Making THE E-11 BLASTER
Ken Lesaint, a 10 year game industry veteran, discusses creating the Stormtrooper rifle
Adding an authentic Star Wars weapon into the scene came late in the day and the team turned to Ken Lesaint, senior artist at Obsidian Entertainment, to complete the task.
“Originally, we didn’t plan on creating a Star Wars-themed gun to replace the stock Unreal first-person weapon, however, once things got further along, we noticed how great everything was starting to look and were encouraged to take things further. We decided at the very last minute to add an E-11 blaster to replace the stock weapon,” says Ken Lesaint.
Ken created the model in 64 hours – including texturing – by modelling only 40 per cent of the high-poly pieces, while the other 60 per cent were simply low-poly pieces with an Architectural and Design Mental Ray shader applied.
“When rendered, the shader produces a bevelled edge effect on all 90-degree angles giving the appearance of a high-poly mesh,” explains Ken. “By creating this pseudo highpoly, I then made a duplicate of the gun mesh and projected the pseudo high-poly details to a low-poly mesh, into a normal map, using a projection modifier and 3ds Max’s texture baker.”
Since this method tends to work best with sharp and boxy shapes, round and smooth curves are best to be modelled out as traditional high-poly elements, “I also used this method on several of the environment props which are scattered around the level,” says Ken.