Lord Sandor

Lord Sandor is a plug-in player model for id Software's Quake 3 Arena. Lord Sandor was modeled and texture mapped in 3DS MAX R3 in late 2001, and his textures were created in Adobe Photoshop in early 2002. The model was rigged with a Biped skeletal system and animated with the stock "Visor" animations from Quake III Arena.

As with SuperMale, my goals for Lord Sandor were to explore the tradeoff between polygon count and mesh detail, and see how much accomodation could be made in the texture. The result is that Lord Sandor is a lean Q3 model (weighing in at 766 triangles) yet maintains geometrical interest and distinguising shapes.

Geometry AVI Lord Sandor Image Red CTF Image Blue CTF Image

In working on the textures for Lord Sandor, my focus was improving upon where I had left off with the SuperMale model. My utilization of texture space improved by assigning larger areas to visually-important sections of the mesh such as the face, by rotating and warping the segments of the uv-map to fit in a more optimal jigsaw fashion, and by mirroring symmetrical parts of the model to effectively double texture resolution.

The resulting higher texture resolution pushed me to develop the texture maps to a finer level of detail than I had ever done before. Using a full 24-bit palette also proved both challenging and rewarding as it forced me to broaden my utilization of color and lighting to realize more lively surfaces. The "magma" and "ice" CTF skins also took me outside the bounds of my previous skin work as I attmpted to capture the texture, energy and feeling of the underlying elemental themes.

All the skins below are as they appear in-game except the "magma" skin, which has an additional rendering pass that causes the lava to pulsate.

Sandor Skin Sandor Armor
Red Skin Blue Skin

Download Lord Sandor for Quake III Arena