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What 40 games made our most sought after titles of '04? Find out!
GameSpy Grudge
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 A look at how the art of the game comes together By Dave 'Fargo' Kosak (More About Me) | March 16, 2004 The gaming community was sent buzzing a couple of years ago when it was announced that Firaxis, the company behind such 2D classics as Civilization 3, was looking to hire 3D artists. Firaxis was building a 3D game? Speculation ran rampant. Last year the company finally announced the big secret project: a modern remake of the classic swashbuckler Pirates!. Development continued under a veil of silence until last week when GameSpy and IGN were Advertisement
Ever wonder how a modern 3D game is put together? Meet the crew below the decks! Putting Pen to Paper
Even though games are an electronic medium, the artistic vision of a game always starts with old-fashioned pens and ink. Meet Marc Hudgins, the lead artist behind Pirates!. His office was filled with books of source material and lined with art from the game. Sid Meier wanted to capture the romance of piracy, the Hollywood-esque pirate fantasy. It's the lead artist's job to make sure the look and feel of the game supports the game designer's vision. So Hudgins draws bright and clean and colorful characters -- historically relevant, but exaggerated. Characters are simple, with stylized poses so they're recognizable from a distance. There's no mistaking the good guys from the bad guys. Even the ships are exaggerated: Hudgins took genuine period ships and drew them with brighter colors, bolder lines, and bigger curves so that they had lots of character even when seen (as they often are) from far away. From 2D to 3D
Of course, Pirates! is a 3D game, so before any of the art makes it into the game it has to be turned into a 3D model. This tricky job falls to artists like Mike Bazzell, seen here. In order to create full-on 3D renderings of objects, he has to be as familiar with them as anyone else on the team. Mike's office was littered with books of ship cross-sections and pirate reference material. The job of any 3D artist is to make the game objects look just as good as the art team intended, while using as few computer resources as possible. (The less polygons the computer has to draw, the better the game will perform.) When rendering a ship, for instance, Mike has to decide whether little details of the ship should actually be rendered with geometry (part of the 3D model) or if they should just be faked with clever textures. His best work will look super-detailed, but it'll actually be a very simple model. The process looks like this (Click to Enlarge): 
Notice the gunports along the side of the ship. If you look closely at the model, they aren't really there: the cannons just stick out of the flat hull. But once the model is textured, little shading clues give the impression that there are actually square holes lining the side of the ship. Next: Animation and Sound » Page: 1 2 |
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