Love Is a Many-Headed Thing, Part III

A hydra is not an easy thing to model. Each head should be sculpted symmetrically and animated individually. Be that as it may, a hydra is basically a fancy snake with more heads than are considered healthy. If I could sculpt one snake and embellish it to look like a one-headed hydra, it would be a simple matter to replicate the head and neck and attach each clone to the body.

Regarding the position of the heads, I’m not inclined to follow the hydra model in Jason and the Argonauts, where one row of heads is on top of a second row. Apart from looking kind of messy, the heads that are in front will always have a clear advantage over the ones at the rear when it comes to grabbing food.

Instead, I’d like to position all the heads in a single row like the fingers of a hand. It makes more sense to have each set of vertebrae fused side by side, the way it happens among conjoined twin serpents. This design is based on some amazing pictures of snakes with as many as five or ten heads that I found on the Internet.

With that plan in mind, I figured it would be a cinch to make a snake model. After all, it is the easiest vertebrate to draw, almost as easy to draw as a worm. A snake has an oval head devoid of any nose, ears, or hair that would only serve to complicate it. Attached to its little head is nothing more than an inordinately long tail. Even a child can draw it, so sculpting it ought to be a simple matter to me.

I mean, look at some of the things that I’ve sculpted in the past.

Surely a snake would be child’s play for me, right? Right?

Wrong. Below is my first attempt at modeling a snake. Eat your heart out, Michaelangelo.

Obviously, the body wasn’t quite right. I decided to take a more careful look at my reference pictures. I found that while the neck of a snake is narrower than its head, its body widens considerably towards the middle before tapering down to the tip of its tail. Also, the sides of a snake can be surprisingly flat, rather like a very long and rubbery box.


Armed with this new realization, I made another attempt to sculpt a snake.

What went wrong, I wondered. Why do I have no problem drawing and sculpting complex human bodies but get stuck trying to sculpt a simple snake? The answer wasn’t as surprising as one might think. I have had many years of experience drawing people but have had virtually no experience drawing legless reptiles. The subtle shape of serpents was lost on me.

Yes, a snake’s body can appear to be relatively flat like a box, but it doesn’t have sharp corners outside of its mouth. I needed more polygons to soften its shape. After one more try, I came up with the following model.

Not bad, I thought to myself, although the snake looks like it swallowed a whole box of Viagra. I guess it will never look quite right if I don’t curl its body in a serpentine fashion, but I won’t be doing that until I animate it.

My next task was to sculpt the inside of its mouth. Whereas a snake’s outer form really is uncomplicated, its mouth is a minor marvel of engineering. Not all snakes have teeth, but the ones that do have two rows of sharp, backward curving teeth at the bottom of their mouth and four rows at the top. These teeth are placed along gummy ridges that are present in all snakes, even the toothless ones. Venomous serpents also have two thick poison glands on the left and right side of the mouth way behind the teeth. Delivery of this toxin is accomplished through the use of two fangs, each of which is connected to a poison gland. Where the fangs are positioned depends on the species of snake. Some fangs are at the front of the mouth and some are way at the back, close to the poison glands. Some fangs don’t move inside the snake’s mouth and therefore have to be short to keep the snake from killing itself. The most impressive fangs come from the likes of vipers, whose long, forward-positioned fangs fold inside the mouth when not in use.

So basically, if I wanted to make life easy for myself, I’d make a toothless hydra with no venom. If I wanted to intimidate the hell out of Chaos Wielder’s players, I’d go for a hydra with six rows of hooked teeth and long fangs that fold inside each mouth. Let’s see, that’s two fangs to animate multiplied by the number of heads that the hydra has…

Decisions, decisions. Which one do I model?

Ugh, modeling that mouth was a real b–… Er, I mean, it was really hard to make. Oftentimes, I couldn’t tell where one polygon began and another ended. Making the UV map was a tough challenge in itself. It’s crude work, but I got the job done.

Okay, so what I have now is a low-poly snake model that looks stiff enough to stab vampires with. I’m not done sculpting, though. My next task is to spruce it up to make it look like a one-headed hydra. Stay tuned.

Love Is a Many-Headed Thing, Part II

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on the hydra that I wrote about in my last post. Sometimes life takes us in unwanted directions and puts a monkey wrench in our hopes and dreams. Anyhow, I’ve been reading up on creature design, and there’s this adage that goes, “Form follows function.” This means that any creature’s appearance should ultimately be based on what it is capable of doing. I’ve also been reading some fascinating material about adaptations, which are traits or capabilities that evolved in a species to solve a particular problem of survival. Even in fantasy setting, imagined creatures must abide by these principles for readers or players to willingly suspend their disbelief.

Let’s take the hydra. Chaos Wielder, for whom I am creating this model, asked me to work within a couple of parameters in designing the creature:

• The hydra is a many-headed venomous snake like the monster that appeared in Jason and the Argonauts. In other words, Chaos Wielder wants the classical, mythological hydra, not the many-headed dinosaur from the D&D Monster Manual.

• The hydra should be appropriate for a swamp setting.

Whether I wanted the hydra to sprout two heads for every one that got chopped off was up to me. Now this is fortunate, because apart from the difficulty of creating a model that could do that, this capability just doesn’t make sense. If the hydra is a vertebrate, as all snakes are, where would the neck bones of the extra head attach to? Isn’t there a physical limit to how many heads a hydra can grow? Otherwise, wouldn’t the whole world eventually be covered with hydra heads and necks?

At this stage, I could see that growing new heads just wasn’t going to happen.

For a snake to have more than one head raises more problems than it solves. Snakes do not bite off chunks of flesh from their meals. They swallow their prey whole. Snakes’ teeth are designed not for tearing off meat but for keeping prey from escaping their mouth. A snake with more than one head would have a tug of war over who gets to swallow their food. This isn’t a what-if scenario. It’s a fact. Like other animals, snakes occasionally give birth to conjoined twins. A two-headed snake could struggle for hours over which head gets to swallow its prey. Having multiple heads is not an adaptation. It is an accident of nature, and the unfortunate creature with this trait is unlikely to pass on its genes to the next generation.

But that’s not all, as they say in infomercials. Looking at stills from Jason and the Argonauts, I had more questions that I probably should have asked before I started modeling the hydra. If the hydra is a serpent, why does it have a bird’s beak? Putting in a trait because it looks frigging awesome isn’t a good enough justification. Remember, form follows function. Also, if the hydra lives in the water, wouldn’t having a split tail make it more difficult for it to swim?

Holy Harryhausen, Batman. After all that work I did on the hydra, I realized I had to start over from scratch. Nevertheless, as they say, no experience is ever wasted. I learned some new creature design principles and 3D modeling techniques.

In case anyone is wondering, I did make progress. Since the hydra is basically a water serpent with many heads, I’ve been creating a 3D model of a snake.

Don’t laugh. It wasn’t easy. More on my next blog post.

Love Is a Many-Headed Thing, Part I

I'm baaack.

While it may seem that I've pretty much abandoned my modding efforts for NWN2, some things just refuse to die. Once again, I find myself creating yet another NWN2 creature model.What was it that made me return to modding just when I thought I had laid it to rest? Was it love? Was it a compulsive, masochistic desire to post a new file in the Vault that few people will download and even fewer will vote for? Was it a promise that I made to Chaos Wielder years ago to create a new monster model for him?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Three months ago, Chaos Wielder emailed me, asking if I still intended to make good on my promise to him to make a hydra model, a promise that I made in 2008 when I was very much active in the modding scene. Truth be told, when I saw last year that few players still cared to download NWN2 mods, I decided to lay to rest my dream of creating Faithless and anything pertaining to NWN2. The iron was no longer hot, so there was no point in striking it. Then along came Chaos Wielder, gently, almost sheepishly reminding me of my promise to him, although he assured me that he wasn't holding me to it. Regardless, I grew up believing in keeping one's promises. I realized then that like vengeful ghosts, the things you say may come back to haunt you.

Last week, I finally got around to creating the model that I promised to make. Chaos Wielder wanted a hydra that looked like the creature from Jason and the Argonauts, not the D&D version of the monster. I downloaded a few photos that I could find on the Internet and went straight to work. My hydra started life as a bunch of ZSpheres in ZBrush, an excellent 3D modeling application. Rather than making all seven of its heads, I decided to create only one head and leave six neck stumps for me to replicate the head on later. The finished ZSphere model can be seen here. Kind of looks like a mutated ginseng root, doesn't it?

I then transformed the ZSphere model into something that is known in ZBrush as an adaptive skin. I sculpted this skin into something vaguely hydra-like, as can be seen in the screenshot on the right. It looks rather like a lumpy mass of modeling clay, but that's just for starters. The next step was to make a more refined model through a process known as retopologizing, which basically means creating a new model by plotting a set of vertices over the old one.

I had actually gone as far as retoplogizing the hydra last week. Unfortunately, when I attempted to save the model, the application crashed, and my model was lost forever. I was so frustrated that I didn't work on the hydra for the next five days. In fact, I probably would have given up on creating the hydra altogether if it weren't for my six-year old son. He saw me making the model, and he said he wanted me to make a blue one for him. Ah, love. It's what makes a person strive onward with redoubled effort after stumbling down, rather like two fierce heads that sprout from a bleeding neck stump. I still had my lumpy modeling clay version intact, so yesterday, I retopologized the model one more time. The fruit of my masochistic compulsion can be seen here. The model looked more like a hydra at this point, although the neck stumps weren't convincing at all. That wasn't a problem because they were intended to be placeholders for the actual heads.

The next step was to export the model as an OBJ file for importing into 3DS Max. I replicated the central head and neck of the hydra and replaced each of the neck stumps with the head clones. I had to painstakingly adjust the vertices on the necks and shoulders of the creature so that I could weld them together.

When that was done, I exported the model as a new OBJ file, which I imported to ZBrush. Below, you can see how the model looks now. There is still much work to be done, but at least I've nailed the basic shape of the creature.

My Latest Work in the Vault

While I haven't been exactly idle in the modding front, my output has been meager thus far. Nevertheless, I do have something of mine that was uploaded to the Vault earlier this week. It's... (drum roll, please...) a new module.

Ha, ha, gotcha there. If truth be told, I didn't actually make the module. I just provided voice work for one of the characters. It's quite a character though -- the end-game boss, no less. You can hear my evil voice in July Anarchy Prologue by JM Scion. Unfortunately, my work is uncredited, so this blog will probably be the only place where I'm identified as the perp. If you still have Neverwinter Nights 1 installed in your computer and if you happen to enjoy science fantasy settings, why not give July Anarchy Prologue a go?

Killing Your Boss Requires Careful Thought

In computer games, nothing gets a player’s adrenalin pumping more than a great boss fight. If a battle can be likened to a multi-course meal, the boss is the pièce de résistance, the culminating moment to which all other minor encounters lead. There is more to designing a memorable boss encounter than giving the boss far more hit points and damage than most other enemies. The encounter should be difficult enough to force players to re-evaluate their strategy and think on what course of action to employ.

Below is a list of ways to add spice to your boss fights. Many of the suggestions listed below can be combined with others to create challenging battles.

Resistance to Damage Type. The boss may be resistant or invulnerable to specific types of damage. The challenge for the player is to discover what damage type hurts the boss the most and to apply it to the boss without getting killed first. For example, as anybody who has seen The Wolfman movie knows, werewolves can shrug off damage from all but silver weapons, fire, and the fangs and claws of another werewolf. Not many players may know the vulnerabilities of a new boss of your creation, however, so it may help if you can provide your players clues on how best to dispatch it.

Sweet Spots. A boss may be invulnerable or highly resistant to damage in all but certain parts of its body. In the Wii game House of the Dead: Overkill, for instance, all the bosses can only be hurt by targeting specific body parts that are marked during gameplay.

Attack Patterns. A boss may follow certain attack patterns that the player must discern if they are to prevail. The player character must generally evade when the boss is about to attack and strike when the boss is vulnerable (say, right after the boss attacks). Charged attacks, for instance, are more lethal than ordinary attacks but take some time to gain maximum power. Hence, the boss’s powering-up animation can serve as a signal for the player to get their character out of the line of fire. In the Wii game No More Heroes, nearly all the bosses are designed with their own set of powered attack patterns.

Conditional Buffing or Weakening. Some bosses have damage protection and/or enhanced attacks for as long as some condition exists. In Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide, for example, Heurodis is initially invulnerable to damage because of the mythallar protecting her. The only way to kill Heurodis is to nullify her invulnerability by destroying all the mythallar pieces. Alternatively, a boss may be naturally strong and/or damage-resistant until a particular condition is put into place. For example, Superman has incredible strength and can ignore most attacks thrown at him unless he is exposed to kryptonite.

Font of Healing. A boss may have access to something that can heal it. This source of healing may have limited or unlimited healing charges, and it may be so powerful that the boss cannot be killed for as long as the healing source is accessible. For example, in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Malak can instantly bring his hit points full up by draining the life force from any of the unconscious Jedi in the room. Players can either keep fighting until Malak runs out of Jedis to drain, or they can destroy the Jedis before Malak gets to them – assuming that Malak doesn’t finish off the player character first.

A Few Good Minions. A boss need not fight player characters all by its lonesome. The boss may have a few good minions by its side to harass the hapless heroes. One or more of these minions may even be strong enough to count as a boss. Such is the case in the final major encounter in Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir, in which the heroes battle the Herald of Zehir, who leads a number of minor minions as well as the Hierophant N’Safa, who is a boss in his own right. Because minions have fewer hit points than the boss, it is usually best for the player to dispose of them first to reduce the number of attackers wailing on the party.

Minion Spawner. Some bosses can spawn or summon one or more minions during the encounter. (The salient difference between a minion spawner and a boss with a few good minions is that the latter has a fixed number of subordinates that are already present at the start of the encounter.) If the player focuses on attacking the boss, its minions will damage the player character unabated. The player will often have to dispatch the boss’s minions before focusing their efforts on the boss, which may spawn additional minions in the course of the battle. There may or may not be a limit on the number of minions that the boss can summon. In Dragon Age: Origins, the broodmother spawns a few tough minions every so often to harass the player characters, thus making this boss difficult to dispatch.

Transformer. Some bosses transform into different versions of themselves. Perhaps the boss transforms into progressively more lethal versions as the battle rages. Or maybe the boss randomly transforms every so often into another form with new invulnerabilities and powers. Whichever the case, each transformation may require the player to adopt different strategies to damage the boss effectively.

Multi-Part Boss. Some bosses are composed of two or more parts, each of which has its own set of hit points. The hero may have to destroy all these parts to kill the boss. Alternatively, killing one particular part of the monster (such as its torso) may kill the rest of the parts (e.g., its many heads), but that one part happens to be much tougher than the rest. To use a previously mentioned example, the broodmother in Dragon Age: Origins has tentacles, each of which has its own set of hit points. Players must choose whether to focus their attacks on the core of the broodmother itself or destroy its tentacles first.

Unbeatable Foe. Some bosses may be impossible to beat, at least in the earlier stages of the game. The best recourse in this case is for the player character to run to safety before the boss gets them. For example, when the player character first encounters Alma in F.E.A.R., he has two choices: run or die. If most players are like me, they initially attempt to fight Alma until they realize that not running away leads to a quick demise. You should probably have no more than one or two unbeatable bosses in your game if you are to keep your players’ frustration to a manageable level.

Bad News

Yesterday, I found out that over the next eleven months, I'll be extremely busy with work. Unfortunately, this will probably affect my modding badly. I don't know for sure how badly it will be affected, but let's just say that I'm more likely to produce models than modules, and my output will probably be meager.

Sigh.

My Abishai, Part 1

A month ago, Jolly Jenkins posted a request for an abishai model at the Custom Content forum. Since I was planning to make several infernal models for Faithless anyway, I offered to help him out. Jolly said that he'd be needing the abishai in about a month's time. Little did I realize that in the interim, I'd be saddled with much more work for Shattered Dreams.

One month later, all I have to show for myself is the high-poly mesh pictured here. I still have to make the low-poly model, UV map, texture maps, skeleton rig, and animations. Now I'm starting to wonder what the devil possessed me to commit to this thing. Oh, well.