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Guild Wars 2 armor sets (large images)

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haikai polycounter lvl 8
UPDATED! 9/9/2012

First of all, congratulations to all my friends back at ArenaNet on Guild Wars 2's success! Now that it's finally released here's some more work I did:

GW2_sylvariPrototype.jpg

The Sylvari were easily the most problematic of all races in Guild Wars 2. Everyone seemed to have their own ideas as to what they should look like. I was part of a team of artists to create this prototype of the Sylvari in a different style. This was one of the projects I was most proud of during my time at ArenaNet even though I knew from the start that it had almost zero chance of going through. It was a lot of hard work for seemingly nothing, but well worth it for me.

I can only take partial credit for this. Although I established the initial take on the model, our concept artist, Hyojin Ahn (http://thefirstcolor.cghub.com/), did most of the hard work finalizing the face and body after we showed him the ropes on how to use the 3d software. I learned a great deal working with him about just how much you can, and SHOULD, push your model to be the best it can be.

I made the armor as well as a variety of poses and additional modeling support. Danny Yeo (http://supyeo.cghub.com/) made the hair, and my brother, Donald Phan (http://dondon.cghub.com/), rigged the model in addition to helping with a lot of the technical issues (we even had this character running around in the game at one point!). Hongman Leung also helped out by animating this pose- it was really cute, but you'll have to use your imaginations for it!

The image seen here was rendered with Marmoset Toolbag (http://www.marmoset.co/).

GW2_CharrMale.jpg

I modeled the base body and head of the Charr male. I tried to work in elements of the Charr from the original Guild Wars as well as the newer concept art. I think this is the first fully normal mapped character model I ever made! In Mudbox, no less! Back then most of us were using Mudbox because we were scared of Zbrush's interface. I'm STILL scared of Zbrush's interface, but I made the switch soon after this anyway.

GW2_SylvariArmor.jpg

As seen in the first few Guild Wars 2 videos, the Sylvari race were once more traditional elf-like in appearance than they ended up being in the final game. These are some cultural armor sets that were made before the design changed to be more literally "of plant." I'm not sure if these armor sets I made ended up being used in the game in any capacity.

ALSO: I added a bunch of new armor concept art to my personal site: http://haikai.net. I don't want to waste anyone's time with it here, but if you're interested in seeing how we did concept art, as well as a bunch of stuff that will probably never be made, then check it out.

That's the last of the GW2 art I'll be posting. There's a bunch of other miscellaneous junk I worked on, but it's not worth the trouble. All of this is YEARS old anyway! Hopefully I'll have some newer work to show soon.


I finally got around to posting some of my work from Guild Wars 2. Almost all of these 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. :)

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 third image, 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: http://haikai.net

Hopefully more coming soon!

GW2_Orrian.jpg

GW2_backpack.jpg

These first two images were rendered in Marmoset Toolbag. These were pretty much my final tasks at ArenaNet before I left.

*EDIT: This sounds like an excuse, but the armors below 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.

GW2_Heavy.jpg

GW2_Light.jpg

GW2_medium.jpg

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