Developer Diary: creating Space Mountain.... image - Yuuzhan Vong at War mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
Behold the Yuuzhan Vong Army! This mod adds the Yuuzhan Vong Race as a playable faction and all units of this era. We are a community of modders working for the greater goal, so anyone who wants to help or support us is welcome!
This was the biggest art challenge our team has ever faced.
We Solved It.
The Kor Chokk is being used as the Vong Faction space station in Skirmish. It’s huge. A living ship, grown by grafting the hulls of slain vong vessels, asteroids and small planetoids. The outside is a harden rock surface, dotted with stalagmites and stalactites that serve as hollowed out docking tubes, sensors towers and observation posts, while the inside is an organic living tissue that spreads all throughout the structure allowing the vong to live and grow other vong vessels.
To texture this behemoth, we needed to find a new way to texture. Domed and circular objects require the largest texture space in order to prevent the texture skin from looking stretched or pixelated. Single use Tile-texturing would work for keeping the number of used textures low (preventing game lag) but then we would not be able to have Ambient Occlusion... and models that do not have good AO appear a bit fake or cartoonish like a toy , so this would not do, because we are striving for a hyper-realistic visual display.
The texture also has to look good from a distance, when the player sees the Kor Chokk in the distance, they need to be impressed by the geometry and the shadow, but being such a large model, many smaller ships will be flying around and over it, so the quality of our texture work had to hold up and still look good while being very zoomed in, for zooming in on a pixelated or blurry mess without details would just break the immersion and ruin the feeling we are trying to create.
The model was also made to be 1 million polys..... just to add another obstacle to overcome....
So, this was our challenge, the best and hardest thing possible saved for last. Thought of to be a true testament of all the skill and learning our team had acquired over the years...
A 1 million poly model that required super realistic close range detail, a shadow, Ambient Occlusion, and have no more than 9 textures...
It is always a challenge trying to recreate someone else’s concept work... many of the vong models had pre-existing old comic illustrations such as this one. We strived to stay as true as possible to the original designs, but used artistic liberties to enhance the concepts to make them more modern, more detailed, and more uniform with the style of our project.
Whoa, you guys are trully impressive
Love that you guys are not only working from existing designs but also improving upon them. I feel that some of the Vong ships or just ships in general from comics were a little basic but that is not true of what you guys have created. Much kudos to all you hard working citizens of the Empire! <3