Making some of the characters for Lego Star Wars Battles was a pleasure and I was fortunate to have Jason Fitzpatrick as a senior character artist who developed the character pipeline and provided me with feedback when creating these characters.
We didn't have the luxury of being able to use normal maps for our mobile game and we had to rely on Gouraud shading.
In order to have control over the shading we used bevelled edges with face weighted normals.
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Rigging these characters was often also my responsibility. Lego minifigures have a lot in common and I was able to copy the rig from a base. This would usually mean I would only have to rig a few extras such as faces and accessories. On other more unique characters such as the Buzz Droid, a new rig had to be created which I was responsible for.