a north star for level art. Good keyframes also imply interactive affordances through staging: a warm spill of light over the main route, a backlit silhouette on a critical door, or dust beams that reveal volumetric depth and the shape of the encounter space. While keyframes lean toward polish, they remain design‑honest, avoiding invented geometry that will not survive production.

Callouts (Build Instructions)

Callouts translate vision into construction logic. They break down modules, dimensions, materials, and usage rules so environment artists and outsource partners can build consistently. A typical callout sheet presents orthographic snippets of walls, arches, stairs, and trims with labeled measurements keyed to the studio’s grid. It pairs each piece with material IDs that map to PBR targets, notes texel density goals, and specifies where edge wear accumulates. When callouts cover a kit, they indicate how parts interlock, how many unique textures a set uses, and which details belong in the geometry versus the material. The best callouts annotate gameplay constraints—minimum cover height, jumpable rail thickness, mantle allowances—so the kit plays well the moment it is assembled.

Paintovers (Design Alignment on Blockouts)

Paintovers sit directly on top of design geometry to solve readability and flow. Their job is to fix confusion before it becomes expensive. On a greybox screenshot, the concept artist adds value staging to clarify the main route, adjusts silhouettes to make covers and hazards legible, and suggests signage, landmarks, or prop clusters that support orientation. Paintovers often recommend soft geometry moves, such as pushing a rock wall to open a flank or collapsing a vista that distracts from the objective. When lighting is present, paintovers also tune contrast to preserve the intended mood without sacrificing navigation. Because they operate on live design spaces, they are fast, iterative, and among the most cost‑effective deliverables in the pipeline.

Color Scripts (Emotional Pacing Over Time)

A color script is a sequence of small frames charting how hue, saturation, and value evolve across a level or chapter. It protects the emotional arc when layouts change by anchoring each beat to a distinct palette and light quality. Scripts often include notes about weather shifts, time of day, and VFX accents so that lighting and FX teams coordinate their work. A concise color script can save weeks of thrash by ensuring every location contributes to a clear, varied rhythm instead of drifting toward one unbroken mid‑value mood.

Lighting Studies and Time‑of‑Day Boards

Lighting studies isolate illumination as the storytelling agent. They explore key‑to‑fill ratios, bounce behavior, volumetric density, and the direction of rim light that shapes silhouettes. Time‑of‑day boards focus on the same scene across morning, noon, dusk, and night, revealing how readability and tone change. These boards inform not only art direction but also technical decisions such as exposure curves, fog functions, and performance budgets for shadows and translucency. They are especially useful when a location must support multiple gameplay states in different lighting conditions.

Material and Texture Targets

Material boards define the physical truth of the world. They show surface stacks—stucco over brick, moss over shale, paint over oxidized steel—and provide roughness, metalness, and normal intensity targets that shader authors can match. Good boards also describe wear logic: which edges polish from touch, which planes trap dirt, how rain streaking behaves under wind, and where lichen or soot accumulates. In production, these targets keep a large team’s materials reading like they inhabit the same climate, budget, and culture.

Orthographic Views, Elevations, and Exploded Diagrams

Orthographic and elevation views remove perspective to communicate accurate proportion and construction. They are indispensable when a kit must be modular or when a hero structure has complex joints. Exploded diagrams show how pieces assemble, including hidden fasteners, joinery, or cabling routes, which in turn inform where modelers should spend polygons and where texture detail can carry the read. These drawings prevent ambiguity that would otherwise cause inconsistencies across multiple scene owners.

Isometric or Axonometric Cutaways

Cutaways reveal interiors, circulation routes, and service spaces in a single drawing. They are perfect for hubs, dungeons, and multi‑level arenas where vertical navigation and sightlines matter. A well‑annotated cutaway clarifies where lifts, vents, ladders, and maintenance corridors run, and how they connect to combat spaces. Because cutaways show both architecture and systems at once, they are a powerful bridge between narrative logic and level design constraints.

Worldbuilding and Lore Briefs

Lore briefs codify the rules that make a setting feel inevitable. They summarize cultural motifs, resource availability, climate pressures, and technology levels, then tie those directly to forms and materials. The brief might explain why roofs pitch steeply, why windows are small, or why certain pigments dominate local paint. When distributed early, these briefs prevent one‑off art that contradicts the world’s logic and keep outsourcing coherent without micro‑management.

Biome, Foliage, and Terrain Guides

Biome guides specify ground cover, rock typology, tree species, undergrowth density, and color temperature for different regions. They set scale references so trees, boulders, and grasses feel consistent and believable. Terrain notes may include suggested splat‑map percentages, erosion logic, and how paths, water runoff, or snow drift should read. Foliage sheets show leaf silhouette, translucency expectations, and seasonal variants so lighting and shader work align with performance budgets.

Signage, Wayfinding, and Diegetic UI Packs

Wayfinding packs ensure players can navigate without relying on HUD elements. They include signage language, iconography, color coding, and lighting cues embedded in architecture and props. In science‑fiction or modern settings, they also propose diegetic UI—screens, holograms, and indicator lights—that communicate objectives in‑world. These packs reduce friction during playtests and give level artists a reusable system for clarity.

VFX and Atmospherics Briefs

VFX briefs define the behavior and placement of effects such as falling ash, pollen sheets, localized dust, steam vents, or rain splatter. They explain scale, spawn density, motion character, and emissive ranges so that FX enhances mood without obscuring gameplay. When combined with lighting studies, these briefs help prevent late‑stage conflicts where a beautiful atmosphere accidentally hides a critical traversal edge or cover line.

Photobash Kits, Capture Plans, and Reference Packets

For realistic projects, concept artists often prepare photobash elements and capture plans. A capture plan lists locations, times of day, and angles needed to obtain consistent texture or reference photography. The accompanying packet curates photos with notes about why each is useful—joint details, stain patterns, regional brick bonds, or glass tint variations—and how they should be used ethically within the studio’s guidelines. These packets accelerate both concept iterations and material authoring by providing vetted source material.

Map Sketches and Encounter Overviews

Top‑down maps and encounter overviews synthesize design intent with visual narrative. They note circulation, choke points, vista axes, safe rooms, and stealth routes, while marking landmark placement and prop clusters that support story beats. Although simple, these drawings are among the most referenced artifacts in cross‑disciplinary reviews because they help everyone reason about space at a glance.

Benchmark Scenes and Look‑Dev Sandboxes

A benchmark scene is a small, representative slice of the game built to final quality. Concept supports it with tightly targeted callouts and lighting keys. The goal is to validate pipeline assumptions—poly budgets, texel densities, shader complexity, foliage densities—so the team knows what “done” looks like and how much it costs. Look‑dev sandboxes extend this idea across time of day, weather, and fog settings, giving lighting and tech art a playground for tuning without the risk of breaking production levels.

Outsourcing Packets and Art Bibles

When external partners contribute, the concept team usually packages style guides, callouts, naming conventions, kit catalogs, and quality bars into a single source of truth. The art bible lays out pillars, do’s and don’ts, and canonical examples with before/after paintovers that illustrate common mistakes. Clear packets reduce back‑and‑forth, keep quality consistent, and allow smaller internal teams to scale output.

Deliverables for Different Team Scales

In indie settings, deliverables lean toward multipurpose documents. A single keyframe may double as a lighting target and marketing image. Callouts are pragmatic, focusing on a minimal kit and trim‑sheet efficiency that a tiny team can actually produce. In AAA, deliverables specialize and deepen. There may be distinct packets for biomes, signage, VFX, and kits, with separate owners for each. Regardless of scale, the best deliverables are crisp about intent, scoped to the team’s bandwidth, and easy to update as levels evolve.

File Hygiene, Versions, and Handoff

Clean handoff practices matter as much as beautiful painting. Every deliverable benefits from a labeled legend and a simple naming scheme tied to project codes and level identifiers. Source files should be layered logically—line, value, paint, notes, and masks—so others can extract what they need. Exports should include a presentation version and a production version without dramatic post‑processing, ensuring that the reference reflects what is achievable in engine. A short cover note explaining assumptions and constraints prevents misinterpretation and speeds downstream work.

Choosing the Right Deliverable for the Problem

When clarity of flow is the issue, a paintover on the latest blockout is the fastest fix. When emotion is undefined, a keyframe or color script is the right lever. When inconsistencies appear across multiple locations, expand the lore brief or art bible. When build speed stalls, refine callouts and modular logic. Thinking of deliverables as targeted remedies ensures effort is invested where it solves real problems rather than where it merely produces pretty pictures.

Conclusion

Deliverables are not ends in themselves; they are instruments that align people, systems, and feelings toward a shippable, memorable world. Thumbnails test possibilities, keyframes set the emotional contract, callouts make ideas buildable, and paintovers keep gameplay honest. Around them orbit lighting studies, color scripts, orthos, cutaways, biome guides, signage packs, VFX briefs, reference packets, benchmarks, and art bibles. Together, they create a shared language that survives the push and pull of production, from the first sketch to the final playable experience.