DESIGN DIARY - 12.15.00

Hunting for the Equipment

"Come downstairs, I have something I think you'd like to see."

Now imagine this. I'm sitting at my desk, silently typing away.
[No, mom, it's not my Christmas shopping list.]
Then Joe shows up. This means he's wrestled himself away from his desk, which is always quite a feat for Joe - I've seen the heavy iron shackles Management installed there last summer - and took the time to walk up to the second floor to tell me he had something I might like to see.
He didn't call me. He came to get me at my desk. In person. Needless to say, I jump out of my office and dutifully follow him down to the Art Department.
But not before I grab my notebook, of course.

"I'm done with four of the five theme icons that will appear in the Premiere set," Joe tells me on the way down.
Big deal, right?
Well, in this case, icons are a lot more than what they seem. In Jedi Knights, every theme icon bears the face of its hero. Every "themed" card, every card that was designed to belong into a deck based around a specific hero, will be equipped with the appropriate theme icon. And all this means that if an icon is done, the corresponding main character model is completed.
I'm really happy Joe came up to get me.

"Here they are." And Joe shows them to me, one by one.
Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, Jabba, Han Solo.
By now we've all seen the 3D incarnation of Darth Vader in one form or another, and I have glanced at some early version of Han before. But this is the real, finished thing. When Joe, discussing Tarkin back in October, told me that "you can see every wrinkle," he was not lying.
Not that he usually is, but you never know.
As for Han, he looks very debonair and is portrayed in stunning detail, right down to the scar on his chin. And Jabba never looked this good, even in his young years.

Every icon is made up of various elements. "We first build a 3D rendered jewel with a reflection map on it," explains Joe, "and then we encase the head of the model inside the jewel." The result is pretty impressive, and although you'll probably see the icons on the site before too long, you don't necessarily have to wait at all: you can go straight to the Boba Fett card already up in the Jedi Knights area and take a look at a rough version of the Vader icon.

You're back?
As you've probably noticed, the jewel used in the Vader icon is red. You'll see later that the jewel used for Tarkin is blue and the one for Han is green, while the icons for both Jabba and Luke are based on a yellow jewel. At this point the Luke icon is not completed, so I can't comment on it. But the other four look fantastic.
[Some of you might be wondering why there are five different themes - thus five theme icons - in the Premiere set. That's because the Jabba theme will not be usable in the Premiere set, although the related icon will appear on one card.]

"It was a lot of work," says Joe, leaning back in his chair to relax a bit. "In real life, you can take a very good looking model and take pictures that come out looking quite bad, because the lighting wasn't right, the camera work wasn't done properly, and so on. Those things still hold true for digital imagery, and just because we have the jewel and the model ready doesn't mean everything will immediately come out just the way we want it. We have to work at it."

Those of you who went to see the Vader icon on the Boba Fett card - and if you haven't clicked on the link above, just take care of it now and be done with it - have seen that it's somewhat difficult to make out the details in the small icon. But since every Reserve card will also bear its theme icon in XL garb, you'll have the perfect opportunity to examine your favorite theme icon up close.

Looking at the icons on the computer screen, it doesn't look to me like there should be that many elements involved here, between the jewel and the model.
"So how many layers do you use for each icon?"
"Oh," Joe eyes the screen, "about twelve." I'd better keep my day job.

Francis K. Lalumiere
The Juggler