Now that J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens is just weeks away, the wait is more agonizing than ever. Sure, Disney has been shipping tie-in merchandise for months, but no mere toy will rescue us from the tedium. Unless that toy happens to be, say, a digital replication of an original prop, so realistic it’s like you’re wielding the real thing. And that’s exactly what Star Wars Battlefront delivers. Using a combination of scanning tech and reference shots, developers at the Stockholm-based studio DICE modeled in-game weapons and set pieces after originals from the movies—and “brought them back to their original glory,” says Sigurlína Ingvarsdóttir, Battlefront’s senior producer. Suddenly, a little more waiting doesn’t sound so bad.
DAN WINTERSVader’s helmet
The team at DICE relied on a process called photogrammetry: shooting props from multiple angles in order to construct perfect 3-D replicas. But when they got their hands on the most evil breathing apparatus in the universe, the helmet turned out to photograph quite poorly—it was too hard and shiny. Lucasfilm wouldn’t let them dull the surface with matte paint (obviously), so DICE touched it up in post.
Lucasfilm/Screengrab by Wired
