The environments in the first two installments of 'God of War' were amazing and dwarfed Kratos to a relative ant size. Kratos would literally traverse through huge levels that were mounted on the backs of giant gods called Titans. A lot of production tricks were used to give the player the sense of environme nt size within the first two games but in 'God of War III', no tricks were required. “I know this word gets thrown around a lot when discussing 'God of War' and I don’t mean to be cliché,” Feldman explains, “but the best way I can describe the environments for 'God of War III' is ‘epic.’ We are now building full environments on Titans. What was a level in the first game would now fit on a Titan’s arm. We no longer need to do camera tricks to make an environment seem like its moving. We now have dynamic skinned collisions, so the play field is no longer static. Artistically we want the player to feel they are always part of a massive environment. Even if the player is in what appears to be an enclosed cave, the surrounding environment should be much larger. It’s also very important for us to make sure the worlds feel like they are alive. Thankfully the story of the game supports this and allows us to utilize those elements throughout the game.”

In a nutshell
First comes the idea! "Our director Stig decided he wanted Helios to go down in an epic fashion, with his head being ripped off. Then comes the execution. We had the animation department create the head rip and eye bulge. Then character art modeled some guts and we used some shader tricks to get the ripping effect to happen. The fx department added the blood and the rigging guys put the whole thing together.”

Creating a usable set of tools in Maya was the first challenge to meet before even beginning to model. “When the studio started, we decided to use Maya and make it our editor. All of our tools are in Maya. We have five technical artists and three tools programmers who are dedicated to creating tools for the artists, designers and animators. Each department has their own toolboxes to maximize workflow. We use Maya’s particle systems, its rigging/animation system and key framer. We’ve created a CGFX shader that utilizes the hypershade and renders in the perspective window. Pretty much any feature that we have on the PS3 renders in Maya and what doesn’t, we have live linked with Maya attributes. Our Programming Team created an entity system in Maya that uses connections and scripting similar to other game engines and editors...