pharaos curse is the second game with the investigator alan parker cameron and it is the sequel to 'cameron files - the secret of lochness'. it is an adventure, based on a warp enginge with cinematics.
everything is prerendered and has to be produced befor the whole game is fitted together. because of the precalculation character of this project it was possible to spend some more afford on details like the lighting and the details of the objects. but we had the limit to render the warp pictures in a network and not every computer was able to handle such big scenes with more than 2 million polygons and this heavy amount of textures.

but why lightwave?
lightwave vs. 3dsmax was the question befor the work on the game started. the decision was lightwave and we had many reasons for that. first - the modeling. lightwaves intuitiv and fast modeler saves a lot of time. not everyone within the team had a long experience with such projects and so it was easy to teach the members. second - network rendering. the possibility to render all the frames with the help of the network without additional costs.

third - the prize, lightwave is a very strong package out of the box and so it was easy to add more members to the team without spending too much money for the software license.
there are some other reasons and i can say we had two people for this project which used 3dsmax until this project and they had no problems to switch to lightwave and to unleash the power of this package.

sometimes it was not easy to find the right balance, especially for the outdoor areas with palms or the huge desert level. so it was often a kind of realtime modeling, we had to create details not only with geometry but with textures. the modeling for the whole game was done in around 4 months with a team of 2 skilled and 2 junior modelers and the additional help of a surface and scene artist. the team had to build all the models for the game, except the characters.

the next step was to set up the scenes and the lighting and to texture the models. one of the problems we had to manage was to split the work and to keep the overall style of the game. daniel (aka da_duke) discovered this problem at the end of level 1. he created a 'modeling and scene guide' for all the team members with the basics of team based modeling (name convention, layering, surface settings, structur of the scenes etc). because of his long experience with lightwave he was also involved in the lead modeling and had to teach the members of the team.

realtextures materials vol.1 was used for 'pharaoh's curse'