Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires Research

Rendered in Maya's Mental Ray, these characters were ripped from the archive section of 'Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires', posing the characters, freeze-framing them, then ripping the data. Although the Playstation 2 does some perspective changes in real-time, causing the models to be slightly skewed in places, they still show the topology and textures; valuable information for how they were built.

The first face here of 'Lu Bu' shows this distortion well, but the geometry is still very much readable. You can see how the faces of the characters were still made to be low-poly, but still contained some rudimentary geometry to animate reasonably well. They do not follow current generation edge-flow techniques, but still maintain a high quality appearance as the renders show.

The textures in the game only include Diffuse maps because the Playstation 2 was incapable of handling other maps like Normals, Specular, Ambient, etc. However these maps were often not square. The above image shows two maps, separated by a black line towards the right. You will notice the texture on the right is very tall and thin, at a 1:3 ratio. The reason for this is the ability to be able to get more onto one map without the need for extra textures to be loaded, whereas nowadays we often see separate small textures being loaded for each part of the body, such as the head, hands, shoes, etc. The very tall texture on the right is loaded just once per level, containing all weapon textures in the game: a much faster process than having to load a new texture every character with a different weapon. The downside to loading textures with aspect ratios that are not equal is that they take marginally longer to process, but you can imagine that it would still be faster for the console to load than having to load multiple square textures. This kind of optimization is still in use today, but we don't see it as often for obvious reasons.