Risk Assessment & Management Flashcards

What risk does floating-point precision loss introduce when baking 32-bit HDR textures down to 8-bit for a mobile game?

Answer: Subtle gradient information is lost, causing banding artifacts in smooth surfaces

Quantizing HDR data to 8-bit per channel discards fine gradient steps, producing visible banding on smooth surfaces like skin or sky.

Which scenario best illustrates a 'scope creep' risk in a texturing contract?

Answer: The client repeatedly adds new props requiring textures after the contract was signed, without adjusting the fee

Scope creep occurs when deliverables expand beyond the original agreement without corresponding compensation or timeline adjustment.

A studio is using a licensed texture library and plans to ship textures derived from it. What risk must be assessed before delivery?

Answer: Whether the library's end-user license agreement (EULA) permits commercial use in shipped products

Many texture libraries restrict commercial or game-shipping use; failing to verify EULA terms exposes the studio to copyright infringement liability.

What is the primary risk of disabling mipmapping for textures applied to distant geometry in a real-time scene?

Answer: Aliasing artifacts and texture shimmer appear as geometry recedes from the camera

Without mipmaps, the GPU samples full-resolution textures on tiny distant polygons, causing high-frequency aliasing and flickering.

When performing a risk review of a texture pipeline handoff, which documentation gap poses the highest delivery risk?

Answer: No specification for expected texture channel packing (e.g., which channels hold roughness, metallic, AO)

Without channel packing specifications, the receiving pipeline may misinterpret which data is stored in each channel, breaking material shading.

An artist uses procedural textures exclusively during production but the delivery format requires baked bitmap files. What risk does this create?

Answer: Resolution and tiling decisions must be locked at bake time, making later adjustments costly

Baking procedural textures commits them to a fixed resolution and tile count, so changing either requires re-baking the entire texture set.

Which practice best reduces the risk of UV seam visibility caused by tangent-space normal map baking mismatches?

Answer: Matching the tangent basis of the baking application to the tangent basis used by the target render engine

Tangent space normals are relative to the mesh's tangent basis; a mismatch between baker and renderer produces visible lighting discontinuities at seams.