The whole game looks like a post apocalyptic earth but it actually takes place on the alien world of Helghan. The Helghast army are not your typical video game aliens but rather they look just like humans. Right off the bat the game treats you to an gorgeous looking speech by Scolar Visari who exhibits some outstanding facial animations and texture mapping. Lead Tech Artist at Guerrilla Games, Paulus Bannink, tells us that all of the animation was done in Maya 8.5 – with only some of the motion capture being cleaned up a little in MotionBuilder which - right off the bat - is out of the ordinary considering that most 3D games have been developed using Autodesk’s 3ds Max. Paulus tells us “If you can supply people with proper custom solutions they don't really care what tool they have to use as long as they can get their job done.”

Speaking of custom solutions, Paulus also tells us that the 3D artists, animators and level designers all worked in Maya together. Paulus also tells us “In order to support these different disciplines in the same software we developed a large library of custom Maya tools and scripts. We have a few pieces of internally developed software for working with very specific game related systems like animation blending, destructible objects and particles. From a technical point of view it is very practical to have everyone work in the same environment, especially from a point of sharing assets between different departments.”