Dragon Age Inquisition Learn how BioWare used ZBrush to create their first title on the PS4 and Xbox One console platforms.

Over the years it has been a great pleasure to work closely with the artists at BioWare, creating interviews for each new installment of the Dragon Age saga, as well as Mass Effect. Each new title has further pushed the envelope of what console technology can achieve, and ZBrush has always been a central part of making that happen.

Dragon Age: Inquisition released to great acclaim in November. Players and critics alike loved its voice acting, soundtrack, detailed environments and combat. DA:I is the first BioWare title to release on the new generation of consoles and also the first to use the Frostbite game engine – a double whammy that meant the artists could go wild in ways that were never possible before. It shows! Inquisition has the most realistic characters yet seen, along with truly stunning environments.

We hope that you enjoy this newest interview with Shane Hawco and his team, which includes images and even a video never seen anywhere else!

Shane Hawco: I'm the lead character artist on the Dragon Age franchise. I started with BioWare in 2003 where I worked on environment and character art for Jade Empire. Then I worked on Mass Effect for a brief period before going onto the Dragon Age franchise as the character lead. There, I shipped Dragon Age: Origins plus its DLC and expansions, Dragon Age II and respective DLCs as well as Dragon Age: Inquisition and its additional content.

Aaron Dibbs: Dragon Age: Inquisition is my first project at BioWare. I came from a television and freelance background and have jumped between technical animation and creature modeling over my career. My position at BioWare is on the Technical Animation team but when opportunities would come up to develop a new creature, the Character Art team was awesome and allowed me to live in both worlds.

Francis Lacuna: Hello! I have been a character artist at the Edmonton studio since 2005, where I started on Mass Effect. My roles on Dragon Age: Inquisition were to define and engineer customization features for armors, prototype and plot workflow pipelines, manage character shaders, and craft signature assets like the High Dragon.

Patrik Karlsson: I am a senior character artist here at BioWare. I have been at BioWare for about 3 years now, with most of it being on DA:I working on characters like Cassandra, Iron Bull, Inquisitor warrior and various monsters including dragon heads.

Graham Kelly: I've been working at BioWare Edmonton as a senior environment artist since 2009 and have had the pleasure of working on both the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. I joined the Dragon Age team towards the end of 2013 and worked primarily on Skyhold.

Uri So: I'm a senior character artist who has worked at BioWare for 2 years. My main responsibilities were making follower and NPC faces on Dragon Age: Inquisition. I also made the hair for the followers and some for the Inquisitor. Beyond that I worked on the Inquisitor mage, the Inquisitor rogue, Varric, and the Last Inquisitor body armors.

Ramil Sunga: I started at BioWare in 2006 where I was a character artist on Dragon Age: Origins, concept artist on DAII, and on Dragon Age: Inquisition I was a concept artist that was integrated closely with the character art team.

Rion Swanson: Hello, I started here at BioWare Edmonton in 2001 making character textures for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Since then, I've primarily worked on Jade Empire, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, and Dragon Age: Inquisition as a 3D character artist.

Shane Hawco: Dragon Age: Inquisition has been the Dragon Age game we all always wanted to make. We took notes from the lessons of the past and wanted to focus heavily on its key gameplay pillars. This meant adding great depth to customization for the player and party members, and giving them a vast, beautiful and living world to explore and discover.

We also needed to bring our huge new world to life, filling it with different factions, all kinds of wildlife and of course, dragons! On DA:I, we wanted to make our dragon combat especially memorable. They are larger, more limber and have a more predatory appearance and behavior than any other Dragon Age title. We wanted their visual appearance to reflect their combat stylings: some breathe fire, others ice and some electricity. In addition, some are armored while others have a brood that the player needs to deal with. In order to achieve this goal, we gave them different heads representing the elemental attacks and distinctive markings to differentiate the various combat styles as well as help them fit into or pop from their respective environments. The end result is that they feel very alive, intriguing and challenging, reacting to various different play styles.

Demons have been core to Thedas since Dragon Age's inception but for DA:I we needed to have them front and center as they have a major role in the story. For this we wanted to create a mixture of old and new creatures to be both familiar yet refreshing and exciting. We revisited the Pride and Rage Demons as well as the Shade to which we added a bitpack progression: a set of armored parts that are attached to the base model to change the silhouette and create a visual hierarchy in order illustrate the increased difficulty curve when encountering them over the campaign. We also breathed new life into the Demons by expanding the faction with the Nightmare and introducing the childlike Despair Demon.

Since the Demon faction plays off the player's emotions, we wanted to make sure that Fear would not be understated. Knowing arachnophobia is a commonly shared phobia, we felt it was the perfect avenue to exploit. The Fear Demon would have multiple stages. There is the main form a more humanoid floating variety with spider-like appendages that would be accompanied by the spiders you first encounter in the very beginning of the game. There is also the larger, more formidable spider-like form that would take appear only in the Fade. Having the two variations appear based on where the encounter takes place would not only link them across dimensions but also amplify the fear setting whenever they are encountered. We wanted the player to feel that after they encountered the larger Demon, it was starting to bleed into Thedas, manifesting in the more humanoid form, in turn amplifying the fear and increasing the player's resolve.

Another key faction to the Dragon Age: Inquisition story was the Red Templars. Unlike the Demons that were bent on destruction, they were the elite soldiers of Corypheus, driven and corrupted by the power that red lyrium gave them. Showing the transformation though the hierarchy of the faction was key to showcasing this. The normal soldiers look no different from their counterparts, aside from the red lyrium crystal around their neck. The more specialized creatures show how the lyrium had mutated them to enhance their abilities. From the long crystal blades of the red lyrium assassin to the sheer intimidating size of the behemoth, we wanted to illustrate that red lyrium was indeed a powerful and potent drug.

The Venatori/Tevinter are the main human faction in DA:I that does not have the benefit of supernatural powers like the Demons or Red Templars. We still needed to give them a distinct look that not only represented the more arid climate they call home but also to show they were tyrannical, powerful and to be feared. We visually described the tyranny of their resolve with elements of bondage. Most of their appearances are masked; some of them are also chained to identify them clearly as enslaved. These visual elements are designed to do more than differentiate them from other factions around Thedas, as well as to make them ominous, giving off a sense of fear and deviance when the player encounters them.

Shane Hawco: Increased visual fidelity was the main goal for the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition. With Frostbite, we were able to give the characters more complex shaders that resulted in a realistic material response from Frostbite's powerful lighting and rendering abilities. In addition to this, we wanted to focus on giving the player increased customization options, allowing for upgrading and changing outfits as well as customizable materials. We also worked closely with the environment team to marry the character assets into the massive new environments. For this, we employed various different environmental effects as well as buildup properties to the shaders, not only to integrate the characters but to give weight to the exploration gameplay elements.

Shane Hawco: One of the biggest challenges for developing Dragon Age: Inquisition on the next-generation consoles and PC alongside the aging previous generations of consoles was in increasing the visual fidelity of the assets without affecting the customization options needed for gameplay. Most of this was done within the shader technology of Frostbite, which enabled us to turn off non-essential features that weren't necessary for gameplay. This allowed us not only to deliver the same gameplay experience to both console generations but also to add some really nice features to the PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Additionally, Frostbite allowed us to increase the triangle count by utilizing LOD (level of detail) models which gave us the ability to double the density of meshes for the next-generation experience. This is evident in the cut scenes, where the increased visual fidelity really pays off in the characters' facial features. That of course is a primary area of focus for BioWare, where storytelling is an important pillar to our games.

Ramil Sunga: One opportunity for the character art team was to take RPG elements like customization from our past games and bring that to the current gen. This was a challenge because of all the limitations that come with it. Sharing texture maps like diffuse, makeup, tattoo, stubble, etc., was difficult because they have to look good across the board on all shapes and sizes. While keeping the fidelity and integrity of the assets high, one of our goals was to make sure all the combinations from customizing looked natural, believable and worked well together.

Shane Hawco: That was quite a challenge since Dragon Age II introduced a more stylistic approach to the art from that of Dragon Age: Origins. We wanted to keep the visual design language consistent with DA2 but knowing that we were shifting to Frostbite, we wanted to build on the strengths it could provide to the franchise. This empowered the team to create vast and lush environments with a more advanced lighting and rendering technology. For the characters, this resulted in enhanced model details with more complex shaders and a realistic surface response.

Francis Lacuna: Frostbite opened up our customization features and surface treatment by giving us modern shader graphs. One of those features I'm particularly proud of is the texture swatch tinting. When characters craft their armors, the surface of the material changes. Atop those surfaces, we added accumulation effects that adapted to environments. When it rains, water drips down their gear. Step in water and legs get wet based on the water depth. Mud and dirt were built up on the characters as they explored the world. These features gave weight to a more intricate level of detail and aesthetic.

Another toy worth mentioning was Frostbite's displacement mapping to add more detail without the need for additional geometry. It was only showcased on a handful of creatures in the game but the gains were huge. DA:I was the first Frostbite title to make use of displacement maps and it really makes a difference in the models where it's used!

Shane Hawco: Outside of the increased triangle count and increased shader and rendering technology, we wanted to utilize the power the Frostbite engine gave us to create a deeper and more rewarding customization experience for the player. Working closely with Design, we developed a complex system for the playable characters that empowered the player to customize their visual appearance as well as open up gameplay options, all while retaining the unique visual design and characteristics given to each of the followers.

We started by calling back to the customization options given to the player in Dragon Age: Origins. In DA:O, various outfits that the player could wear were broken up into three different sections: arms, torsos, and legs. These outfits could also have their materials (metal, leather and cloth) customized and parts combined to create numerous unique appearances. The problem with this system, however, was that the unique characters would lose their identifiable appearances if they could wear basically anything that the player and NPCs could have equipped.

On DAII, we resolved this issue by giving each of the followers a unique appearance that only they could wear, resulting in each of them having characteristics that retained their uniqueness as well as the ability to be quickly identified and differentiated from other characters on the battlefield. This visual success unfortunately led to the loss of customization.

For Dragon Age: Inquisition, we wanted to retain the best of both worlds, giving the player the ability to customize their followers while still retaining a unique appearance for each character that helps define and embrace their unique characteristics. We did this by reinstating the arms, torso and leg parts, as well as coming up with a base and bitpack system. Each character would have a couple of different base outfits to which bitpacks could be applied. Each of these bitpacks would also have a progression that could be upgraded over time. The combination of the parts, bases and bitpacks — along with the customizable materials — would give each character immense customizable options while still retaining the unique visual characteristic for each follower.

For the Inquisitor, we wanted to retain the unique appearance as well as display the player class choice in their visual appearance outside of the weapon they carried and abilities they performed. For this, we made three different bases and bitpacks to represent each class: a light armored cloth base with leather jack bitpack for the mage, a medium armor leather base with leather and metal bitpack for the rogue, and heavy armored chainmail base with heavy plate bitpack for the warrior. All of these have customizable cloth, leather and metal materials. Since these appearances could be shared amongst all the classes within the deep customization system, we wanted to ensure there was some class-specific detail remaining. The result is the accoutrements on the belts of primary Inquisitor outfits: a spell book for mages, a lock pick for rogues and a war horn for warriors. I was confident this was something players would appreciate, so we wanted make sure we got it in there. It's the small touches that help give personality to a complex system. With the time players put into their appearances as well as the dedicated effort that cosplayers put into their outfits, these small details would not go unnoticed.

With the immense visual impact we could achieve from Frostbite, as well as the rich detail we were putting into the outfits and their customization, ZBrush became an essential tool for the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition. All of our high-detail modeling was done in ZBrush and we also made use of Decimation Master and ZRemesher to help with quick proxymesh breakdowns for rig and animation testing.

Francis Lacuna: One of the big goals we set out to achieve was to improve upon the armor mod ability we had done on previous BioWare games. I wanted to give the player the choice to wear not just cool armor but to get the feeling of upgrading it throughout the course of the game. Unfortunately, we ran into some challenges that made it difficult to achieve that goal fully. One of those was having to deal with limited part counts and performance budgets on the previous gen consoles. Limited G-Buffers also made it impossible to pull off our multi-material characters and attempts to apply full PBR (Physically Based Rendering) rules. So the challenge came in expending time to make variations with fewer parts, rather than have many parts with interchangeable variety. In the end we came up with novel solutions to work around these issues but I feel we could have done so much more. That said, the future looks bright for the possibilities.

Patrik Karlsson: When it comes to Cassandra, customization was a good way to enhance her character and also give a sense of progression as you explore the world. Like the other followers, Cassandra had two bases and two bitpacks that were all interchangeable. Each part of the bitpack — torso/arms/legs — were divided into three progressions each. This, together with various materials and colors, occupied the player for some time with customization while still maintaining the specific feel of a character. The example shown is the kind of visual payoff you would get when upgrading your chest piece on the second bitpack.

There are a lot more challenges to this than one might think at first glance. Not only do you need to plan in advance how the pieces will work in relation to each other to give the visual impact, you also need to keep in mind how they would work on the other base and in relation to other parts that might have other progressions on them. There are lot more textures that need to work with each other and in order to keep the character efficient you would need to remove covered geometry on more advanced progressions. For each progression we needed to make four additional LOD (level of detail) models. It ended up being more or less an army of geometry when you would place all of those parts out. Keeping track of it all and making sure that everything adds up in the end is a big challenge and with all of that in mind, we strived to keep the quality bar high within the project's deadlines.

Rion Swanson: An important part of the gear for characters (the bitpack system noted above) is that as you might imagine, the more it was planned out in the concept stage, the easier it would be to get it built in an efficient manner. In other words, this went smoothly for characters who were concepted and built later on once the system was all figured out, but we had to go back and revisit some of the initial characters. Blackwall and Dorian are two that come to mind who were built early on as gold-standard prototypes but had to be heavily adjusted at a later date to work within the new bitpack system.

Another big aspect of the system is the bitpack progressions. We figured that since we made all these complex bitpack additions, we could break them down into stages. So you go through the game and find (or craft) a new armor that fits on top of your base outfit -- but it is only part 1 of 3. This alone allows for tons more variety and has a good impact in-game as you can eventually be rewarded with the full armor set (progressions A, B, and C). We broke each body model down into torso, arms, and legs, so each of these ended up having bitpack progressions. For example, on the arms you'd start with the base outfit, then maybe get forearm plates for progression A, then the addition of hand and elbow plates for progression B, then the addition of heavy shoulder plates for progression C. The arm variations also can be equipped without the corresponding torso or legs (or vice versa), so this gave even more variety but also made it more challenging to plan for.

In the case of Cole, for example, he had tons of overlapping cloth pieces and less plate armor. So whereas Cassandra or Blackwall had all sorts of armor parts that would accumulate as a bitpack, Cole had various jacket and sleeve pieces that would combine and amount to a complex fabric costume with only some armor bits. Any time there was overlapping cloth in the concept design, we would have to take an extra close look to determine how the parts would be built. We also had the added task of determining which parts would translate into a simulated cloth piece and where it would be cut, if the cloth continued up over the character's body. This required some back and forth with the technical animators, who would do initial tests and then request changes to the cloth pieces to make them work as well as possible.

In the end, the player certainly has a huge variety of costume options. Many people really seem to enjoy customizing their characters, so I think it was well worth it to put in all the work to achieve this system.

Shane Hawco: We wanted to make use of a lot of the legacy models from DAII and even some from DA:O. The first step for this was to go back to the original ZBrush sculpts and determine what (if any) reworking would need to be done. From there, we would utilize the high-res sculpt to make a new updated rendermesh and LODs, then reproject the ZTool to generate new textures for the shaders we made in Frostbite.

Graham Kelly: Although the environments for DA:I were an order of magnitude larger than those of DAII, the power and flexibility of the Frostbite engine, coupled with the largest art team ever assembled on a BioWare project allowed us to bring the world of Thedas to life in way which wasn't possible before.

The vast majority of environments in DA:I would have needed to have been drastically scaled back in scope with the previous engine. Frostbite essentially got rid of such limitations and enabled the Art and Design teams to create these epic environments that we'd always seen in the concept art but never quite been able to achieve. DA:I was the first project at BioWare to use the Frostbite engine, so the challenge for the entire team was in learning to adopt a completely new engine with an entirely new workflow at the same time as developing a next-gen RPG across 5 platforms.

Graham Kelly: One of the big advantages of moving to Frostbite and Gen 4 consoles was that we were able to use Displacement Mapping on terrain and certain environment assets -- most notably the rock assets. This enabled us to match more closely the fidelity of sculpts that we were seeing in ZBrush, transferring those details into the game in a way that normal maps alone couldn't achieve.

Also, artists will never complain when given more polygons to play with along with increased texture resolutions. Couple that with more realistic shaders, lighting and VFX. The fidelity of the environment assets and art in general improved across the board.

Graham Kelly: Very much so. Although we'd used ZBrush for environment assets on previous titles, DA:I was the first time we used it to create tileable environment textures. As we were new to this approach, it was very much a learning process for us but towards the end of the project we had artists creating tileable textures purely in ZBrush.

We started with the 2.5D approach of dropping meshes to the canvas and then arranging them via the Layer palette. However, this was found to be too restrictive for us, as further edits couldn't be made once the meshes were dropped to canvas. In the end, with ZBrush being able to handle millions of polys without a hitch, we decided to keep each individual part as a separate Subtool. Using this method, we kept things non-destructive in the event that textures needed to change later on.

Graham Kelly: For me, I'd have to say the lush forests, farmsteads and ruined forts of the Hinterlands and the bustling village of Redcliffe. In terms of both content and art, it was the most densely populated environment we'd attempted on a Dragon Age game. The sheer scale of it meant that there were lots of hidden areas and things to find, something that I'm personally a big fan of.

Shane Hawco: DAII was mostly done using ZBrush 3.5 and 4 where 4r6 was largely used for Dragon Age: Inquisition assets. But we are all embracing 4r7 now! ;)

Shane Hawco: ZBrush is slowly starting to make its way into the concept art department. It's a great place for the concept team to start roughing out ideas for characters and props for the environments. On Dragon Age: Inquisition, Ramil Sunga was the concept artist who integrated into the character team. He utilized ZBrush during the development of the new head customization system for DA:I.

Ramil Sunga: ZBrush was instrumental to the concept pipeline. A huge part of game development is iteration and revision. We are constantly changing and improving ideas, and having the benefit to iterate on designs directly in ZBrush was extremely efficient. I would often use ZBrush in conjunction with a paint over for a variety of my tasks.

Shane Hawco: ZBrush was mostly used on Dragon Age: Inquisition for its incredible sculpting ability. We did utilize the texture painting feature for blocking out face textures as well as new patterns and details on existing assets.

Ramil Sunga: On the current gen, we can now produce higher fidelity detail in our characters and have it actually be useful. In order to keep the visual aesthetic developed for the Dragon Age franchise we chose not to use scan data for micro details, so we relied a lot on photo manipulation. We used Projection Master and Photoshop to generate pore detail and fine wrinkles.

Patrik Karlsson: When texture painting in ZBrush, I found the Mask by Cavity feature to be extremely powerful. On the dragons, it gave us a very nice and easy way to be able to paint areas between the scales and in various cracks of skin, making the look of it all much more believable and seamless.

Rion Swanson: I found that Polypaint was very helpful for painting in landmarks or markings according to concept art. It then became much easier to sculpt from there, knowing precise locations. An example of this is the Avvar bear from the Jaws of Hakkon DLC, where the war paint and caked-on mud had to roughly line up in most places.

Aaron Dibbs: Dynamesh became a very useful tool for me when developing new creatures or making alternate versions of a creature type. I could take an already built model that I know anatomy-wise fits the rig needs, bring it in and convert it to Dynamesh then just start sculpting. Knowing that the core “bone structure” already matched the needs of the rig but then being able to go to town adding and totally reworking the model was an awesome, fast, and creative way to work. After you get my new shapes, I would do a quick retopo with ZRemesher and be ready to go for subdividing and detailing with the new shapes. If I'd find a problem area as I went, I'd just freeze the top layer, do another ZRemesh to adjust the areas that needed it, then unfreeze and be back to sculpting your details in minutes. Those two tools working together has been a huge workflow improvement on any new models I work on.

Francis Lacuna: Definitely ZRemesher. Being able to quickly generate a low-density quad mesh made it especially useful for reworking sculpts. This feature was extremely helpful when designing the High Dragon. In the past, it was a struggle to have to maintain subdivisions if there were major revisions. Now we can make drastic changes to an asset and regenerate a proxy that could be skin wrapped and dropped into the game almost instantly.

Patrik Karlsson: I did try out NoiseMaker for Iron Bull's helmet and found it to be very useful, even if my application of it was quite small. I then passed that information on to the team, and Rion was able to utilize it to greater effect. I used Dynamesh when I was working on the Nightmare to be able to experiment with the design in the earlier stages.

Uri So: I like ZRemesher in the new ZBrush features. When I want to get a clean mesh with ZRemesher, I do a few things. First, I make a high poly with Dynamesh. Second, I apply ZRemesher features and divide the mesh several times. For the last step I project everything from the original mesh. This is a really good way to save time and the result is excellent.

Rion Swanson: NoiseMaker came in super handy for Blackwall's base outfit quilted jacket, specifically. Once I learned how to use it and made some adjustments to my UVs, it was quick and easy. I love how it wraps the pattern around the mesh so uniformly.

I tried out FiberMesh a bit and it was pretty amazing. It's great for allowing you to create some more believable looking hair or fur really quickly.

Also, BPR rendering was great for quick work-in-progress sculpt shots for critiques, or for final images.

Patrik Karlsson: The new and improved ZRemesher looks very promising, thanks to the latest adjustments to it. I would use that for sure. The Copy/Paste feature feels like a welcomed add-on to the workflow to speed things up. I do like the new FBX export and the fact that it supports Displacement, Normal and Texture maps. That's something I would definitely have a lot of use for. Creased Edge Beveling sounds amazing and something I am looking into at the moment. Working with that in mind would alter the way I would build my mesh at very early stages even before I bring it into ZBrush so that it does make a big difference, once again saving time and effort.

Rion Swanson: As many artists already do, I'd like to get more comfortable creating fine detail geometry directly in ZBrush instead of having to make so many tiny detail parts in an external program and then bring them in. Scenes can get out of control with huge numbers of Subtools, so grouping more of them together in a logical way and separating by UVs will be another thing I do more of as a general rule. I've played a little with the new ZModeler brush and look forward to getting more familiar with it. It seems to offer a lot of control and to allow you to build very quickly.

ZRemesher is going to help out a lot and I'm sure I'll be using it all the time.

I love using GoZ now as it's a great way to speed up importing meshes from Maya.

I want to learn more about Dynamic Curves when creating primitives, as well as deformation features for creating new small-detail parts.

I'm also looking forward to further exploring the newest BPR features and I'm really excited to try the MicroMesh and Insert Multi-Mesh tools.

Aaron Dibbs: Working on the giant was a very fun process; lots of people -- from Concept to Animation to Design -- really got behind the giant and it was great trying to achieve the goals that people had in mind with him. Also, having a creature that was not much smaller than a dragon is a fun challenge, because you really have to start thinking about the details when a foot on a giant is bigger than the player. This means that when the camera gets close, he has to hold up to the detail that's needed with that size. There is also the matter of how the model deforms as it moves becoming more important the larger it gets, making sure it can hold up to all the extreme motion that the animations will go through.

Francis Lacuna: The High Dragon. I had the fortuitous opportunity to work closely with Tom Rhodes and the concept team to define the Inquisition dragon appearance and anatomy. Reworking the old Dragon Age: Origins model was the most fun experience I've had at BioWare. And ZBrush was a big help with that process.

Patrik Karlsson: I had a blast working on dragons for obvious reasons. For one thing, they are big and mean. But it was also because we had a lot of freedom in coming up with the design. I started dragons on DA:I week (time dedicated to developing a personal project that could make marked improvements within the DA:I universe) so obviously it's something I had a lot of passion for.

Same goes for Iron Bull. The design of this guy was very compelling to me in both complexity and personality. During the first DA:I week I started on his head. Eventually I did everything from modelling/texturing him and his outfits to his helm and one of the weapons he was using.

Another clear favorite for me to make was the Inquisitor warrior outfit that was later modified to be able to go on any race/gender and ended up being on the cover of the game.

Uri So: My main work was making faces and hair for the followers and some of the NPCs. My favorite assets are the faces of Samson, Dorian, and Cullen. The Last Inquisitor was also an attractive character.

Samson is not normal and looks like someone who is drunk because of his red, tired eyes. He also has little hair. He's not a usual handsome character so it was interesting for me to make him.

Also Dorian's concept is based on someone who takes a great deal of pride in their personal appearance. I wanted to express someone who is deliberately handsome. For example, his carefully arranged moustache and hair.

I know Cullen has many fans and he is a general. I wanted to make him handsome and make him look like someone who has power. It's an enjoyable time when I make character faces because I consider the history of the characters.

Also in the case of the Last Inquisitor, the curve and strict lines match well with the armor. There are also a variety of choices to customize the armor. I used a variety of materials such as leather, metal and cloth for the armor. I also made the arms and chests have decorative looks.

Ramil Sunga: My favorite asset in the game is the one the user creates. We have a much more extensive head system for you to customize your character, and there are endless combinations of features for you to make your character unique. I always spend more time than I should in the character creation system; I can't help but feel immediately attached to my character.

Rion Swanson: Vivienne was my favorite simply because I love her concept design, and I was able to build the entire character from head to toe. One of the challenges was planning (and making the necessary adjustments to) the bitpacks and the base outfits. Some of her armor bits are small and therefore less obvious when you change between them. Overall, I'm happy with the character -- especially in terms of shapes and form. Tech Animation did a nice job on her cloth, too. In the end, I think she could use a little more variety in bitpack parts to differentiate them better and probably a bit of high frequency detailing.

Also, I found Cole's second base outfit to be a really fun asset to build. The leather strips and belts on his thighs were a challenge to place tightly together in order to hold his 'ripping tools.'' Concepts like Cole can be really fun because the designs have a different flavor and give him a very unique personality. The hat shapes, for example, are particularly memorable and enjoyable to build.

Shane Hawco: I wouldn't want to give away any spoilers other than to say we are not quite finished with the story of the Inquisition.

Shane Hawco: ZBrush is an amazing tool. We have embraced it at BioWare and are exploring its potential in unused areas. It has been an essential part of the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition and I have no doubt will also play a critical role on future BioWare projects. It's been our pleasure to be a part of its history.

We at Pixologic would like to thank BioWare and the Dragon Age team for their participation and assistance in preparing this interview. We also wish to extend our gratitude to Electronic Arts for their approval to open this line of communication with the artists.