Lux: Wow, so Golden Axe™ shipped on Oct 14. How long ago did you wrap up your artwork in the making of this game?

JH: I was officially off the project at the end of August. At that point I was only creating marketing materials using our in-game assets, and making sure to address any character art bugs that showed up during play testing.

Lux: What is your role and how did you first get offered a position there at Secret Level?

JH: It was a combination of my extensive experience with making in-game characters, a background in sculpting maquettes for Japanese companies, and my self-taught experiments with making character models using normal and AO maps. I started the project as Senior Character artist but moved into the lead role about half way through the project.

Lux: So did you ever play the original arcade version of Golden Axe?

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JH: We have an actual arcade machine here at the studio, so yes I have played a few times.

Lux: Let’s look at the concept art for the main character Tyris Flair. Who did the art and how did you interact with the artist and interpret it?

JH: This is the final in-game power-up costume created by our concept artist Marc Holmes. The design was heavily constrained by an initial design created during pre-production, however Marc was still able to give her a more appealing, harder, more barbaric feel. All the costume variations had to work with the same initial body and costume, as the parts had to fit onto it without changing the base mesh.

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Details, like the straps had to be omitted or moved since would not animate very well, and other parts, such as the armor were modified to fit the base body profile and design. During the concept stage I asked for angular forms, or ones that could be repeated easily, or use same texture, etc. This process went smoothly as Marc was familiar with the restrictions of poly count and texture space.

Lux: Let’s have a look at the Twins. Did you model one and then modify into the other one?

JH: The design was originally intended to have two unique models and body shapes. I had already started on the first model, when it was decided to have them fit better with the original game concept and re-cycle the same body for the other. Fortunately, I had made sure to build the first model in a way that it could be re-used as the other twin!

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Lux: I know you use several tools to create these characters, please explain the basic pipeline and where modo fits in. Please give us the specs on the characters too.

JH: Each model is approximately 15000 triangle polygons with 4 separate 2048x2048 texture/UV sets. A texture set consists of a layered PSD files that contain Diffuse, Specular, Normal, AO, Material Masks, and Alpha. The models were made in Maya, and then imported into modo for mesh tweaks and UV layout. The mesh was then imported into Zbrush for sculpting. The Normal Maps where generated in Maya or Mudbox. The AO was generated in XSI. modo was initially only used for clean-up and detailing of rendered AO maps. Later, modo’s ability to display our large normal and color maps while remaining usable, made it easier to create the diffuse maps based from projected photo maps as well as the specular, alpha and material masks. Towards the end of the project, modo was then used for shader set-up and rendering of marketing materials.

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Lux: I am curious, why didn’t you compute the ambient occlusion inside of modo?

JH: During the early stages of this project, we tested out several software packages to find that XSI rendered the best quality maps as well its ability to import extremely our dense zBrush meshes. I tried making the maps in modo much later in the project after using it for texture clean-up, and it works very well, but it seemed like it did not handle our heavy Zbrush mesh data quite as well as XSI.

Lux: How did you do the fur on the Twins?

JH: Fur and Hair can be difficult to simulate in real-time. I used a technique from my experience with Nintendo 64 and Playstation 2 development, by using a thin 1 bit texture that is stretched across several polygons. This leverages the consoles’ ability to draw polygons faster than textures. In Maya, I used Nurbs patches converted to polygons to define the form and volume and 1 bit alpha to cut out the hairs. In-game it is very slow to sort 4 bit alphas, so 1 bit was the only reasonable solution.

I also used the same technique on this female mesh, only this time the planes are considerably longer to simulate long hair. In modo I used Sketch extrude tool to make the poly planes, and removed the inner faces, leaving only the outer faces. The advantage to using the Sketch extrude is it created the poly UVs at the same time they drawn, much like the Nurbs patches I used in Maya.

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I could use a fur renderer in modo!

Lux: Uh, well we are working on that!

Lux: Introduce us to the other baddies in this game. Did you have the lead role in modeling all of them?

JH: As character lead, I was responsible in making sure all characters get in game, and providing support with the Art Director, Matt Butler. The game contains seven characters I personally completed, plus I helped on many of the others with various parts, tweaking existing models or only providing quality feedback and direction...

Lux: You have a lot of experience in Maya… Tell me how you feel about modo and Maya.

JH: I first started using Maya in 1997. At the time my primary experience was Power Animator, and Lightwave. Maya changed they way I created models, it was the first time I could model in a 3D viewport, with no need to rely upon orthographic cameras. The major issues with Maya is that it has a very steep learning curve, and constantly needs additional MEL scripts created just to get many tasks done!

modo on the other had is fairly easy to learn, and all the tools work with each other and are less cluttered and more accessible. modo really caught my attention with its easy to use UI, superb UV tools and the ability to paint directly on 3D models.

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Lux: Have you used the 3D painting in modo in production?

JH: Well yes, 3D paint was one of modo’s features that I really wanted to use! I had been using Body paint from time to time, but I found its interface to not be very intuitive. After using modo primarily for texture clean-up, I soon discovered modo’s ability to display normal maps and alphas, while allowing me to paint on a model at the same time, to be very helpful to add detail to the maps that matches the rendered maps. This is something that Body paint cannot do.

Lux: How do the characters look in game vs in these renderings?

JH: The game is fantastic, and much of the feeling you get while playing is from a combination of gameplay, realistic looking environments, and the very detailed characters. The modo renderings use the textures at full resolution, but in game they are reduced in size due to memory and performance restrictions. Adding to the various texture layers, the game also has custom shaders to help represent the surfaces and materials, such as metal, rock, skin etc, just like in modo.

However the in-game shaders have to render at 60 fps, so their effects are optimized to work best over all objects and lighting conditions within the game. modo allowed us to use the same or similar images to control many more variables beyond just basic Specular, Diffuse, and AO.

For example, I really wanted the Armor on the Twins to look like worn copper, similar to how an ancient coin might look. By using an AO map I was able to control the roughness, fresnel and reflection amounts to get a look that is much closer than what is running in-game.

The in-game lighting is very important to the realistic feel, and to help that, the whole game is lit by one “sun” light throughout the game! It seems to work similar to the “Physical Sun” setting in modo, as that was very helpful to render characters with lighting looking closer to the game look. However, to make the images more dramatic, I added a few more colored lights in modo in addition to the “Physical Sun.”

Lux: To get the characters ready for animation, did the riggers come back to you and ask for many model changes?

JH: Oh yes. The in-game mesh’s had to have well placed edge loops and good edge flow to the greatest extent possible to allow good deformations as well as keeping the polygon count to a reasonable level. Several of the modo polygon tools are very good at that, such as the Edge Slide, Edge Spin, etc.

Lux: Have you made others there at Secret Level curious about modo?

JH: Definitely. They are initially interested in the functions that Maya and Max do not do very well at, such as UV layout and 3D paint. However modo’s easy to use shader set-up and modeling tools are also of interest.

Lux: Thank you for your time and insight.

Golden Axe: Beast Rider is © Sega