Friday, January 14, 2011

Iteration during truck model design

We have another look behind the scenes for you today - images of work in progress, and also an example of the kind of feedback that the lead artist repeatedly provides back to the 3D designer building the model.

You will notice that we are trying to pay attention to characteristic visual features, but inevitably, we do have to make compromises. We cannot afford to throw hundreds of thousands triangles at the model, we need to make sure it renders at reasonable framerate in the game even on lower spec computers. We are always hungry for high quality reference material, this is another hurdle for us. Obtaining technical blueprints or at least decently scaled schematic images of the original vehicles is quite rare. All the mod makers could confirm how tough it may be working just from photos.

This model of course should or perhaps we had better write _may_ end up in Euro Truck Simulator 2 eventually. We need to formulate our statements safely - so that there is less potential for disappointment when the game finally ships. All the images from development that you see here on our blog are still subject to final approvals, and please don't take it for granted that any of the stuff is guaranteed to appear in the game. Especially with trucks, this is highly sensitive topic. Just as with our previous games, there may be material that we had spent weeks and months working on which may end up being cut from the final version of the game to keep us in safe legal zone. We need to respect that the truck manufacturers have multi-billion business, their brands are a huge part of the value, and they protect their brand and public image fiercely. We are trying hard, but there may be cases where the walls erected around the brands may be too thick to penetrate.


(click the images to get the full size view)