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How involved is Epic Games
with the creation of these action figures? Did Microsoft participate
in the process at all?
Randy Falk: Epic is
very involved and it is a tremendous help. We met early on
to discuss concepts and ideas before we began sculpting. From
there Chris Perna has been my daily contact. We are in constant
communication e-mailing sculpt photos in progress and getting
great feedback and corrections from Epic so that we can make
everything as exact and true to the game as possible. I can’t
tell you how helpful Chris and the guys have been with reference,
direction, and quick turn-arounds on approvals and revisions.
Without revealing your magic, what’s the process to
bring a CGI character to life? I know there are three dimensional
printers that create sculptures from a 3D mesh, but I don’t
know if you use such a technology or sculpt the model the
old way.
Randy Falk: The magic
is in the artist’s and sculptors themselves. While the
dimensional printers you mention can be a useful tool it is
not something that we utilize. We prefer to create everything
by hand the old-fashioned way. While I think that technology
has it’s place and in the future it may be more viable
for now there is so much work that has to be done to the outputs
you get we’re better off going from scratch and using
clay/wax and lots of reference and we play the hell out the
games to really study the characters, how they move, how they
look, how to articulate them without compromising the aesthetics.
We start out with a basic rough clay
of a figure standing straight up and down to determine proportions
and scale overall and once we have that we rough-out the remaining
figures to be in scale and then begin posing them and adding
detail. At the same time a model maker or fabricator will
take the reference on the weapons and accessories and begin
building models of things like the Lancer or Hammerburst using
sheets of plastic that they cut, turn on a lathe, and manipulate
to make these incredible little replicas. In all honesty with
Gears making each weapon is just like sculpting a figure since
they are so detailed and intricate. It’s another appealing
thing to us that Epic created all these amazing weapons and
while they are a lot of work they’re really fun and
cool to make.
Did you only use the real-time
models as a reference or did you get other material such as
the high-polygon geometry Epic created to generate the normal
maps?
Randy Falk: We used
all photo reference from Epic that could be anything from
jpgs, psds, and QT turn-arounds. We followed some photo reference
of the hi-poly figure models they created but again it was
just as a visually guide to get the details accurate. We had
.max files of the weaponry but we would convert them to bitmaps
or something our model maker could print out at size to follow
from all angles while building the weaponry.
What can you tell us about
the specs of this first assortment? What’s the figures’
height? What about their points of articulation?
Randy Falk: The figures
are around 6 ¾” – 7” tall and articulation
varies per character and pose. Marcus has ball-jointed neck,
shoulders, torso and wrists along with swivel forearms, v-crotch,
swivel thighs, bendable knees, and hinged ankles. The articulation
works out really well because you can pose Marcus almost straight
and also have him bent way down in a duck and cover move and
the sculpt still looks amazing.
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