Some recent art for Darkwind: War on Wheels

I just wanted to present some art I've been doing for Darkwind: War on Wheels recently.

We have set up a badge system to reward players in their participation, or for winning leagues. It's a racing based game after all...
I thought it might be interesting in presenting the way I work. I haven't worked so seriously for a game for nearly 10 years, and I feel a bit rusty.
Regarding my past - and long background - in the prepress industry, I have been used to work with Illustrator and Photoshop. Those programs have largely improved since the beginning, and I think some of the operations I'm doing in Photoshop, could be done at once in Illustrator. But like old monkeys ;-), I have bad habits.

I generally start working and designing elements in Illustrator, in a vector format, with a large use of beziers curves.
Such curves are very handy once you are used to.

Here are the 3 badges that have been done so far:
Marshal badge, for users contributing in helping new players.

Final touch in Photoshop.

veteran badge, for users achieving a given number of races.

After some Photoshop work:

Somerset's League Race Champion badge Illustrator.

Photoshop modifications...

All these badges are also scaled done to 50x50 pixels and are automatically added has a signature in the forum.


Another creation session has been done on the barriers.
It wasn't really needed, but after been playing hours on the tracks, I couldn't bear the default barriers, nor the black and yellow stripes.
It was time for me to come up with something new. Though, it was evident, the new barrier needed to keep exact size of the original one, to avoid placement issues. I was also looking to save some frame per seconds and to have a second model to act as a LOD.
No need to mention this was my first attempt in using QuArk.

Here is a view from the start pit of the Somerset Junkyard track #1:

You will notice some Urban Pack elements, as well as Todd Picken's house model.

During the barrier making process, I've been struck by their size. It's more evident as my stripped zone is larger, and when you have a car nearby.

You can see we are sometime using many barriers at once. Combined with the 18 cars rendered in the race and particle effects, saving fps is not an option.
My second (low poly) model is a standard 6 faces cube as seen here.

Closer look, same shape (3 datablocks though) with 3 textures.

Digged out, the complete barriers:

edit: fixed image problem.