Character- Trooper Pirates (Gene Kohler):
Leaving the freezing landscape of Phendrana Drifts behind her, Samus travels into the heart of the Space Pirates base of operations on Tallon IV: the Phazon Mines. This research facility is well guarded by enhanced Trooper Pirates that can easily shield themselves from many of the bounty hunter's weapons. These Space Pirates include Power Troopers, Wave Troopers, Ice Troopers, and Plasma Troopers.
"The Trooper Pirates were probably my favorite creatures to create for Prime," recounts Gene. "The concept that Andrew Jones provided me with was awesome I couldn't wait to get started on it and throw it into the game. It took me about two days to model three days to skin (texture). I love how they turned out the animation crew really brought them to life."
Much like Gene's Samus model, the Space Pirates were modeled from scratch and not a pre-existing base model. The original concept came from Andrew Jones, who had a large amount of input from a number of people working on the project. With this feedback, Mr. Jones went back and developed several polished versions for approval by the team. Eventually, "he takes all the recommended ideas for a particular asset, fuses them into his own creative imagination and funnels them all into a finished piece," recalled Gene.
Once Andrew completed his final concept, it was passed along to Gene for modeling. Gene then interpreted and translated the 2D (two-dimensional) concept image into a fully 3D game asset. "Just about every asset that you see in a game is the combined effort of many team members. Designers, concept artist, modelers, skinners, animators, programmers, sound engineers all of them put a bit of themselves their style into each asset," explained Gene. "My point is that no one asset is made by solely one person. Since I created the model and skin for the Trooper there is a bit of my style my input placed into it for sure."
Just as he did with the Flying Space Pirate, Andrew came up with "slightly different variations of the Pirates to give some cool, unique, foes for the player to go up against all the while keeping the main enemy race consistent." This again allowed for a greater deal of diversity and artistic creativity.
Environment- The Phazon Mines Main Quarry (LeRoy Strauss):
When Samus first enters the contaminated Phazon Mines, she finds herself in the "Main Quarry." The particular room was modeled and textured by LeRoy Strauss.
The Main Quarry took about three weeks to completely model and texture. All game textures for the area were hand done by Mr. Strauss in Photoshop and Painter. "There were a couple of digital photo's used to make a noise layer or for paper in Painter. All textures though were hand made with tons of layers. As far as texture count for each room I don't remember too much. It wasn't the amount of textures but rather that amount of memory we had to stay in," explained LeRoy.
For inspiration on the design of the area, LeRoy looked at a number of source materials to realistically portray the setting. "I looked at many photos of real life places like factories [and] outdoors scenes. As far as inspirations from movies and video games, I was inspired by it all," describes LeRoy. "I love video games and movies, so all that content is up there floating in my head. As to specific movie[s] or game[s], I am not sure. It's just a big jumble of Sci-Fi and fantasy!"
I'm sure we will all agree that the end result of LeRoy Strauss' work truly paid off. The area does a fantastic job of maintaining the established visual style of the Space Pirate technology previously seen on the orbiting and crashed Frigate.