Creation Engine Blog

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“The majority of our modeling is done in 3ds Max although we do have one who loves his modo,” says Johnson. “Character and environment models are built primarily on the hard surface end in Max and then brought into ZBrush for organic or soft surface work, or the ever-present damage and weathering pass that most of our assets undergo.”

“A couple of the character modelers do use ZBrush for hard surface work as well, but it’s more limited. We’ll generally bring our assets back from ZBrush (after decimation) to Max for low poly tracing. We generally texture in Photoshop but get good use out of CrazyBump and a few other small tools if we have special case needs such as normal map blending and so on.”

“Animation is all done in Maya,” adds Johnson. “We have a large number of custom Maya tools to facilitate animation, including an auto rig tool.” [I’m sure many artists reading this right now would love to get their hands on that auto rig tool!] “We’ve also developed a universal head geometry which allows us to transfer facial weights to a new character in a few clicks as opposed to re-rigging a whole face, which can take hours or days.” As a quick side note, the facial animations in Gears of War 3 are amazing.

3ds Max, modo, ZBrush, Photoshop and Maya can be purchased at an educational discount price from Creation Engine