New dinosaurs…
I mentioned in my intro to this blog that I would be updating an old character, something I’ve been meaning to do for literally years. This character is in fact the base model for all of the base soldiers from Dreadnought, at the time we were pretty limited in what we could pull off character wise and apps like ZBrush and Mudbox weren’t prevalent like they are today. Neither were there retopology tools or advanced normal map generators, we were using very unfriendly command line tools to generate our maps.
So, the guys in the screenie below were modelled in 3DSmax, high and low res, every fold modelled in by hand using spline cages and surface tools. The image below is a real-time screenshot from the Instinct Engine, which is now being improved and extended across hand-held devices, check out www.instinctengine.com for more info.
The low res game versions were created by hand optimising the high res version of the asset vert by vert until the target tri count of about 1200 was reached. Textures were typically 1024×1024 or lower compressed to DDS. So before I start moaning about how we had to walk to the office in our bare feet carrying a lump of coal to power the server, here’s what the base high res model looked like (without body armour and helmet)
In the course of this blog I’ll be looking at what can be kept, tweaked and dumped as I work through updating the model and textures, warts and all, hopefully ending up with something I can use in my portfolio that smacks of twenty elevenness. I’ll probably use Marmoset or Max 2012’s tasty Nitrous viewport for the final render.
Pete Mc Nally's Blog 
Cool I will watch this closely!
Cheers Don