LOAF: Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. Best parts of the idea: Art is easy - chrome shader applied to everything! And you wouldn't need to hire good voice actors, either - the bad acting could be part of the package. I like it. This is of course assuming you were thinking more along the lines of the old 1950s B&W sci-fi films. If not, apologies.
Maj Striker: The basic process is this: Create mesh, roughly uv unwrap the mesh, bring that rough un-wrap into photoshop, paint various lines and details onto the un-wrap, save out several version of that new texture - bump, decal, glow, apply those maps to the mesh in 3dsMAX using various texture mixes, overlays, and masks, make an automatically unwraped version ( to pack the uv resolution) and bake the textures out into 5 elements. Base color, Ambient occlusion (also known as a dirt map), Normal map (bump map), Glow map (engines and the like) and Specularity Map (Shine map). REfine and repeat as necessary.
Bob McDob: Hey, don't worry about it - we're hardly the most important thing going on in WC. Also, for clarity, all these shots are internal Max renders. However, before you yell "FAKE!" at the top of your lungs, I'm not doing anything in the render that won't be done in-engine. Most of these preview renders have one omni light (shadow casting) and one ambient light (general in-shadow color...in most cases a darkish gray-blue). This is something our engine can very easily handle.
Cam: I'll stick up the render sometime tonight, or late tomorrow evening...soonest, hopefully.
The brightness in the thumbnails seems about right to me.
