Dungeon Siege Interview

IGN.PC has conducted an interview with seven of the artists working on the upcoming RPG from Gas Powered Games, Dungeon Siege. Here’s an excerpt:

IGNPC: What sort of programs and techniques are you using to create the content within the game?

Joe Kresoja: We use 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and lots of psychedelic trance music to stimulate the soul.

Kevin Pun: We use 3D Studio MAX for creating all of our 3D content and proprietary tools for exporting models and animations to the game. For terrain, we also use 3D Studio Max with a custom exporter that produces the Siege Nodes (SNOs). A designer can use the Siege Editor, an editor that was created in-house, to assemble maps using a library of these SNOs. Oh yeah, we also have a tool called “SNO Blow” that cleans up our geometry inaccuracies.

Steven Thompson: Most of our characters are animated with Character Studio, an animation and vertex weighting plug-in for 3D Studio MAX. Each character has a series of animations that are linked together in the game engine, based on commands issued by AI. Most of these animations loop to a common “pose” frame, so transitions between animations are seamless.