I finally got around to posting some of my work from Guild Wars 2:
fav.me/d4bohbqfav.me/d4boh8efav.me/d4boh4vfav.me/d4boh3gfav.me/d4boh1mAlmost all of them have been shown in some form or another in the various trailers and publicity images. I'll update with more as information is officially released (stuff that I can say is at least 95% my work since these can go through several hands for various tweaks and fixes). I should also point out that these images were accurate as of March 2011. I'm sure there will be changes by the time the game actually ships.
The armors by themselves run anywhere from ~2000-3000 triangles (at least mine did... there are some other GW2 armor sets that are way more). The texture res ends up being about 512x1024 (it's composited together with other parts of the character on a 1k map). Sorry, I probably can't show the texture sheets, and there's nothing special about the wires. Armor sets generally took me ~10 working days. Female sets, when not straight up conversions of male armor, typically took ~5 days for the unique pieces unless the whole thing was different from the male.
*EDIT: Okay, I lied. I just looked at the Orrian armor again and it's actually way over the poly budget I mentioned! I blame it on these being my final armor sets there.
This sounds like an excuse, but the armors were colored using the game's dye system. It's great for players, but rather frustrating for artists because inevitably there are colors that will look better than others or, in the worst case, might not look good in ANY color. You end up having to minimize hue variation and high contrast which can make the textures rather bland.
We were all new to normal maps when Guild Wars 2 started up over 4 years ago, and my process evolved quite a bit since then. I sculpt almost everything in Zbrush, even things like hard edged armor pieces. I tried hard surface modeling (the heavy armor sets on the bottom row), but I found it was generally too time consuming, and fantasy armor doesn't really need to be that clean and perfect anyway. I typically retopo in Maya because the resolution of the low res meshes doesn't call for anything fancy, but I also use 3dCoat nowadays on Rift for more complex shapes. I use standard Maya tools for UV layout. I either bake normal maps in Maya or Xnormal, and bake AO in Xnormal. I paint textures in BodyPaint & Photoshop. Pretty standard stuff, really, but feel free to ask any questions.
You can find some concept work on my web site as well:
haikai.net/guildwars.htmlHopefully more coming soon!
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