Hellgate: London Hunter Model Tutorial

[GameBanshee News]

Blur Studio's Alessandro Baldasseroni has written an interesting three-page article that gives us a great overview of the work he did to model the Hunter class for Hellgate: London.

Once I’m satisfied with the general proportions of the body under the armor, it’s time to begin covering it with the metal plaques. Of course, the dark blue ones first, since they’re the closest to the body, then the light blue ones.

No special techniques here. Once again the modeling is in subdivision with the very same stack as above. I usually start with a single quad, then Extrude edges all around, trying to stay close in volumes and shapes to the given reference. In a lot of the meshes, you need to make sure the volumes and shapes are solid, keeping an eye to not go too far from the underneath of the body.

When I’m satisfied with the general volume, I just try to develop a good quad topology of the main volumes. Of course the topology is done to take a count of the main cuts and holes, but the rest can be easily done with a normal map or a bump map. You need to decide how much detail is worth modeling and what can be put into a bump map.

I usually adopt a ‘rule of thumb’ that means if something looks tricky to carve or extrude into an existing geometry, I usually put it into a Normal Map. When you make something for production you don’t usually have time to model everything, so you need to set priorities.