Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Interviews

Sigil Games senior artist Christian Akesson and associate artist Jeff Damron have both answered a handful of questions about their work on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. The first interview with Christian is over at Silky Venom:

Q: What process does game art go through starting from conception all the way to production? Including design decisions, software used to create the art, how the game art is actually put into the game, and so on.

A: It all begins with a meeting where all involved parties vent what they have in mind, and then discussions take all the ideas into consideration. From there, a concept is created and given to the artist in charge of making the model. Not everything can be concepted as that would seriously overload our concept guys, but the artist can get an idea of the style for the concepts that he or she does get, and extrapolate other objects/buildings/dungeon rooms etc. out of that.

The building of the object will then commence and we use Autodesk Maya (formerly known as Alias Maya) as our main 3D software. There are a thousand ways to reach the end model in Maya and every artist has their way of approaching thing so it would be hard to discuss specific modeling techniques here.

The model is then UVd, which is the step when we assign texture coordinates and assign shaders to the model. To get the model across to our game engine, we have a plug in for Maya that exports it into our various mesh packages. We can then place buildings and objects in Maya and then write out command files to the editor so that it automatically places everything like we did in Maya or we can hand place objects in our game editor. We use both of these options depending on what we want to do. For example, it makes sense to just hand place a rock out on the terrain but it is easier to write out a command file when laying out a city since you have more controls of manipulating object placement in Maya.

While the second interview with Jeff is over at Ten Ton Hammer:

Q: When did you join Sigil and what attracted you to working for them?

A: I joined Sigil in May of 2004. Sigil is just a great place to work. The people, the game, the art.it’s all attractive and I was able to see a glimpse of this and the passion behind it when I interviewed. I was just lucky enough to have friends on the inside to vouch for me, and the willingness of Sigil to look past my horrible art test and give me a chance. J

There is some big heart here in creating this game. That’s exciting to be around and is easy to see when I first walked into the place. I am one for a challenge and for a startup company out to prove themselves, I was all about it.