It went very well. Of course, we had less reference material to work with than with real weapons, but the designs were pretty straight forward. We had to tweak them a bit to fill in the blanks and for them to work within the limits of the game. They make a nice addition to the arsenal available to the players.
For the background shaders, we use ZBrush to accentuate the normal maps. We worked directly on the canvas of ZBrush with the normal map material. We also created some textures by converting alphas into 3D meshes and placing them on the canvas. From there you can have the normal map by selecting the normal map material or just doing a Grab Doc with different materials to have base diffuse textures.
The way we work with 3dsMax is that once we are done with the ZBrush work we export a lower division, apply the normal map generated in ZBrush and this is used as our high-res model for projection.
It's great for normal projection because for 3dsMax it's like projecting from a high-res model and it keeps our scenes very light and quick to render. The problem is the occlusion pass done with this model is not very detailed. With Decimation master we win on both sides. We keep working with lighter scenes and we have more detailed models for the occlusion pass.
Decimation master also helped us to quickly create LOD's for characters in the background of our scenes. Decimation master's ability to preserve shape and UV's was by far superior to anything else we were using. We could in most instances create LOD's in a matter of seconds that we could then take and place directly into our scene.
Rod:
It's hard to pick just one! I have three favorites: Salem, the heavy shotgun and the heavy grenadier. All three are very different and I enjoyed doing them because of their design. In the end, if I have to pick one I would say Salem because it was fun to play with its different versions.
Joe:
For me it would have to be Rios. He was a labour of love; such a long process being one of the main characters. So he's like my baby, with so much work put into him I have to love him. But if just for looks, it would be my flamethrower dude.... just cuz he looks so bad-assed.
Ed:
I don't know if I could pick just one. Three of them were personally fun for me for different reasons. Breznev was a lot of fun because he was this scummy bad guy. The concept for this character was really nice which always makes the work more fun. The other two were Bob the security guard and the little old Asian man. Both of these have a lot of character in the face which makes them a fun challenge to work on.
