Starcraft 2: how units are made and some details on the environments |
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An IGN report on the Art Design behind the highly anticipated StarCraft 2 reveals several details on how models of the units in the game are made.
During the second day of Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational 2007, a panel discussion on the artistic efforts when it came to StarCraft 2's design had Sam Didier (Senior Art Director), Rob McNaughton (Lead Technical Artist), and senior 3D artists Trevor Jacobs, Allen Dilling, and Dave Berggren on hand to give their ideas.
McNaughton revealed that the base wireframe model of the Protoss Zealot comprised of 1,500 polygons. Now to make that bunch of polygons look like the Protoss that we know, mapping, texturing through Photoshop, and some light effects were added.
Jacobs noted that unit models have to be adjusted from concept art phase to final so that they render better in top-down view. For example, the Protoss Immortal had to have its shoulder pads enlarged and its facial angle tilted.
Each unit in the game will have three variations of animation to help make things look more interesting when hundreds of the same type of unit start to flood the screen. Also, it was noted that each unit needed to have bold and saturated colors and strong silhouettes to stand out when on screen, since most of the time the camera is zoomed out and the units are small.
As for the effects of each unit's attacks, Dilling noted that they want to make the effects as quick as possible so that it doesn't interfere with gameplay.
When it comes to the environments, three were revealed during the panel discussion. There was a forested Protoss temple world called Belshir, a Terran space platform, and Zerg's very own Char.
On to the technical stuff: Blizzard is using Photoshop for texturing, 3D Studio Max, and StarTools. StarTools is set to be made available to the public along with ScummEdit for map creation. StarCraft 2 is built on a DX9 engine. The game uses per pixel lighting, normal mapping, high dynamic range bloom, rendering and tone mapping, and integrated havoc physics.
Blizzard hopes that using their techniques will enable them to have around 300 units on the screen at once.
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