Do You Know ? (God of War III)

First comes the idea! "Our director Stig decided he wanted Helios to go down in an epic fashion, with his head being ripped off. Then comes the execution. We had the animation department create the head rip and eye bulge. Then character art modeled some guts and we used some shader tricks to get the ripping effect to happen. The fx department added the blood and the rigging guys put the whole thing together.”

Creating a usable set of tools in Maya was the first challenge to meet before even beginning to model. “When the studio started, we decided to use Maya and make it our editor. All of our tools are in Maya. We have five technical artists and three tools programmers who are dedicated to creating tools for the artists, designers and animators. Each department has their own toolboxes to maximize workflow. We use Maya’s particle systems, its rigging/animation system and key framer. We’ve created a CGFX shader that utilizes the hypershade and renders in the perspective window. Pretty much any feature that we have on the PS3 renders in Maya and what doesn’t, we have live linked with Maya attributes. Our Programming Team created an entity system in Maya that uses connections and scripting similar to other game engines and editors...

-God of War Team-