Do you work from concept sketches or maquettes, or are the models your own conceptions?

Everything I work on was designed by me. We had so many things to build for the game and such a small team, that everything had to be done as quick as possible. So, they'd ask me to build something and I'd either start building it right away from some quick idea in my mind, or I'd scribble out some ideas for myself and then start working. These are CG meshes that we have to create, but I try to rush it out as fast as possible, because we have such a small team. If I get it in the game in one day, then I'm very happy. :)

As to the process of making a model, this is what I do:

1) Scribble out an idea very quickly if I must;
2) Model the high poly version;
3) Model the low poly version;
4) UV the low poly version;
5) Create a Doom shader and render the high poly normal maps for the low poly version;
6) Paint the diffuse, bump, and specular maps for the model.

How do you go from the high poly mesh to the low poly one?

When I make a low poly version of the high poly model, I take the high poly model and put it in the background and make the low poly polygons one by one over it. I never work with a model that's one contiguous solid mesh, so I can never run an LOD on the high poly mesh to create the low poly version. I really wish someone out there would create a tool that would merge all of the floating meshes into one contiguous mesh so an LOD would be possible. Especially considering how normal maps are becoming the industry standard. ZBrush actually can do that, but the polygonal accuracy isn't high enough to be able to use it properly. :(

I actually did use the ZBrush unified mesh tool once on a pretty simple model where its accuracy would work out, and it took me longer to clean up all the holes in my model than it normally takes me to make my low poly mesh poly by poly. The reason why there were holes, was because my high poly model was flawed. There were a couple of floating meshes that had little gaps between them.

How do you make the normal shader maps in LightWave?

We make all our normal maps in the Doom engine - we've been working on this stuff for a long time before other companies started thinking about putting it in their programs. After we're done making the high poly and low poly models, we create a shader that will point Doom to those models, and where to save the normal map out to.

Once we're done writing the shader, we just run Doom from the command line and tell it what to compute by pointing it to the shader we just created.

Are you involved at all with the X-Prize/ArmadilloAerospace project?

I wish I was. That project has completely blown me away. I remember a couple of years ago, I was completing all of my work on my arcade machine conversion (I'm a huge fan of fighting games, and so I was converting my Street Fighter 3 arcade machine into an arcade machine that ran my PS2 and Dreamcast so I could play almost every fighting game ever on my machine) and John walked by to get a soft drink. He stopped briefly and asked me what I was working on and he seemed interested in all of my soldering irons and piles or wires, circuits, and chips laying around, so I got really excited and started telling him how giddy I was that I actually got that machine working after all that hard work! Then, he says "Ah, that's nice! I'm building a rocketship." My jaw just hit the floor with that comment! I was super proud of myself because I thought I was actually impressing that technology genius; but the fact that he's now a rocket scientist dropped my amazing arcade machine back to the stone age.

That Armadillo project is just truly amazing to me.

Thanks for talking to us Seneca, and I know your nose is back to the grindstone on your next project already, so good luck with that!