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Dev: pestibug
Position: character / level modeler and concept / texture artist
How yer scurvy legs be matey? Aaargh!
I hope they are good because we’re sailing the seas this week. Well, we’re actually going to have a look at a certain boat which you’ll be sailing.
Remember in this trailer, the ships sailing there? Well if you take a good look you’ll see there’s some strange grey parts on them.
Yes, that DOES look like crap! So once I was properly beaten for that by the art team I had to fix it and try to make it as amazing as everything else in spellborn. And some of the people who follow spellborn might kind of guess the magic word: history.
Yes everything in Spellborn has historical roots. Maybe not perse things that are deeply integrated in the lore, but just the visual indication there’s a historical connection. That’s what we’re needing on this boat.
First lets have a look at the thing without any textures.
Pretty neat huh? Yeah sure, it looks really boring without textures, but it does show the detail that’s gone into it. And since this boat is in a scene where there’s not very much happening on screen polycount wise I could go nuts on the details and textures. Lets have a look at it with textures. (oooh’s and aaah’s at this point are appreciated, but not mandatory).
Ah much better, we see what’s wood, what’s metal, all that stuff. But even cooler is all the details! Yes, okay so I think I’ve worn out 3 Wacoms on this one and probably have increased my risk on RSI by 150%, but damn if that doesn’t look sweet!
Some details:
Now at this point, some people might think a bit and say: “Pesti, you stupid, who’s going to see that? Everyone is on the ship, no one will see that stuff on the outside! Also, it will be in the water, no one will see all the stuff under the water.”
Well, yes, so you would think, but of course I wouldn’t waste all this time on things that aren’t to be seen by the players. So let me show the next thing.
Hmmm, it seems something went horribly wrong here. Yes, this is the wreckage you will be able to see later on in the game. That’s one way of how the history element comes into play. First you are on a ancestral quest on this boat, next thing you see it lying shattered in the persistent world of spellborn. Pretty funky huh?
So, now you get to see all those lovely details I’ve worked on.
Now on a technical side, the wreckage was a big challenge to make. It’s more than just pulling the boat apart and then scatter it around. For example, the textures on the wreckage ae the same as on the original boat, but scaled, differently arrange on their texture sheets. This had to be done because in the persistent world we can’t have huge textures, that would just kill most GPU’s. Also the geometry (polygons)had to be optimized. The trick was of course to do all this without making it end up with huge differences between the boat and the wreckage.
So it took some puzzling, being a bit creative and a bunch of tweaking. But in the end I pulled it off and it looks gorgeous! So, now that you know all this, when you see it in game, spend at least 5 mintues looking at it, that way I didn’t do it for nothing ;)
Okay, well that’s it I guess, just a little bit of how we sometimes take things and improve on them. That way the quality remains high. It’s not always fun, but in the end it feels satisfying.
Right, enough of my rambles, I hope you enjoyed it, and if you didn’t well, you can complain in the gameamp forums and let me know how to entertain you even better!
Of course, music of the week: slayer, Nine Inch Nails, The White stripes |
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