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| 8/11/99 |
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I promised I'd talk about the tools we use for art creation on Torment.
First and foremost, Newtek's Lightwave. For 3-D modeling and animation, I think it's a hard one to beat. All the backgrounds, characters, animations, and a majority of the interface art is generated in Lightwave. It's modeler has a nice quick feel making it easy to create organic and inorganic shapes. Lightwave itself has some extremely spiffy animation tools, all fairly easy to get into and understand. If you really want some over the top texturing you can use texture mapping, built in procedurals, or a third party plugin. After Lightwave, my guess is that PhotoShop has the most uses. Painting textures, touching up backgrounds, generating interface art, and pretty much everything else in between. Preliminary Torment renderings were marked up and noted in PhotoShop then passed between artists and designers. Many backgrounds were touched up in PhotoShop. Nearly all of the item art was made or touched up in PhotoShop. Debabelizer Pro has been a godsend. It's batch processed all of the character animation in the game. That's roughly 180,000 frames of animation color reduced, palletized and processed. Of course, that number doesn't take into account that we've done that entire process twice (early and final versions) for all the characters. The final main program would have to be Painter 5. I wasn't aware of its bitchenosity till late in this project when Gary Platner and Brian Menze started re-touching the backgrounds. This is an awesome program for generating textures and adding artistic touches that are hard to re-produce in PhotoShop. It has a huge selection of art brushes and paper textures to apply to any drawing. One last little thing possibly on your mind. Our computers. Most artists' have...
I wouldn't get discouraged if you think that all these neato tools make our jobs that much easier or faster. It's mostly the artist creativity that paces the job. Thanks for your time,
Tim |