High-Stakes Poker Assets
A comprehensive suite of optimized, game-ready 3D assets designed for an upcoming mobile casino game. I am currently expanding the project with full environments and additional models.
The client required a highly optimized, visually striking suite of casino assets for a new mobile poker game. The primary challenge was achieving high-fidelity PBR graphics while strictly adhering to mobile performance constraints. Additionally, this is an ongoing project where I am currently in the process of designing and modeling full casino environments and auxiliary props to surround the core tables.
I began by gathering extensive real-world reference material of professional poker tables and casino chips to capture the nuances of the materials. Modeling was executed in Blender, prioritizing clean, low-poly geometry essential for mobile hardware. All the heavy detailing, such as the padded leather rail wrinkles, was baked down from high-poly sculpts into the normal maps. Texturing was handled in Substance 3D Painter using custom smart materials to ensure the felt and leather looked realistic even on smaller mobile screens.
The core poker table and chips were successfully integrated into the mobile engine, maintaining smooth 60fps performance without sacrificing visual quality. The intelligent use of detail maps and optimized geometry resulted in a significant reduction in draw calls. The project is currently active, with new environments, slot machines, and architectural models actively being developed to expand the game's world.
Case Study
Project Overview
The objective of this ongoing project is to create a highly realistic, performance-friendly collection of casino assets for a mobile poker game. The centerpiece currently is a professional-grade poker table, meticulously modeled to match real-world casino specifications while staying within a strict mobile poly budget. Accompanying the table are optimized casino chips, and I am currently working on expanding the scope to include full casino environments and surrounding architectural models.
Design & Modeling Process
The modeling process in Blender focused heavily on optimization. The padded leather rail was a particular challenge; I utilized sculpt tools to bake high-poly tension folds into a low-poly mesh. This allowed the final model to look plush and expensive without destroying the framerate on mobile devices. The chips were instanced from a single optimized master mesh, relying heavily on normal maps to provide the grooved edges.
Texturing & Materials
Texturing was handled entirely in Substance Painter using a PBR workflow tailored for mobile rendering. The felt material was custom-built using noise nodes to simulate the fibrous details of real casino cloth, while the leather armrest was given subtle roughness variations. For the chips, I created a smart material that allowed for rapid iteration of different chip values and colors, ensuring consistent wear and tear.
Challenges & Future Work
The primary technical hurdle was maintaining visual fidelity on mobile screens where compression and lower-resolution textures can easily ruin the illusion of felt and leather. I solved this by utilizing a detailed normal map and tuning the shader to pop under mobile lighting conditions. As the project continues, the current focus is shifting towards building out the surrounding environments, ensuring that the new architectural models seamlessly match the high quality of the central poker assets.