Expectations were sky-high after a trailer of Killzone 2 was revealed in 2005. All images © 2008 SCEA Inc. All rights reserved.

I have to say, I looked at Sony with pride when they showed off that gorgeous Killzone 2 trailer for the PlayStation 3 at E3 2005. I thought they shot themselves in the foot again when they said that the trailer was actual, in-game footage, but after seeing and playing Killzone 2 now that it is released, I am very impressed.

I sat down with the Guerrilla Games team that created the visuals for Killzone 2 to find out exactly how they put together this big chunk of eye candy. First, the story: players take control of Sgt. Tomas "Sev" Sevchenko. Sev and his team are at war with the Helghast army, which is lead by the dictatorial antagonist Scolar Visari. 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 videogame aliens but rather they're humanoid soldiers with slight differences from Earth humans. The game treats you to a gorgeous looking speech by Scolar Visari, who exhibits some outstanding facial animations and texture mapping.

Lead Tech Artist at Guerrilla Games, Paulus Bannink, says all of the animation was done in Maya, with only some of the motion capture being cleaned up a little in MotionBuilder. Right off the bat, this game is out of the ordinary considering that most 3D games have been developed using Autodesk's 3ds Max.

Developer Guerrilla Games re-worked Maya for their uses, giving them a unique software package for use on Killzone 2.

Bannink says, "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, Bannink adds that the 3D artists, animators and level designers all worked in Maya together. "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."

Guerrilla Games Art Director, Jan-Bart van Beek, also chimes in on the art and animation of Killzone 2. "Aside from the usual off-the-shelf software like Maya, MotionBuilder, Houdini and Photoshop; most of our tools for both the art and design departments are custom made. Even Maya has been largely rewritten by Guerrilla engineers and so we're now running a different version of Maya then the rest of the world." Van Beek says they completely did away with Maya's viewport rendering software and added their own tools such as a lightmap rendering software called Hyperion.

AnimationBlender is another tool they built to edit and create in-game animation. AnimationBlender, almost a decade old, was used as the model for other programs like NaturalMotion. The Guerrilla engineers also created a tool that helps the developers edit particle effects dubbed the Particle Editor. Another of their custom tools that really piqued my interest is something they call ColorTweaker, allowing the team to make color corrections in realtime on the PS3.