THE TIE FIGHTER
Terry Hess explains how he created the signature starship of the Imperial fleet
“The Twin Ion Engine, or TIE Fighter, was originally only intended as a fly-over low-poly asset to help create movement in the environment. As it began to take shape, we quickly realised what an iconic shape the TIE fighter was and that it deserved more than a low-poly representation,” explains Terry Hess, senior environment artist at Obsidian Entertainment, who was charged with creating the famous asset.
“The start, as with most assets, is to gather reference,” says Terry. “I gathered images of primarily screenshots from A New Hope but it also included reference from the [scaled replica] EFX model. Scale and proportions are crucial for the balanced look of the TIE Fighter, most of the block out time was spent making sure these were correct.”
Standard box modelling in 3ds Max was used. “Originally it started as a 2,500-tri, low-poly asset. Details and chamfers were added until it ended up about 41,000 tris,” he explains.
Terry says the asset has unique UVS for everything except the glass and solar panels of the wings, which were tileable. “It has a total of six materials, all at 4k resolution, except for the two 2k materials for the tiling parts. The materials were in Unreal Engine 4 with RGB packed texture for Roughness, Metalness and Ambient Occlusion,” says Terry, explaining: “I feel the Roughness map is the most important of the maps and prefer to put it in the green channel, as the Green channel has one more bit of resolution than the red and blue channels."
When it came to texturing Terry turned to industry-standard Quixel Suite for the majority of the work, with some textures created in Substance Painter – for example, the end caps of the greeble elements.
“The TIE Fighter turned out to be a very solid asset. In total I spent about 80 hours on it. If I were to start over today, I would use Substance Painter for the majority of texture creation as I feel it has more control and tunability to the final resulting textures,” says Terry. “Remember to nail down your scale and proportions first, it will save you a ton of time down the road.”