Here’s my first attempt to capture the same style that those amazing artists at Rockstar used on Red Dead Redemption. I think it can be pushed a little further and roughed up a bit, but for now I’ll call this one finished, as it’s for a client. Getting a likeness is tough. Yes, I left out his infamous sunglasses.
I feel like I need to add the theme song for effect 
I had a major crash over the weekend – I should have know better that 3DS Max, Maya and Softimage don’t like to play together on the same machine. The solution has been fixed, but I lost the weekend trying to recover my system. The Star Wars tutorial will have to be put on hold – until I can afford to purchase Camtasia or a similar solution.
An often overlooked, but very important part of 3D modeling (or of creating any art for that matter) is the preparation of your reference material. 
Now obviously we start with the concept art from the Star Wars: The Old Republic Website, but to dive in unprepared…well, we could lose a limb to a lightsaber.
We want to grab a few screen shots of from the game to give us a better understand of the style used by Bioware once the 3D asset is in the engine. If you look closely enough at this shot in particular, you can also count the number of edges they used for the cylinders that make up the gun barrel, which gives us an idea of what we should aim for with our model’s resolution. I count 16 edges.
Since Bioware is using a styled art style for their game, this makes it ideal for a beginning tutorial, since we don’t have to worry about creating a high polygon model in order to generate normal maps. We’ll leave that for a later tutorial.
We have our screenshot, but we aren’t done yet. A quick glance at the concept art tells me that the concepts are influenced by 17th century flintlock pistols – commonly seen in your favourite pirate movie – which makes sense considering these pistols are for Smugglers. A google image search for “flintlock pistol” reveals a large selection of great references. I usually grab at least 5-10 reference pictures – the more the merrier. Throw these into a folder for safe keeping.
Next, we want to prepare our concept art. You may be tempted to just throw the concept art into your 3D program as-is, but good practice is to seperate the image, and place it on a neutral or high-contrast background. This allows you to eliminate unnecessary, distracting elements from the image. I also find that the time spent in Photoshop preparing an image allows me to really look closely at the concept and break it down into geometric shapes – mentally preparing myself for the next stage.
Bring the concept art into your favourite image editing program, be it Adobe’s Photoshop or an alternative, and separate it from the background.
I chose the upper left-most pistol. After my edits, I ended up with the following and saved it as a 512×256 pixel jpeg image:
Now we are ready to begin the next stage: modeling!
I will be posting up a tutorial later today that will walk you through modeling one of the pistols from Bioware’s upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic .
This tutorial will be aimed at beginning modeler and will be using Autodesk’s Maya.
Well, it seems when my provider migrated to a new server, my blog stopped working. The quickest solution was to delete the directory and start again.
