| name | engine-handoff |
| description | Define and validate the art-to-engine contract for formats, scale, naming, materials, rigs, animation, metadata, import settings, automation, and ownership across distributed production. |
Art-to-Engine Handoff
Use when art production and engine implementation need a reliable shared pipeline.
Procedure
- Map the complete path from source DCC or design tool through export, version control or storage, import, processing, runtime asset, and final scene use.
- Define source and export ownership, canonical formats, scale or axis, naming, folder or package structure, metadata, and versioning.
- Specify material or shader conventions, texture channels, rig or skeleton expectations, animation clip or event conventions, LOD or collision, and other asset-class requirements.
- Automate repetitive import validation or conversion where it materially reduces drift, while preserving useful warnings and artist control.
- Make import settings reproducible from versioned metadata or configuration rather than one person's editor state when possible.
- Provide validation that catches missing references, wrong scale, unsupported features, bad pivots, channel mistakes, oversized assets, or incompatible rig or material data.
- Test the handoff from a clean workspace or another eligible node to expose machine-local dependencies.
- Define who owns fixing source defects, exporter defects, importer defects, and engine integration defects so failures do not bounce indefinitely.
Decision rules
- A handoff is a contract between tools and teams, not an instruction to export and hope.
- Machine-local editor settings are fragile pipeline state.
- Validation should fail with actionable messages at the earliest useful boundary.
- Keep source-of-truth and generated outputs distinguishable.
Quality gate
The pipeline is ready when a clean node can reproduce import behavior from versioned source and configuration, asset-class contracts are explicit, common defects are caught early, ownership for failures is clear, and artists and engineers can exchange work without hidden machine-specific ritual.
