a great deal.

One of the fun parts with making characters for games is that you always have to come up with new ways of making the characters look good depending on the platform and the game engine. Some games I have worked on have had a really low polycount budget for the characters but a really high goal on how the character should look in the end. In these cases it's important to use any cheats possible to make it look good. By using Normal mapping in the right way combined with detail tillable textures you can really push the looks of today's games.

3DTotal : Can you tell us a little about how normal maps and tileable textures have changed the way in which characters are textured nowadays?
Sven : Well a lot of the textures are baked from the high resolution mesh. That gives you a good base to start with. It´s now quite common that each material get´s its own material. This makes it look even more realistic, but it´s of course a lot more expensive than using one specular map for the entire mesh.

3DTotal : What are the best and worst aspects of specializing in character design / creation?
Sven : The best part is probably that the characters tend to differ a lot from project to project which makes the whole process very creative. The projects tend to be a lot shorter than they used to be at EA Dice; one month I'm working on a cartoon character for a TV spot and the next I'll be working on a character for a game cinematic. I'm not on the same project for years any more, which makes me feel a lot more motivated throughout the whole project. This of course is better both for me and the client, and the end result will be of a higher quality. On the downside, it's sometimes hard for me and the client to get the same vision of the project at hand. Sometimes I only have cartoony concepts to work from and the client wants me to make the character more or less photo realistic. This tends to be a bit tricky because a sketchy concept can in the client's mind differ to the way that I see it. But as long as you work really tight with the client it's pretty easy to narrow it down towards the same vision. Working closely will also speed up the whole process, and in the end the client is the one that makes the final decisions.

3DTotal : Which films based on Marvel characters do you feel have done the most justice to the central character and have looked the best from a CG perspective?
Sven : Well I really like the X-men movies and the Hulk as well. I really liked how the Ang Lee hulk looked like. Far from that there are not a lot of characters that are completely CG.

3DTotal : You have two Marvel characters in your portfolio; Juggernaut and Captain America. Tell us why you chose to model these in particular, and what is it about comic book characters that appeals to a 3D modeler?
Sven : I have always been a huge fan of the Marvel characters ever since I was a little boy and have been reading superhero comics. In our summer house on Gotland (an Island in Sweden) we have always had a room filled with comic books. Comics from the early 70's to comics of today, so I guess that's where it all started. So when I started doing stuff for my portfolio I tried to find some superheroes that hadn't been made so many times by other artists. The Hulk and Wolverine are really popular superheroes for artists to make, so I wanted to make something different. But as for many others out there I really like those two and I will probably end up with my versions of them as well :)