Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

Love Is a Many-Headed Thing, Part I

2011-12-05T00:52:00.002+08:00

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

2010-07-31T19:11:00.000+08:00

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

2010-02-22T23:10:00.001+08:00

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

2009-09-04T00:00:00.002+08:00

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

2009-08-22T22:27:00.004+08:00

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.

STAR*DRIVE -- Is This Impressive or What?

2009-08-20T08:46:00.005+08:00

I was idly browsing the Neverwinter Vault when I came across this bit of news from Yaddaman about his upcoming sci-fi module, STAR*DRIVE. The picture on the right was shamelessly lifted from the STAR*DRIVE news page at the Vault. There are more screenshots to be found there, so if this picture does not amaze you, head over to Yaddaman's announcement and prepare to be floored.

There are three things about this module that impress me: (1) The custom models are awesome. (2) The module and its custom content were all done by one person -- Yaddaman. (3) Yaddaman would like to see other modders use his custom content to create their own sci-fi modules. Don't take my word for it. Read this quote from Yaddaman, which he posted at the Comments section.

"I wish I could tell you exactly when it will be done but it's hard to say since I'm doing it alone and I don't have a huge amount of spare time (job, wife and two kids). I just hope you won't be dissapointed with the final mod and that you will enjoy playing it as much as I enjoy making it. It would be really cool if people would like to make their own sci-fi modules using the mod and maybe even contribute with some new resources eventually."

Hear, hear!

Look into the Mirror, Part 2

2009-08-09T17:20:00.002+08:00

Most creators of custom models for NWN2 probably learn 3D modeling by first making placeables. This was not the path I took. I felt that making a placeable was not challenging enough to hold my interest, which is why I decided to plunge head first into creature modeling. Ironically, the most complicated model that I've done to date is a placeable, the one shown in the picture to the right. It has more mesh parts than I care to count, and the whole thing weighs in at over 14,000 polygons. It has been several weeks since I first blogged about this model, which gives readers an idea of how long I've been working on it. Now, I'm tired and would like to rest. Must play Neverwinter Zork.

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Scenes

2009-07-27T17:02:00.002+08:00

Over the weekend, I saw the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Having read the book previously, I wanted to see how the story was adapted for the wide screen. I am well aware that anything longer (or shorter) than a novella will not survive the transition to a movie version without serious changes. This is a situation that I accept, and I appreciate clever adaptations of written works such as that of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. With the Half-Blood Prince, however, I was disappointed with the extra screen time devoted to some scenes and the inadequate time spent on others. While I do not intend to write a full review of the movie, I want to set down my thoughts on why I felt that certain scenes could have been written better. This blog post may serve as a guide on keeping one’s stories tight without making them feel rushed.

Shifting the Balance of Power

In the movie version of Half-Blood Prince, a couple of Death Eaters launched an attack on the Weasley family home. I felt that this scene, which was not present in the original novel, is completely pointless. What did Voldemort and his Death Eaters hope to achieve by destroying a single house? If their attack was intended to weaken Harry Potter and his friends, there was nothing in any of the subsequent scenes that showed they had succeeded. In fact, David Yates, the director, could have left the scene in the cutting room floor, and the audience wouldn’t have missed it.

The way I see it, the purpose of any scene involving an on-going conflict between two parties is to shift the balance of power between them. This is true regardless of whether the scene in question comes from the latest James Bond thriller or any of Jane Austen’s romances. The shift in the balance may be subtle most of the time and heart-pounding in only a few instances. Regardless, for the shift to be meaningful, its effects should be felt in the later parts of the story.

Introducing New Conflicts

Not all scenes are intended to develop an on-going conflict between two parties. Some are meant to introduce conflict between parties that had hitherto been at peace with each other. Nevertheless, if one party takes a swipe at another in one scene, we expect this conflict to escalate and eventually be resolved in later scenes.

Hence, I feel that the opening sequence showing the destruction of London’s Millenium Bridge could have been left out altogether. The wizard-versus-muggle conflict was never developed in the later parts of the story, and the screen time taken up by this sequence could have been better utilized in other scenes. I realize that the opening scene was intended as a more dramatic replacement for the first chapter in J.K. Rowling’s book. Nevertheless, I also feel that this chapter could have been safely deleted from the book for the same reason that I stated earlier.

Establishing Characters

Who is Narcissa, and why is she in the company of Bellatrix? Who is Romilda, and what’s her relationship with Harry and Ron? Who is Dean, and why is Harry upset with him? Those who saw the movie without ever having read the Harry Potter books may never know the answer to these questions. That’s because there aren’t enough scenes in the movie to establish these characters, their relationships, and their motivations. Any character that is at the heart of one or more conflicts must have enough scenes devoted to establishing them clearly enough for the audience to appreciate the conflicts in which they are involved.

On the other hand, characters that don’t figure in any of the story’s conflicts may be safely glossed over or left out. For instance, the director and screenwriter were wise to make Blaise Zabini practically invisible in the movie. Because the romance between Remus and Tonks did not make it to the movie version, giving these characters less screen time is justified. If the attack on the Weesley home had been left out, Remus and Tonks could even have gone with it.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I gave three reasons for developing a scene: establishing characters, introducing conflicts, and shifting the balance of power. I don’t claim that these are the only reasons for crafting a scene, but these definitely revolved around my dissatisfaction with the Half-Blood Prince movie. As usual, everything written here is just my opinion, and readers may apply or disregard all or part of my blog post as they see fit.

Designing Puzzles

2009-07-10T02:10:00.008+08:00

I haven’t been working much on my 3D models these past several days, having been instructed by Dirtywick to design a puzzle for our module, Shattered Dreams. While trying to come up with a good one, I pondered quite a bit on the difference between good and bad puzzles as well as what principles go into designing different types of puzzles. I’m writing my thoughts here, partly as an aid for other game designers and modders who want to make their own puzzles, but mostly so I can refer to my own notes when the need arises. None of these ideas are written in stone, of course, and I may change or refine my opinions at any time in the future.

Please note that the puzzles I’m referring to here are the ones that may be used in adventure or role-playing games.

Puzzles to Avoid

There are various kinds of puzzles, some of which are so bad that they deserve special mention. The following are the ones that I feel deserve to be in the Puzzles’ Hall of Shame.

Mazes. Seriously, mazes are not fun at all. They are especially bad in games where the point of view is first-person, although they can also be tiresome in 2D graphical adventures. If an area you’re designing branches out like a maze, consider redesigning it.

Mathematical Word Puzzles. “Sally is two years older than Tim. Ten years ago, Sally was twice as old as Tim. How old is Sally now?” When was the last time you had to open a locked container by solving a mathematical word puzzle in real life? You never had to? Well, that just goes to show how contrived these kinds of puzzles are when they appear in adventure or role-playing games. Mathematical word puzzles can be amusing for some and vexing for others, but unless you’re a scientist, engineer, or programmer, you’ll probably never encounter them outside of textbooks and silly computer games.

Riddles. As a means of gaining entry to an otherwise inaccessible place, riddles are almost as bad as mathematical word puzzles. What makes riddles halfway acceptable in adventure games is that Oedipus and the Sphinx had set a precedent for them thousands of years ago. Nevertheless, if some NPCs really wanted to secure a place, they could have done better than to leave a clue to entry out in the open. Unless you don’t mind some silliness in your game, you might want to avoid using riddles. There are some good exceptions to this guideline, however. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for people who have a tendency to forget their email password to allow a means to retrieve it by having the computer ask a question that only they and perhaps few other people know the answer to. Use your judgment when determining whether a riddle is appropriate to use in a game situation. Chances are it’s not.

Pixel Hunting. In some games, particularly 2D graphical adventures, one of the challenges facing a player is determining which visual elements can be interacted with. Some of these visual elements are so small that they can be easily overlooked. In such cases, the player winds up wrestling with the interface. Hunting for pixels is mostly an irritating experience. Fortunately, in NWN2, a player can highlight all useable objects in visual range by pressing the [Alt] key. Many other adventure games do not have a similar feature. If you ever create an adventure game from scratch, you would do well to provide some means of making all useable objects readily apparent.

Some Principles of Puzzle Design

There are things that I call “principles” (for lack of a better word) that go into the making of a puzzle. Some of these principles may be combined to create more complex puzzles. Not all these principles will be found in each puzzle, but every puzzle has one or more of these principles behind their design. I can’t claim to have an exhaustive list of these principles, but the ones I came up with may help generate some ideas for puzzles.

Toggling. This is probably the simplest puzzle design. A player may activate or deactivate an object by toggling some sort of switch. For example, a certain switch may open or close an electronic door. The puzzle can be made more complicated by requiring the player to flick a set of switches in the proper combination, not unlike entering a binary string code. Sometimes, the only way to figure out what each switch does is through experimentation.

Matching Type. In certain puzzles, players are required to match certain objects or bits of information with other objects or snippets of info. For example, in Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (2000), there is a puzzle in which players have to match a set of objects with the famous personage who uses each object. Players who are familiar with the Forgotten Realms will find this puzzle easy, but those who aren’t steeped in the lore of the realms may still benefit from the textual clues provided.

Timed Movement. Sometimes, passage through a dangerous area may be safely negotiated by timing one’s movement precisely. For example, if a deadly blade on a pendulum swings by every few seconds, players have to time their characters’ movement so that they move past the pendulum on its upswing. If many similar traps are stringed along the passageway, it becomes a challenge for players to observe the traps’ patterns of motion.

Positioning. Some puzzles are solved by positioning certain objects in accordance with a set of rules. The oft-used Towers of Hanoi puzzle is an example of this. Sometimes, these objects have certain “powers” that are brought into fore or even activated from their new positions. This is particularly true of puzzle-like games such as chess and Othello.

Code Breaking. Simple codes can be deciphered by observing the patterns when the codes appear. The game of Mastermind is a well-known example of this type of puzzle, variations of which can also be found in role-playing games like Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer (2007) and Fallout 3 (2008). A more subtle example of this type of puzzle is when the player has to decipher an alien language by observing the situations when certain patterns of symbols appear.

Combination. Some objects can be combined with each other to produce a new object or to change the state of one of these objects. For example, by combining a key with a locked chest, the player character transforms the locked chest into an open chest. The principle of combination is a staple of many text and graphical adventure games and is used to solve the puzzles therein.

Substitution. When an object is required to solve a problem, but the player character does not have it, sometimes, a suitable substitute may be used instead. For example, if the player character does not have the key needed to open a locked chest but has a wire coat hanger and a pair of pliers, the character can use these objects to produce a makeshift lockpick. The principle of substitution is a good way to add some lateral thinking to your puzzles. Nevertheless, it can be abused badly. In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991), for instance, when the player character needs to shut off a water pump that is lacking a handle, he can pull out a monkey from his inventory and use it as a monkey wrench. Duh.

Misdirection. Every magician and mystery writer knows that one can hide important information with misdirection. The trick is to bring some unimportant thing into focus while keeping the salient clue in the background. In a mystery adventure, for instance, suppose that forensic examiners have determined that a certain victim’s murderer is left-handed. Later, the player character might come across an old photo of a group of people standing near a building with an impressive-looking edifice. Players who examine the photo closely might notice that one of the people in the photograph is holding a cigar in his left hand. That person just so happens to be a suspect in the case as well. Bingo. Clues can also be hidden in text by focusing on an unrelated topic while mentioning the seemingly unimportant clue in passing somewhere in the middle of the text.

Physics. In some puzzles, objects interact with each other in accordance with certain rules, what I call the “physics” of the game world. For example, a ball can be made to roll down a sloping surface or bounce off a spring. These objects can be positioned in certain ways so that their interaction will solve a particular puzzle. The in-game physics may or may not be related to real-world physics. For example, there is a kind of “physics” involved in the way counters interact with each other in the game of Othello, but this has nothing to do with the physics of the real world. On the other hand, there is a bit more real-world physics going on in The Incredible Machine (1992), a game where players can create Rube Goldberg machines that achieve some stated objective. The beauty of this type of puzzle design is that more than one solution can be implemented to solve the same puzzle.

Conclusion

This concludes my post on designing puzzles. There are other types of puzzles that I did not expound on because of their limited use in adventure and role-playing games. (Word puzzles such as crosswords come to mind.) Nevertheless, I may have missed a few puzzle types or design principles that can be useful in these types of games. Readers who would like to offer their own insights into the puzzle design process are invited to leave their comments here.

Look into the Mirror, Part 1

2009-06-30T23:52:00.004+08:00

It’s been a while since I last posted a screenshot of any 3D model in the works. That’s because I am currently making a very complex placeable, the kind that should have players realizing that this is no ordinary object when they first look at it. As can be seen from the concept art to the right, the placeable consists of a fairly ornate mirror held by a couple of angel statues. I had to craft and assemble several meshes to produce the high-poly version of this piece. In the process, I came across some new challenges for me to hurdle.

Firstly, there is the matter of the mirror frame, the design of which is inspired by art nouveau and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It may come as a surprise to some people that Lovecraft and art nouveau go very well together. One of the main features of art nouveau is the presence of vine-like tendrils that curl about in a stylized way. Well, it doesn’t take much tweaking to replace tendrils with tentacles, the appendage of choice of Lovecraft’s famous creation, C’thulhu.

Heretofore, I had been using only ZBrush to make all but the simplest meshes. The mirror frame, however, consists mostly of planar shapes that are often curved along the edges. ZBrush isn’t really suited for constructing planar shapes, so I turned to 3DS Max instead. I used splines to build the meshes, something that I had never done before. It’s actually a pretty cool technique once you get the hang of it. I later refined the wings, tentacles, and curlicues in ZBrush, but even before then, these shapes, which I first built in 3DS Max, were already somewhat complex. The only part of the mirror frame that I did not create with splines was the cherub’s head, which I sculpted in ZBrush from a sphere.

Like the cherub, the angel figure that holds up each side of the mirror was sculpted in ZBrush. As can be seen in the screenshot to the right, I put in a lot more detail in the figure’s dress than what I am accustomed to doing. It seems to me that each time I create a new model, I push the boundaries of my knowledge and skills. I see this as a good thing, and I really wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to post an in-game screenshot of the entire mirror in my next blog post.

Welcome to the Team

2009-06-22T22:51:00.007+08:00

Several months ago, I identified the members of the Shattered Dreams team, all of whom have contributed their unique talents to our creative undertaking. While a few have since left to pursue other projects, most are still active with us. Since then, we’ve had some noteworthy additions to the team, whom I’d like to welcome in this blog post. Here they are, arranged according to when they joined us:

Henry Solberg, Composer. I first met Henry online when he messaged me with an offer to compose music for Faithless, the module that is supposed to be this blog’s reason for being. (Ahem.) It became obvious that I wasn’t about to release Faithless any time soon, so Henry asked if he could be a part of what was then known as the “secret bouncyRock project.” After listening to samples of Henry’s music, Dirtywick said yes. Henry joined the Shattered Dreams team last December, but it’s only now that I finally got around to blogging about his involvement with us. Thanks to him and Gallaen Frost, we’ll have new music for our players to enjoy.

Wyrin D’njargo, Writer. Last April, Dirtywick posted a request for a writer to join the Shattered Dreams team. It is well known among modders that the two major bottlenecks in module building are area design and writing. While we have some really awesome area designers, Dirtywick (being our lead writer) was the only one who was active with writing at the time. This was on top of his activities as project leader and area designer, which put a strain on his writing duties. A day after posting his request, Dirtywick informed me that he got an offer from none other than Wyrin D’njargo, creator of the popular “Dark Avenger” series. I emailed Dirtywick with the following response: “Wyrin? Wy rin’t we hiring him on the spot?” Dirtywick emailed back, saying that he was looking to fill only one writing position, but he had received a second offer from someone else. My eyes nearly popped from their sockets when I found out who the other guy was.

Amstradhero, Writer. It turned out that Amstradhero (aka Shadowbeast) had also offered to join the writing team. Amstradhero is the creator of “Fate of a City,” which was one of the modules that won the Neverwinter Vault’s 2008 Gold Award for module of the year. In an unprecedented move, “Fate of a City” shared the gold award with another module – Dirtywick’s own “Subtlety of Thay – Chapter 2.” (Have I mentioned that Dirtywick is our lead writer?) Anyhow, I pleaded with Dirtywick to let both Wyrin and Amstradhero join us. Dirtywick wasn’t sure at first if he could handle two writers at the same time, but he eventually decided to welcome both of them to the fold. Woo hoo!

Baron, Writer. Some weeks back, Barry the Hatchet told a friend of his named Baron that Dirtywick was looking for additional writers for Shattered Dreams. Baron (not to be confused with Baron Rosencheckl of Robinson Workshop) was highly recommended by Barry the Hatchet, who enjoyed his stories. I got a chance to read samples of Baron’s writing when Dirtywick forwarded a module that contained some of his conversation files. While the context of the dialog remains hazy to me, I did find the writing entertaining, and several lines brought a smile to my face. It seems that Baron has an affinity for comic writing. Anyhow, Dirtywick has already brought Baron to the team. Judging from Baron’s work, I’m sure it’s a decision well made.

Welcome to the team, guys. Glad to have you aboard.

With Friends Like These

2009-06-15T21:51:00.003+08:00

Meet Mister Grin, one of the potential companions that player characters may take up in Shattered Dreams. The picture shown here is how I envision this character to appear. I’ll make a 3D model of this NPC later. For now, I’d like to say a few words about him to give a preview of what he is like:

Although Mister Grin is dressed in the height of fashion, people tend to be taken aback by his appearance for three reasons. Firstly, almost every part of his body is covered with some article of clothing. Mister Grin explains that his heavy clothing helps him resist the ague, to which his frail constitution is highly susceptible. Secondly, while Mister Grin is obviously a man of breeding, it is not entirely certain what breed he is of. An occasional peek at his pointy ears suggests that he may be of elven stock, although he is taller and bulkier than the typical elf. Also, even with Mister Grin’s hat, scarf, and dark glasses on, it is easy to tell that he is completely devoid of hair. Mister Grin explains that he is in fact predominantly half-elven and that his non-elven father had passed on a genetic trait that causes all hair to drop off and stop growing when its carrier reaches a certain age. Finally, there is the matter of his strangely upturned nose, a feature that he explains is due to his father having some orcish blood in him.

Mister Grin is a charming and eloquent gentleman, and he speaks with such ease and conviction that no one bothers to question his statements. That and his desire to help player characters defeat their greatest foe will surely make Mister Grin a welcome and trustworthy addition to any party.

Boss of Bosses, Part 4

2009-06-07T23:24:00.005+08:00

“My name is Enemigo Monstruoso. You killed my minions. Prepare to die.”

Well, that’s what the big boss seems to be saying in the picture to the right. It may look impressive, but I’ve found that from a modeling standpoint, this monster has a whole slew of new challenges to hurdle. The most obvious problem is the sheer size of the thing. Having a monster this large means that in combat, players will almost never see it in its entirety. To make it more visible, I lowered the height at which the creature hovers above the ground, but I can’t get it lower than fifteen to twenty feet without its appendages sinking below ground during its animation cycle. I could bring the mob to a more manageable size, but its background story would hardly make sense unless the creature is as large as possible without making it unplayable.

Another problem is that I may have made the creature’s collision spheres too large, because even at fifteen to twenty feet away, a player character can still hit it in melee. I’ll have to confer with the other core designers of Shattered Dreams to see if this is going to be an issue. I can always shrink the collision spheres if necessary, but that might mean having to make more of them to cover the parts of the creature that are exposed.

Another problem that I’ve had to deal with revolves around the limit that the NWN2 engine imposes on the number of bones a model may have. According to Jonny Ree, a single model may have no more than fifty-four bones, although there is a way to work around this limitation. Creatures with separate models for their tail and wings can have another set of fifty-four bones in each of them. I decided to model the creature’s tentacles as a separate wing model, something that I’ve never done before. (Considering that this is only the second or third model that I’ve had to animate from scratch, there’s really a lot that I don’t know about yet.)

I managed to get the tentacles to appear in the toolset as an animated wing attachment on the boss creature, but in the game, the tentacles were nowhere to be seen. For two days, I tinkered with the 2DA, GR2, and MDB files to try to get the tentacles to appear. After long hours of experimentation, I eventually discovered that the tentacles appeared in game when attached to creatures like humans, pit fiends, and mind flayers but not when attached to horses, dire boars, and One of Many. The salient difference between these two groups of creatures is that the first group has a head model that is separate from its body, but the latter does not. In other words, creatures from the first group are built from two or more MDB files, and those from the second group have all their meshes in one MDB. Because I had originally constructed the creature’s head and body as a single mesh, I had to make changes not only to my MDB files but also to my 2DA entries. Fortunately, that solved the problem.

I haven’t finished making all the animations that the big boss will need, but I expect that this task will be easy going from here on. Then again, I said something to that effect in my last blog post, so one never knows what surprises I may come across. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Boss of Bosses, Part 3

2009-05-30T07:09:00.003+08:00

I spent the last few days constructing a low-poly version of Shattered Dream’s ultimate boss. With 5,208 triangles, however, this mesh exceeds the poly count of most, if not all, official NWN2 models. Considering that this creature is one of a kind, I think that the relatively large number of polygons can be forgiven. As can be seen from the in-game screenshot on the right, I’ve also textured the mesh. My next task is to rig and animate the model. Because none of the skeletons of the existing NWN2 models fits this creature, I’ll have to make one from scratch. This, together with creating the animations, will probably be easier than building the mesh itself.

Here’s another picture of the creature. If, during the game, you can see the pupils of its eyes, you are too close.

Update, May 31, 2009

Stop the presses. Feedback from Nicethugbert and Josh/Anduraga has prompted me to try to retexture the boss to make it look more natural. The new look is shown on the right. Oh, by the way, that cute little thing beside the boss is a full-grown red dragon. It's just there to give a sense of scale but won't appear in Shattered Dreams. Player characters will have enough to worry about without red dragons getting in the way.

Boss of Bosses, Part 2

2009-05-27T04:21:00.002+08:00

In my previous blog post, I presented a new design for the main boss of Shattered Dreams. When I started working on the high-poly model, I realized that what looks good in 2D does not necessarily look good in 3D. In particular, the crown of heads really didn’t work out so well, so it had to go. Also, the tentacles make more sense when put in front of the model rather than behind it. Anyhow, I hope this latest incarnation of the main boss will have the desired effect on players of our module. Time will tell.

Boss of Bosses, Part 1

2009-05-23T21:52:00.007+08:00

Thus far, I’ve constructed a number of mobs for Shattered Dreams, some of which are bosses in their own right. Nevertheless, all these creatures are mooks compared to what I’m about to make. Behold the boss of bosses, the thing that will have players’ adrenalin pumping on overdrive as their characters hang on to dear life.

Actually, the picture shown on the right is my initial concept for the main boss. When I first drew this picture, I had not yet learned about making silhouette studies. With my newfound knowledge at hand, I decided to make a quick and crude silhouette of the creature to make sure that my design is on the right track. Below is the result.

What’s wrong with this picture? Simply put, the silhouette does not look dangerous at all. It’s generally bell-shaped, which brings to mind not only bells but also pears, statistical graphs, and women in Victorian dresses. How threatening are those? Clearly, a redesign is in order.

It didn’t take me long to come up with a silhouette that I like. The general shape of the drawing on the right is that of an inverted triangle. Most of the weight is at the top, which suggests upper-body strength, unlike the bottom-heavy bell shape, which looks much less strong and mobile. Also, triangles with their sharp angles look far more dangerous than pears with their soft curves. This whole discussion on shapes and their significance is part of what is known as “form language,” which professional concept artists and product designers are familiar with. Being the amateur that I am, it takes a bit of research for me to figure these things out.

Satisfied with the above silhouette, I then painted the details. Below is what I finally settled on. Not bad, in my opinion.

Angel of the Deep, Part 3

2009-05-14T23:05:00.004+08:00

Man, I would never have guessed that animating models would be so much fun. I find it even more engaging than sculpting with ZBrush. It took me only one day to learn the basics in 3DS Max. The hardest part in making an animation sequence is getting the motion to look natural. I imagine that this is especially so for creatures that walk on land, but since my model hovers above the ground, I didn’t have to worry about how a shift in weight from one bone to another affects the rest of the bones.

Below are screenshots from my test run with the model. They are poor substitutes for seeing the creature in action, but these will have to do for now. I don’t really have time to make a nice video. There are more models that I have to build. Busy, busy, busy.

Angel of the Deep, Part 2

2009-05-11T01:22:00.004+08:00

I’m still working on the model that I introduced in my last blog post. So far, I’ve made a low-poly mesh and textured it, though I may change the texture later on. I’m having doubts as to whether the glowing hair and tentacles is a good idea.

In terms of polygon count, this thing is a real monster – 5484 triangles in all. That’s not the worst thing about this model, though. I’m planning to construct a new skeleton for this creature and animate it. Initially, I thought of re-using the skeleton and animations of One of Many, which is why this model bears a slight resemblance to it. None of the available versions of Tazpn’s MDB Import/Export plug-in properly imports the OoM model and skeleton, however, so it seems that I have no other option than to put together some bones and animate them. That’s not as necromantic as it may sound, but I’ll still have to draw upon far greater wizardry than what I’m accustomed to.

More to come in my next blog post.

Update, 11 May 2009

I've decided that as far as making this particular figure glow, less is more. Check out the latest screenshot below.

Angel of the Deep, Part 1

2009-05-04T02:39:00.001+08:00

If you plunge the depths of your subconscious, what will you see? We may never know the answer to that question, but players of our upcoming module Shattered Dreams may encounter the creature shown on the right… that is, if I succeed in constructing and rigging a low-poly version of it. We’ll know for sure in my next blog post.

Conceptualizing Creatures with Silhouette Studies

2009-05-03T02:27:00.005+08:00

I wasn’t thrilled with the last model I made, which I felt was seriously lacking the “wow” factor. The problem isn’t so much in the execution but in the design. My approach is to do a hasty sketch that I will wind up changing on the fly as I construct my mesh. It therefore comes as no surprise that my designs are hit-and-miss, more of the latter than the former. When I started creating a high-poly mesh for the lovely creature shown on the right, it wasn’t long before I stopped what I was doing and said to myself, “This isn’t working.”

Disheartened, I did a few deep breaths and cleared my mind, concentrating my energies on the mystical reservoir of wisdom known as Google. I soon discovered a cool technique that professional concept artists use to design creatures – silhouette studies. From what I gathered, the idea is to draw a silhouette of a creature then to fill in the negative spaces with white to flesh it out. One can come up with different designs from a single silhouette if desired.

I can see how this is a useful technique. The silhouette alone should look interesting. If it isn’t, filling in the details will probably result in an unexciting design. When a player sees a creature from afar, its details will blur into each other, and the player will perceive the creature as little more than a silhouette. One of the artist’s challenges is to try to make the silhouette look awesome.

I decided to give this method a try. I created a 512 × 512 blank image in Photoshop and painted a silhouette over it. I zoomed out to about 25% of the picture’s size so I could focus on the general look without being bogged with the details. Afterward, I zoomed in to full view and refined the silhouette further. The technique is deceptively simple, but I found that coming up with a good silhouette isn’t easy. The first few drawings I made were so bad that I didn’t bother saving them in the computer. Eventually, I came up with something that is similar to the sketch shown at the beginning of this blog post. The main difference is that the silhouette shows much more promise.

Having painted a silhouette that I liked, I laid a transparent layer on top of it and painted over it with white. As I progressed, I added shades of gray. The end result doesn’t look as polished as my original pencil sketch, but I felt that the design is better by a mile. I’ve already started constructing a high-poly mesh based on this new picture, and I really like the results so far. I’ll show a screenshot or two of the model in my next blog post.

Behold a Pale Horse, Part 3

2009-04-27T04:59:00.003+08:00

I've been working hard on this "horse" model, grabbing what little free time I have just to finish it. The rig isn't perfect, but the model will need only a few tweaks here and there to be done. I lack sleep and can hardly write coherently, so I'll let my screenshots do all the talking. Together, they should be worth a couple of thousand words, more or less.

Behold a Pale Horse, Part 2

2009-04-21T20:32:00.003+08:00

I’ve finally added barding to the creature that I showcased in my last blog post. With armor on, this model looks a lot more like a horse than a greyhound sort of thingy. Much of the detail work that I did on the creature’s body is now lost under its barding. I don’t know if this monster looks scarier naked or armored. I’m tempted to have both versions of the creature in the module, but I don’t know if the monster in the buff has a place in the story. We shall see.

My next blog post will feature a playable version of this creature. I hope it won’t take me long to create so I can move on to my next 3D model.

Behold a Pale Horse, Part 1

2009-04-17T01:26:00.004+08:00

I can’t seem to get myself out of creature modeling. I tried making a placeable object for the first time and wound up turning it into a creature. Currently, I’m building critters of the four-legged variety once again. The concept sketch shown on the right is of a horse. At least I think it’s a horse. It’s either that or a really large, armored greyhound. Let’s call it a horse for now. Anyway, this is what’s been keeping me busy lately. (That and a certain video game babe that I’ve been modeling on and off.)

The screenshot shown on the left is of my current work in progress with the high-poly horse model. I’m supposed to give this creature barding, which I will add later. I felt that its present appearance is interesting enough to blog about, which is why I’m posting this picture here.

More to come in my next blog post.

Super-Simple Skeleton Building and Animation Tutorial

2009-04-09T00:52:00.033+08:00

In my last blog post, I showcased my latest 3D model, a statue of an elven warrior. It’s perfectly fine as a placeable, but Dirtywick wanted me to make it a creature. The statue is supposed to be some kind of magical defense against intruders, but there seem to be problems with trying to get placeables to be targeted by NPCs and to fire visual effects without resorting to a bunch of workarounds. Dirtywick wanted to keep things simple for the area designers on our team, which leaves me with the burden of providing a solution. In this particular case, one solution is for the statues to be implemented as creatures that can shoot spells from the crystals they are holding. None of the existing skeletons and animations in NWN2 is suitable for our needs, however, so I took this as an opportunity to teach myself how to make skeletons and animations from scratch. As usual, I’m documenting the things that I’ve learned in a tutorial.

Its title notwithstanding, this blog post is not a super-simple tutorial on skeleton building and animation. This is a tutorial on building and animating a super-simple skeleton. The skeleton will consist of only one bone and a few attachment points. It will have only one idle animation that does absolutely nothing. The animation is for a statue after all. It’s not supposed to fidget while it stands in place. Nevertheless, the statue will be able to shoot spells from the crystal it is holding, and because it is effectively a creature, NPCs will be able to target it for destruction without any changes to their AI.

Preliminaries

It is assumed that you have 3DS Max version 6, 7, or 8 as well as the Expotron plug-in. The plug-in that we have available at the Vault will not work with any other version of Max, nor will it work with other 3D modeling software. It is also assumed that you’ve already constructed and textured the main skin mesh of your model as well as its two lower level-of-detail meshes. The third and final assumption is that you know how to rig the mesh with the new skeleton that you’ll be creating.

It’s important to name your meshes properly. For creature models that are neither PCs nor NPCs, the main mesh should be named C_name_ar_BODYxx, where name is a unique identifier for your model, ar is the type of armor your model is wearing (CL if the model is unarmored), and xx is a two-digit number from 01 to 99. Mesh names are not case-sensitive.

If, like me, you’ve been using Tazpn’s plug-in to import MDB models as a reference for setting the scale of your models, the Expotron will export them at a very tiny scale. You should resize your meshes at 10,000% of the scale that Tazpn’s plug-in works with. After rescaling, you should make sure that the base of each mesh is at world coordinate (0, 0, 0).

Skeleton Building

Hide the two lower level-of-detail meshes so that only the main mesh is visible. With the main mesh selected, go to the Display panel at the right of the screen and click the “See-Through” box to put a check mark in it. This will make it easier to position bones and attachment points in relation to the mesh.

Go to the Create panel and click the Systems button, which is the rightmost button just below the panels’ tabs. Under “Object Type,” click the Bones button.

Click successive points in one of the viewports to create bones. We only want to create one bone, so press the [Esc] key after clicking two points. This will actually create two bones, so select the longer bone and delete it. Rename the remaining bone using the following convention: C_name_SKEL, where name is the unique identifier of your model. This bone will be the root node of your skeleton hierarchy, which includes not only bones but also attachment points and collision spheres.

Move the bone you created to the desired position. This is almost always the center of the pelvic area.

We’re going to create and position a few attachment points, which are sort of like invisible hooks to which other external objects can attach themselves. All attachment points are prefixed with “ap_”. In NWN2, there is a standard set of attachment points with specific names. The ones that we’re going to use are the following:

Attachment Point Name	Usual Position	Example Attachment Objects
ap_camera	Inside the head	The camera’s focal point during cutscenes when the creature is the active speaker
ap_halo	Above the head	Effect icons, spell conjuration effects
ap_hand_right	Right hand	Primary weapons, spell conjuration effects
ap_torso	Center of and just behind the chest	Spell conjuration effects

I chose these attachment points because they are the ones most likely to be used for spellcasting and cutscenes. For the statue model, I want to change the position of ap_halo to just above the crystal and ap_hand_right to inside the crystal. Both of these attachment points are involved in spell conjuration and casting, and I want to make the statue’s spells seem to emanate from the crystal.

In 3DS Max, attachment points are implemented as dummy objects. In the Create panel, click the Helpers button then click the Dummy button.

Click and drag the mouse icon over a tiny area of a viewport to create a dummy object. Change the name of the object to one of the standard attachment point names and set its desired position. Do this for all attachment points before moving to the next step.

Nearly all creature models have one or more collision spheres, and this statue is no exception. Collision spheres are for determining if two objects are in contact with each other or if there is a straight line of sight toward an object. In NWN2, only creature objects make use of collision spheres. (Placeables make use of collision boxes.) Each collision sphere is attached to a single bone and moves with that bone. Generally, a collision sphere encompasses the bone to which it is attached.

To create a collision sphere, click the Geometry button in the Create panel. Click the Sphere button and click-and-drag the mouse cursor in any of the viewports to create a sphere of the desired size. Adjust the position of each sphere if necessary. The first collision sphere should always be named “COLS00.” Subsequent spheres are named “COLS01” to “COLS99.”

Select each sphere in turn and edit its Object Properties. Make sure that the “See-Through” box is checked and that the Renderable box is not checked. When you’re done, click the OK button to close the Object Properties window.

Having created all the bones, attachment points, and collision spheres that we need, our next step is to arrange them in a skeleton hierarchy. In this example, the process is very easy because we have only one bone, one collision sphere, and four attachment points to connect. All of the attachments points as well as the collision sphere are connected to the bone, which is the root node by default. Hence, in our hierarchy, the bone is the lone parent object, and the attachment points and the collision sphere are its direct child objects.

Select a child object then click the “Select and Link” button, which is the third button at the bottom of the main menu.

Move the cursor to the chosen child object then click the mouse button without releasing it. Drag the cursor to the parent object, which in this case is the only bone in this model. A dotted line should stretch out as you drag the cursor. With the cursor over the parent object, release the mouse button. The white outline of a square will flash briefly around the parent object to indicate that a link was created between the two objects. Repeat this process for all the other child objects.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to link objects in this manner, especially if one object encompasses or is very near the other. If that is the case, first make sure that the “Select and Link” button is not pressed then select the child object that you want to connect. Now click the “Select and Link” button and press the [H] key. This will bring up the “Select Parent” dialog box. Click the name of the object that you want to set as the parent then click the Link button at the bottom of the dialog box. This will cause the two objects to be linked.

Optional step: If you want to make sure that you linked the objects correctly, press the “Schematic View” button, which is one of the rightmost buttons just under the main menu bar. This will open a Schematic View window. You should see a hierarchical view with the root bone at the top and the child objects below it. The three skin meshes are independent of this hierarchy and are not connected to it. Close the Schematic View window when you’re done.

Rig each of the skin meshes with the bones that you created. I won’t go into detail in this step, having already explained this process elsewhere in my blog.

Exporting the Skeleton

You are now ready to use the Expotron. The first thing to do is to export the skeleton.

Select all the bones and attachment points of the model. The easiest way to do this is to press the [H] key to bring up the Select Objects dialog box and press [Ctrl]+mouse click on each object that you want to select. Click the Select button at the bottom of the dialog window when you’ve selected all the bones and attachment points.

In the File menu, select the “Export Selected…” option. This will bring up a dialog box for you to enter the name and type of the file to export. Under “Save as Type,” choose “Granny Run-Time (*.GR2)”. The name of the file that you enter should be the same as the name of the root bone node. Click the Save button.

In the Granny Export Settings window, click Model. Make sure that the box beside “Include reference in export” is checked and that the box beside “Move to Origin” is not checked. Click the Export button at the bottom of the window.

Exporting an Animation

Every skeleton needs at least one animation – the idle animation. Since our statue model will not move a muscle while it is idle, this section is going to be easy.

Press the Auto Key button near the bottom of the screen.

Normally, at this stage, you would be setting frames and moving and rotating bones into position at each frame. Nevertheless, our model will be as lifeless as a rock, so we’re done with making its idle animation.

Select all the bones and attachment points of the model. In the File menu, select the “Export Selected…” option. This will bring up a dialog box for you to enter the name and type of the file to export. Under “Save as Type,” choose “Granny Run-Time (*.GR2)”. Name the file to export C_name_IDLE, where name is the unique identifier of the model. Press the Save button to continue.

In the Granny Export Settings window, click Animations. Make sure that the box beside “Include reference in export” is checked and that the box beside “Move to Origin” is not checked. Click the Export button at the bottom of the window. Slide the Oversampling button all the way to the right. Make sure that the box beside “Move to Origin” is not checked, and set “orientation curve tolerance” to 0.15. Click the Export button.

If there are other animations you wish to make, you may repeat steps 13 to 15 for each animation file. Release the Auto Key button when you’re done. My advice, however, is to defer creating anything other than the idle animation until you’ve checked your model in the toolset. This is because you may have to correct the coordinates of ap_camera and ap_halo first.

Exporting the Model

We’re now about to export the model to an MDB file. If the main mesh is see-through, uncheck the see-through display option. Unhide all the lower level-of-detail meshes if they are hidden. Now select all the skin meshes.

Go to the Utilities panel. If you don’t see Expotron among the list of utilities, click the More button and select “Expotron Utility” from the list that appears.

Under “NWN2 Types,” click the button beside “Character (skin).” If your mesh will be using transparencies, click the button beside “Transparency Mask” under “NWN2 Flags.” Otherwise, make sure that the button beside “No Transparency” is selected.

Under “Skeleton Name,” type the name of the skeleton file that you created for your model.

Add all collision spheres to the list of currently selected objects.

In the File menu, select the “Export Selected…” option. This will bring up a dialog box for you to enter the name and type of the file to export. Under “Save as Type,” choose “Neverwinter Nights 2 (*.MDB)”. Under “File Name,” type the name of your main mesh then click the Save button. In the Expotron Export Options window, make sure that all the boxes are checked then click the OK button.

Testing Your Model

Copy your MDB and two GR2 files to the folder “My Documents\Neverwinter Nights 2\override”. Copy the appearance.2DA file to your override folder and add an entry for your model. Create a new module in the toolset and add a creature blueprint for your model. Add an area to the module, and put your creature on it. Make sure that the Skeletons button, which is below the main menu bar of the toolset, is pressed. Now examine the creature and its skeleton. Notice any problems?

If you find that ap_camera and ap_halo are in their proper positions, go ahead and create the rest of the animations that this creature will need, if any. Otherwise, you’ll have to change the coordinates of these two attachment points. The Expotron does not seem to export the position of ap_camera and ap_halo correctly. To the best of my knowledge, this problem was first reported by Schazzwozzer at the NWN2 forums on December 3, 2007. At the time that he reported the problem, no one came up with a solution. I believe I have found a solution to this problem, which I will explain below.

We’re going to work with the creature model in 3DS Max again. Select ap_camera and ap_halo in turn and write down their exact x, y, and z coordinates.

Now for these two attachment points, exchange the x-coordinate with the z-coordinate. You may have to add a number to the three coordinates of each attachment point as well. I can’t say for sure what those numbers should be for any given model. I had to go through a process of trial-and-error to find the numbers that I needed to add for the model I made. The following are the formulas I used to derive the new coordinates:

New X-Value New Y-Value New Z-Value
ap_camera Old_Z + 115 Old_Y + 20 Old_X + 5
ap_halo Old_Z + 50 Old_Y + 10 Old_X

Each time you change the coordinates of either or both these attachment points, you’ll have to re-export the skeleton and possibly the idle animation of your model to your override folder. You’ll be able to check out your model in the toolset to see if ap_camera and ap_halo are in their proper positions. If the above formulas don’t work for you, you’ll have to experiment with the values to add to each coordinate. If all goes well, you’ll see that ap_camera and ap_halo are in the exact position that you want them to be.

The iron test for any creature model is to check it out in the game. Bake the area of your test module and prepare for a few encounters with your creature.

	New X-Value	New Y-Value	New Z-Value
ap_camera	Old_Z + 115	Old_Y + 20	Old_X + 5
ap_halo	Old_Z + 50	Old_Y + 10	Old_X

Below are screenshots that demonstrate that the statue’s spells do shoot out from its crystal. In each picture, one of the statues is a placeable, and the other is a creature. It's easy to guess which is which.

Acknowledgments

This blog post is based in part on the document Exporting Animated Creatures by Jay Bakke of Obsidian Entertainment. Even if you've already read this document, my blog post has some important information that you won't find there.

The screenshot shown at the beginning of this blog post was made by E.C. Patterson, aka ciViLiZed. I emailed him a copy of my placeable statue model, and he sent me back this picture. I love the way he lit the area in the screenshot. It highlighted the etching on the statue's breastplate very well.

My First Placeable Model

2009-04-04T05:05:00.007+08:00

I assume that most people who try to learn 3D modeling start with something inanimate such as a box. My first 3D model, on the other hand, was a monster. I could never focus my attention on anything as banal as a box, so I jumped right into creature modeling. Took me over a month to figure out.

For Shattered Dreams, Dirtywick told me that he needed a custom model – something like a tripod, a little taller than a human, topped with a crystal. Since all the other 3D artists on the project were still busy with their current assignments, I decided to try making my very first placeable.

Looking for picture references on which to base my design, I searched the Internet for tripods, preferably those that looked arcane, but the ones I found were either too plain or too modern. I eventually decided to search for candleholders because some of them can be pretty fancy, and their design can conceivably be tweaked for holding crystals instead. It didn’t take me long to find some beautiful ones. The ones I liked were small metal sculptures of women lifting up receptacles into which candles may be placed. Some of those receptacles were shaped like flowers. (Hmm, candles inserted into flowers held by women – could there be something Freudian going on with those designs?)

I liked the idea of making the crystal holder a sculpture of a woman, a fierce but beautiful one caparisoned for war. Because I was running short on time, I decided to forego producing concept art and just create a 3D model on the fly. I thought of making the woman a warrior wizard of some sort, so I had her dressed in a robe. With her hairstyle, however, she looked like a school teacher from the 19th century, so I gave her a breastplate to wear over her clothing. I then decided that the long sleeves weren’t sexy, so I sculpted away the sleeves. That left her arms looking too bare, so I added a pair of bracers.

With all the tweaking I did on the model, maybe I should have drawn some concept art first.

From the beginning, I had planned on posing the high and low poly models symmetrically. I intended to adjust the pose of the low poly model after creating its UV, diffuse, and normal maps. That way, I could create a mirrored UV map without much difficulty. If I had set an asymmetrical pose on the model at the start, producing a mirrored UV map would have been impossible. It was a brilliant plan, I thought to myself.

UV mapping was a breeze. So was texturing. The next task was to pose the model. In ZBrush, I masked off all but the model’s right arm and attempted to rotate it into position. The arm and shoulder twisted out of shape. I adjusted the masking and tried again. Portions of the model’s back collapsed in an inhuman manner. Try as I might, I could not get the arm to rotate convincingly at the shoulder socket.

Yeah, brilliant plan, I thought to myself.

Since that didn’t work out well, I decided to return to my modeling roots and rig the whole mesh in 3DS Max as if it were character model. I then moved and rotated the bones to get the model into the pose that I wanted. Because my rigging was hastily done, a number of vertices wound up a little off position, so I tweaked them into place in ZBrush.

As can be seen from the in-game screenshot below, the model didn’t turn out so badly after all.

Reconstructing Arizona

2009-03-28T02:59:00.004+08:00

A few of the areas in Shattered Dreams were inspired by the Arizona desert, of which we gathered several photo references. Anduraga was not happy with the cliff textures that come with the game, so he requested that some new ones be done based on the Grand Canyon. I took a break from 3D modeling to try my hand at creating terrain textures. It wasn’t easy for me to find information on the image files that comprise them, so Dirtywick passed me information that he found at the Rogue Dao website. When I was done, I quickly assembled a test module to see how my cliff textures look in the game. I rather like the way the textures turned out. I created two cliff textures that can actually be used together fairly seamlessly even at 100% pressure.

The landscape shown here won’t appear in Shattered Dreams, by the way. This area is strictly for testing purposes. Besides, this place is decidedly less grand than the canyon that inspired it. Hopefully, our area designers can make better use of the textures that I made.

The two rock columns shown here were modeled by Nytir and textured by Palafoxx. Shattered Dreams is brimming with lots of custom models, and more are in the works. I’m hoping that the other members of the team will take screenshots of actual in-game areas with the new models in place.

Rusty Metal: A 3D Modeling Tutorial

2009-03-25T03:35:00.011+08:00

In my last blog post, I showcased a creature model wearing rusty metal armor. In the process of texturing the model, I figured out a few techniques for achieving the surface look that I wanted. In this blog post, I explain the process of creating the rusty metal look.

This tutorial assumes that you have the following software:

An image editor that can handle layers and channels such as Photoshop or Gimp as well as a plugin for converting image files to normal maps. I use Photoshop, but the operations explained here can also be done in Gimp, albeit with different commands.

3D Modeling software that can import and export MDB files such as 3DS Max with Tazpn’s MDB plugin

The tutorial also assumes that you already know the basics of normal and diffuse mapping and that the model you’re working on already has a UV map in place. The tutorial also assumes that you know how to use your software. I won’t explain how to create alpha channels or how to set overlay layers.

When you’re ready, do the following steps.

Create a normal texture representing the embossed and engraved patterns on the surface of your model. Note that the surface marks due to rusty metal are not yet accounted for in this normal texture. We’ll include those later.

Download or create a rusty metal texture. Some excellent textures are available for download if you search well enough. Before using downloaded textures, make sure that you’re allowed to use it for whatever purpose you intend. Some textures are available for non-commercial use only, which is fine if you’re modding NWN2. Other sites may not be as generous regarding their terms of use.

In your image editing software, tile your chosen texture so that the image is the desired size of your diffuse map. If these tiles are created from separate layers, merge them to form a single rusty metal layer.

At this point, the diffuse map covers the entire model with a rusty metal texture. If there are other areas of your model that use different textures, create a new layer over the metal layer for each additional texture that your model needs and paint over them.

For the texture I’m making, the new texture layer appears as shown here. Note that all areas not covered by the texture are transparent (which, in Photoshop, is indicated by a gray-and-white checker pattern).

When both layers are visible, the resulting image appears as shown here.

We’re done with the diffuse map. You may now save it as a TGA or DDS file. (DDS files are smaller and should generally be the format of choice for your texture files.) You’ll have to refer to your original file with its separate metal layer as well, so you may want to save it in the native format of your image editing software just to be safe.

From your original diffuse map file, duplicate the rusty metal layer to a new window. Now create a normal texture out of this image. This normal texture will show as pits, scars, and surface bumps on the metal surface. Rather than explaining how to do this, I’d like to refer the reader to this excellent tutorial. Continue to the next step when you’re done.

Copy the new normal texture as a layer over the first normal texture that you created in Step 1. Set this layer as an Overlay layer so that the rusty metal surface is added to the design pattern of the first normal texture. Note that you may have to erase parts of the overlay layer that cover areas that are not of rusty metal.

If the normal texture does not already have an alpha channel, create one. The alpha channel of a normal map controls how much light is reflected from each area of the model. White areas on the alpha channel reflect the most light in the corresponding surface of the model, and black areas on the alpha channel reflect the least light. How much light the shades of gray on the alpha channel will reflect depends on how dark they are. On the alpha channel, we want the rusty parts of the metal surface to be black and the non-corroded parts of the metal to be white. The non-metallic portions of the model may be represented by black, white, or shades of gray on the alpha channel depending on the type of material they are supposed to be made of.

Don’t even think of painting the alpha channel by hand. The rusty texture is much too complex for that. Do the following steps instead to paint your alpha channel.

From your original diffuse map file, duplicate the rusty metal layer to a separate window just as you did in Step 6. With the new window active, click the Channels tab at the right side of the screen. Select the Blue channel and copy the grayscale image to a new window.

We choose the Blue channel because of the different color qualities of sheet iron and rust. Sheet iron that has not corroded is grayish, which means that it has a relatively even mix of red, green, and blue light. Rust, on the other hand, is orange, with variations across the range of red to yellow. Everyone knows that red and yellow, when mixed together, make orange. Not as many people realize that when you mix red and green light together, you get yellow. (Mixing red and green pigment, not light, results in a grayish color, but that’s neither here nor there.) In the blue channel, everything bluish appears lighter and everything with a predominance of red or green appears darker. Hence, in the Blue channel, rust will appear darker than iron that hasn’t corroded.

What we want to do now is to darken the rusty areas to almost pure black and lighten the non-rusty areas to almost pure white.

With the newest window active, duplicate the layer that has the grayscale image. Set the upper layer as an Overlay layer. Duplicate this Overlay layer several times to sharpen the contrast of the image. (In my case, I created nine copies of the overlay layer before deciding to stop.) Merge all the layers together.

Adjust the image’s brightness and contrast by cranking both as high as you can.

Add another layer on top of the image and paint over it so that the non-metallic sections of the normal map are represented. Whether to paint those sections black, white, or some shade of gray will depend on how much light you want to reflect off the non-metallic sections.

Merge all layers when you are done.

Copy the entire image to the alpha channel of your normal map. Save the resulting image as a TGA or DDS file (preferably the latter).

Open your model in 3DS Max and access the Material Editor. If you haven’t set the normal and diffuse map of your model as a material, do so now. Make sure that this material is currently selected.

Under “Blinn Basic Parameters,” set the Specular Level to a value between 40 and 50 inclusive. This will set a fairly strong highlight on the model. Set the Glossiness value to 100. This will concentrate the highlights over smaller areas of the model, which is good for simulating metallic shine. Assign the material to your model and export everything as an MDB file.

Put your MDB and DDS or TGA files in your Neverwinter Nights 2 override folder. You may have to copy the Appearance.2DA file to the override folder and edit it to include your creature model. You may now view your creature model in the toolset or in the game. If all goes well, the rusty metal on your model should look fairly realistic.

A Hard Day’s Knight, Part 3

2009-03-23T00:41:00.007+08:00

Three weeks. That’s how long I’ve been working on this armored creature model. I estimate that the model is about eighty percent done, which for all intents and purposes means that it’s completely done. Everything else amounts to patching flaws here and there that most players probably won’t even notice in the heat of battle. Discerning players may catch these flaws if they pause the game and scrutinize the creature in various stages of animation, but I’m hoping that most won’t bother.

When I envisioned this model, little did I realize what sort of hardships I’d undergo to create it. The entire mesh is composed of smaller meshes representing different armor parts – the breastplate, gardbrace, rerebrace, couter, tuille, and many other strange-sounding accessories that I won’t bother to list. The high-poly version of these armor parts are difficult to make because of the complex details in their design. Many of these components overlap other parts, so I have to make sure that no polygon pierces through any other polygon. This is hard enough to do when the model isn’t moving, but once it’s animated, it’s very frustrating to try to put polygons in their place.

This brings me to another problem: Rigging a model comprised of overlapping sub-meshes is very difficult. If there is a way in 3DS Max to make some elements invisible so I can easily weight the vertices underneath, I haven’t found it. I can make the entire mesh see-through, and I can switch to wireframe mode, but these are no substitute for selectively hiding polygons while rigging.

Another problem I experienced stemmed from the animations that I recycled from NWN2. These animations have a wider range of motion than one would expect from an armored humanoid. To make use of these animations, the 3D artists at Obsidian Entertainment created armor designs that are much more articulated than real armor. Blissfully unaware of this situation, I constructed armor based on a more traditional design. I now realize that I’ve created armor that is much suppler than sheet metal has any right to be.

This just goes to show that with only five months of experience in 3D modeling under my belt, I’m still just an amateur. On the other hand, I think I did some fairly good texture work on the armor. The metal is rusted and pitted in some parts, and it shows pretty realistically in game. Some fancy Photoshop techniques went into the making of this texture, some of which I figured out on my own. I ought to document my workflow for creating this texture before I forget it all. I hope to have it done in my next blog post.

Because I couldn’t decide what color to paint the armor, I made it fully tintable. (Well, it’s tintable in those areas that aren’t corroded.) This will give the other members of the Shattered Dreams team a chance to make this creature as scary or silly as they want it to be.

To the actual members of the team who happen to read this blog post: Disregard the part about making the model silly. Please. This dude is meant to be seriously intimidating. If you’re not convinced, check out the picture below.

“Look, a player character. Nab ‘em, boys.”

A Hard Day’s Knight, Part 2

2009-03-14T04:05:00.003+08:00

It’s actually been a hard two weeks for me. I’ve been busy constructing a highly detailed mesh of the knight that I featured in my last blog post. Along the way, I made several changes over its original concept art. This is especially evident in the creature’s helmet. The one that I initially designed looked rather prosaic to me. I wanted a helmet that was more intimidating. Since Chaos Wielder and I had emailed each other recently about our drawing inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft, I thought of giving the helmet that calamari look that’s so in vogue among eldritch horrors. When I showed my work in progress to Dirtywick, he suggested adding horns to the helmet. I was skeptical at first, thinking that horns might detract from the helm’s cephalopod look, but it looked quite nice when I stuck them on.

Of course, the helmet wasn’t the only thing I worked on. I’ve tweaked, enhanced, or replaced every part of the model except for its head, which is now barely visible behind the helmet. Below is the final high-poly mesh of the creature. I’m going to construct a fully rigged and textured low-poly version next.

A Hard Day’s Knight

2009-03-08T04:05:00.004+08:00

Having finished the “dog” model that I featured in my last blog post, I immediately proceeded to construct the knight depicted in the sketch to the right. I soon found that making a high-poly armor mesh takes tons of work. I feel that despite having paid a lot of attention to the details on the armor, they still aren’t good enough. In particular, the armor on the hips, limbs, and feet need more moving parts or decorative ridges. I also have to make a helmet for this dude. I could spend another week just improving the model.

On the other hand, this mesh is better than anything I’ve created previously. I told my wife as much, and she said that my subsequent meshes are bound to be better than the one I’m currently working on.

She’s right of course.

Man’s Best Fiend

2009-02-28T00:19:00.010+08:00

Concept sketch

This is what I call a dog. It is my task to create a 3D model based on this concept sketch. When I offered to make a whole set of new models after proving to Dirtywick that I was capable of constructing them, I estimated that I could produce one per week. I was wrong. So far, I’ve been working on this critter for nearly three weeks.

Actually, I encountered some unexpected problems while building this model. Firstly, I had to learn how to create a low-poly model using the Retopology feature of ZBrush. Rather than explain the workflow here, I’d like to direct curious readers to the following links, which have helped me immensely:

Tutorial: Bird of Prey

Topology & Flow Lab

Something wicked this way comes

Even with the above information at hand, I made lots of mistakes constructing the low poly model. Most of these mistakes had to do with not connecting vertices properly. I must have used up an entire week just fixing my errors. The learning experience was worth it, though. My new model has only 2,612 polygons, which is close to the average number for a non-boss creature.

My second unexpected problem was with UV mapping. My only other experience with this task was with the monster head that I featured in my tutorial. This time, I had to map an entire creature, not just its head. Trying to figure out what seams to cut and where to place them is a challenge in itself. I found that fingers and toes were especially vexing to map. I eventually created more seams than I had intended, but since the additional seams were mostly in the creature’s digits, it is unlikely that players will notice them.

To make matters worse, once I had completed my UV mapping, I found that it would not be stored in the model when I exported it as an MDB file. I could not figure out why that happened. After experimenting with the problem for a few days, I eventually found that if I exported the model as an OBJ file then imported it anew, the UV map would be stored properly. To this day, I do not know why I had this problem in the first place, but at least I have a workaround to fall back on if need be.

In-game action

Once I had these two problems licked, everything else fell into place. I’m not yet finished with the model, but it should take me only a couple of days to create lower LOD versions. (That’s “Level of Detail” for those who aren’t into 3D modeling.) All told, if these problems had not occurred, I estimate that I could have finished this creature model in one week. Hopefully, having more experience under my belt means that I will be able to work faster on my next creature models, of which there are several.


Too much butt-scooting		Man's best fiend

Who's the Boss?

2009-02-16T23:27:00.004+08:00

As far as our module "Shattered Dreams" is concerned, this is the boss.

The boss scares me. It looks like this monster will have polygons numbering in the tens of thousands, but the standard upper limit for creature models is only 5000. To make matters worse, there are no existing skeletons that I can recycle for it. This means I'll have to make my own skeleton and animations. I've never done anything of the sort before. Then again, I had never made 3D models from scratch until I started on this project, so I guess I can hurdle this challenge. On the other hand, look at all those tentacles. That's an awful lot of appendages to animate.

No time to write. Must construct 3D models.

Building Design for the Architecturally Challenged

2009-02-11T00:50:00.003+08:00

Here is a design that I created for one of the buildings in "Shattered Dreams," a module in the making from bouncyRock Entertainment. It may not look it, but this picture was entirely computer-generated. Although I have some skill when it comes to art, I have little to no patience with drawing buildings, especially in perspective. What I did instead was to create this building in the toolset using Nytir's BCK II hakpak. I then took a screenshot of the building and manipulated it digitally to achieve an artistic effect.

I sent this picture to Nytir and requested that he make a 3D model of it. Nytir happens to be on our team, so he's the obvious choice for modeling buildings. I can hardly wait to see what he comes up with.

More Freaky Artwork

2009-02-08T00:39:00.004+08:00

Below are a couple more concept sketches for "Shattered Dreams," an upcoming module from bouncyRock Entertainment. In a couple of days, I'll start making 3D art based on my drawings. I hope I'm up to the task.

Which Comic Book Character Are You?

2009-02-07T02:24:00.004+08:00

While surfing the Internet for art references, I came across a dubious personality test called "Which Supervillain Are You?". Amused, I decided to take it. As I was answering the quiz, I realized that the test didn't seem to be particularly well made. There were several questions bunched together toward the end that seemed to be blatantly referring to Poison Ivy. Anyhow, I completed the quiz and came up with the following result:

You are The Joker

The Joker		47%
Lex Luthor		34%
Apocalypse		34%
Dr. Doom		34%
Magneto		33%
Mr. Freeze		32%
Venom		31%
Green Goblin		29%
Two-Face		29%
Dark Phoenix		25%
Catwoman		22%
Kingpin		19%
Riddler		18%
Juggernaut		17%
Mystique		17%
Poison Ivy		8%

The Clown Prince of Crime. You are a brilliant mastermind but are criminally insane. You love to joke around while accomplishing the task at hand.

The Joker? Uh-uh, not I. A sense of humor is far from being my strong suit, although the part about me being a brilliant mastermind isn't so far off. (Ahem.) As I shook my head with disappointment, I noticed the percentage value in my test results. It seems that I only have a 47% match with the Joker, which makes for a poor match indeed. I guess I'm not cut out to be a super villain after all.

Then I found out that there is a similar test called "Which Superhero Are You?". Against my better judgment, I took the test and got the following results:

You are Batman

Batman		70%
Hulk		55%
Supergirl		35%
Green Lantern		30%
Spider-Man		25%
Robin		25%
Superman		15%
Wonder Woman		15%
Catwoman		15%
Iron Man		5%
The Flash		0%

You are dark, love gadgets
and have vowed to help the innocent
not suffer the pain you have endured.

Now that's better. The description seems to fit me, and the test results show a 70% match. Not bad, not bad at all. I couldn't help but notice a pattern with the results from other quizzes that I have taken. I'm sure that none of these tests have any scientific basis, but they're fun to take anyway.

Twisted Art and Shattered Dreams

2009-02-06T00:28:00.005+08:00

Dirtywick has given us the go signal to announce our upcoming bouncyRock module to the NWN2 community. The title of the module is...

Shattered Dreams.

I'd like to say more about our module, but words fail me at the moment. Instead, I'll show a few sketches that I drew in preparation for 3D modeling. These are some of the things that I'm hoping to create for the game. Dirtywick pointed out, however, that trying to release the module by April while building new models is going to be tough. I'd like to have my cake and eat it too, but whether these sketches become realized as full 3D models remains to be seen.

What Kind of Creature Are You?

2009-01-22T01:07:00.003+08:00

Several days ago, I took a 9-question test at Quiztron called "What Magical Creature Are You?". It's a multiple-choice personality test of sorts, but I'm certain that it has no scientific basis whatsoever. The Quiztron site lets anybody create their own test, so I think it's safe to say that nearly all of them did not originate from someone with a Ph.D. in Psychology. This particular test was apparently created by a girl who was between 13 to 17 years old when it was posted a little over a year ago. Nevertheless, the test was fun and took me less than a minute to complete. Reading the comments page, I found that possible results included dragon, elven warrior, and werewolf. Here's what I got:

Demon

You are dark and don't take s*** from anyone. You are a powerful creature and skilled in battle. Most fear you, but a few are on your side.

Skilled in battle? I couldn't help but laugh. Nevertheless, I liked the test enough to try another one. This time, I took a test called "What Dog Are You?", getting the following result:

Pitbull

A tough dog that stands it's grownd (scarry too)

I sense a pattern here. LOL.

Creature Modeling, Part 7: The Road to Completion

2009-01-20T00:40:00.019+08:00

This is the conclusion of my series on building creature models for NWN2. Those who haven’t read the start of the series may want to refer to my previous blog posts.

We’re almost done with our creature model, but not quite. There are still some issues to tackle, which we shall discuss in this write-up.

Level of Detail

You may recall that in Part 3 of this series, I mentioned that the MDB file we’ve been editing contains not one but three ghoul heads. We’ve been working on the main mesh, but there are two other meshes with fewer polygons. When the creature is shown in the game, the mesh that is used depends on the distance of the creature to the screen. Up close, the mesh with the most polygons is displayed, but as the creature’s distance to the screen increases, the mesh is substituted for one with fewer polygons.

In NWN2, 3D models have at most three levels of detail (or LOD for short). The mesh with the most polygons has the same name as the MDB file. The one with fewer polygons has “_L01” appended to the model name, and the mesh with the fewest polygons, “_L02.” The last two meshes need not be in the MDB file, but having them will help the engine run more smoothly by decreasing the polygons to be rendered when the model is zoomed out.

Below are the steps to follow in creating the lower LOD meshes.

Load your model in 3DS Max and click the “Display” tab at the right side of the screen. (It’s the one with the tiny icon of a computer monitor on it.) Under the “Hide” rollout, click the “Unhide by Name…” button. This will bring up the “Unhide Objects” screen. Click the two lower LOD meshes while holding down the [Ctrl] key to select them both then click the “Unhide” button. We’re going to replace these meshes, so select each in turn and press the [Delete] key. The only remaining mesh should be the one with the highest polygon count.

Click the remaining mesh to select it. Go to the File menu and click the “Export Selected…” option. (Don’t click “Export…” since you’ll want to export only the selected mesh.) Export the mesh as an MDB file. Next, click the File menu again and select “Import…” This will bring up the “Select File to Import” window. From there, select the file name of the mesh you had just exported then click the “Open” button. When the “Import Name Conflict” dialog box appears, edit the text in the “New Name” textbox so that it will be the same as the name of the original mesh but with the characters “_L01” appended to it.

The newly imported mesh has its UVW mapping already embedded in it. The “Unwrap UVW” modifier, as well as most other modifiers that are on the original mesh, are gone, their effects having already been incorporated into the new mesh. In fact, the mesh comes with just a Skin modifier on top of it, which we will now delete.

Select the newly imported mesh and click the “Modifier” tab to display the Modifier panel. Right-click the “Skin” modifier and click the “Delete” option from the context-sensitive menu so that only the “Editable Mesh” modifier remains.

Click the button with the downward-pointing arrowhead above the modifier stack and click “MultiRes” from the dropdown list. This will add the MultiRes modifier to the stack.

In the “MultiRes Parameters” rollout, click the “Generate” button. Next, enter a lower figure in either the “Vert Percent” box or the “Vert Count” box. If there is no checkmark in the box beside “Vertex Merging,” click the box to put a checkmark in it. Click the “Generate” button again. This will decrease the number of vertices in the mesh to your approximate target value.

Note that while automated vertex merging reduces the tedium of creating lower LOD meshes, the results are not always satisfactory. It’s possible to manually merge vertices at some point, but it’s up to you to determine when to stop merging vertices automatically and when to do it manually. It’s also up to you to decide which vertices to merge together.

When you’re satisfied with the results, you may add a Smooth modifier on the stack so that the mesh won’t look too blocky.

Add the bones that the mesh will need. For head models such as this one, the lower LOD mesh may need only three bones, so it’s a simple matter of adding them one by one. Body and armor LOD meshes typically have the same number of bones as the original mesh, however.

In case the lower LOD mesh needs the same bones as the original mesh, there’s an easy way to copy all the bones at once. This method was described by one of the artists at Obsidian Entertainment and posted by Rob McGinnis at this thread in the NWN2 forums:

Select the original mesh and right-click its Skin modifier in the modifier stack. Click the “Copy” option in the context-sensitive menu that appears. Select the lower LOD mesh then right-click the modifier stack and click the “Paste” command from the context-sensitive menu. This will add a new Skin modifier on the stack, complete with the same set of bones found in the original mesh.

Set the bone weights at each vertex for each bone. If there are only a few bones in the mesh, this can be done using the techniques I described in an earlier blog post. Nevertheless, if there are many bones attached to the mesh, you’ll want a faster way to rig the whole thing. In the same thread cited above, Rob McGinnis showed a technique that will allow us to copy bone weights from the original mesh to the lower LOD mesh. This technique is described below.

Select the original mesh then click the “Utilities” tab in the right side of the screen to bring up the Utilities panel. (It’s the tab with the tiny hammer icon.) Under the “Utilities” rollout, click the “More…” button. This will bring up the “Utilities” dialog box. Scroll down the list box on the left of this window and click “SkinUtilities.” Click the “OK” button to close this window. Notice that a new rollout called “Parameters” appears in the Utilities panel.

With the original mesh still selected, click the “Extract Skin Data To Mesh” button under the “Parameters” rollout. This will create a new mesh that has the same name as the original but with the prefix “SkinData_” preceding it. Let’s call this the “skin data” mesh. Select both the skin data mesh and the lower LOD mesh together then click the “Import Skin Data From Mesh” button under the “Parameters” rollout. A new dialog box called “Paste Skin Data” will appear.

Click the “Match by Name” button in the new dialog box then click the “OK” button. Finally, select the skin data mesh and delete it.

This process is a quick way to get weight vertices on the first pass, but it isn’t guaranteed to be perfect. You may have to tweak some of the bone weights manually, but the tedium of weighting all vertices from scratch is done away with.

Repeat steps 2 to 6 above for the “_L02” mesh, which should have fewer polygons than the “_L01” mesh.

Body Building in Brief

I won’t go into detail on how I created this creature’s body. Suffice it to say that I built it out of spare parts; namely, the red wizard robe, the elven boots, and the ghoul’s hands, all of which are available in the toolset with the MotB expansion. Since both the ghoul’s body and the red wizard robe have their own set of collision spheres, I had to delete the ones that come with the red wizard robe. I sliced the hands off the ghoul using a couple of Slice modifiers, one for each hand. I then joined the individual parts together by dropping an “Edit Mesh” modifier on the stack of one of the meshes and clicking the modifier’s “Attach List” button

I also applied a process that is similar to much of what I have written in this series of blog posts. With this information at hand, it probably wouldn’t be difficult for a novice modeler to figure out how I constructed the creature’s body.

New Creature Entry

We hijacked the ghoul’s slot in the toolset as a quick way to test our model. Unless we give the new creature its own slot, however, we won’t be able to have both the ghoul and the new creature in the same module. Hence, we’ll have to rename the creature’s MDB files. This can be done in 3DS Max, but the process is much faster and less prone to error when using RunnerDuck’s MDB Cloner. We’ll follow the convention of naming monster heads C_name_Headnn, where name is the name (whether abbreviated or not) of the creature, and nn is a number from 01 to 99. For the monster’s body, the convention is C_name_CL_Bodynn. (“CL” in this case stands for “cloth,” which means that the creature is not armored.)

The last step is to copy the file appearance.2DA to your NWN2 override folder. You should then edit it to add a new entry for the creature you’ve just created. As I mentioned before, I prefer using Excel to edit 2DA files, although there are a number of free 2DA editors that you may download from the Vault.

If you need more information on the 2DA file format, you may refer to this document.

Last Remarks

This ends my tutorial on building creature models. Although there is still much to learn on this topic, I believe I've covered enough information to show how to construct models from scratch. Considering that the Vault isn’t exactly teeming with creatures for NWN2, perhaps the information herein will help would-be modelers increase the Vault's offerings.

Creature Modeling, Part 6: Painting Diffuse and Glow Maps

2009-01-15T14:59:00.014+08:00

This is a continuation of my series on building creature models for NWN2. Those who haven’t read the start of the series may want to refer to my previous blog posts.

So far, we’ve created a skin mesh, rigged it to a skeleton, mapped its UVW coordinates, and given it a normal map. The color of the creature we’re modeling has been gray this whole time, however. As we shall see, adding a diffuse map to the model can make it much better looking. Subtle use of a glow map can boost its creepiness as well. Here, we discuss how to create and apply a diffuse map and a glow map to the model.

Rendering the UVW Template

When painting the diffuse map, you may need to start with your model’s UVW template, which shows which parts of the texture maps are rendered on which polygons. Here’s how to render the UVW template.

In 3DS Max, load your model and click its Unwrap UVW modifier. Click the “Edit” button, which is under the “Parameters” rollout of the modifier. This will cause the “Edit UVWs” window to appear. Click the “Tools” menu and select “Render UVW Template.” The “Render UVs” dialog box will then appear.

Input the width and height in pixels of the image to be generated. These must correspond to the dimensions of your texture maps. The width and height must always be equal, and this number must be generated from powers of two; e.g., 256, 512, or 1024. Click the “Render UV Template” button to bring up the “Render Map” window.

In the “Render Map” window, click the icon that looks like a floppy disk. (It’s the leftmost icon at the top of the window.)

The “Browse Images for Output” dialog box should then appear. Save the template in a format that can be read by your image editing software.

Painting the Diffuse Map

Load either the UVW template or the normal map in your image editing software. You’ll need one of them as a reference for the placement of features such as eyes, nostrils, wounds, tattoos, piercings, etc. If you need both of them, put them in separate layers in the same file.

Paint over the image to establish the placement of the main features of the model. Don’t try to paint any details yet. At this point, you just want to get the main features blocked in.

Output the image as a DDS (DXT5) file with nine mipmaps and put the file in your NWN2 override folder. You may either save it under the same name as the diffuse map that your model already uses, or you may edit your model to use the new diffuse map. If you choose the latter, you’ll have to store the revised MDB file in the override folder as well.

Run the NWN2 toolset and view the model in it. Make sure that the colors of the main features are not displaced. If they are, correct your image file and try again.

Paint more details over the diffuse map. If you’re striving for realism, you may want to manipulate photos over the image to make them fit over the main features.

Creating textures is an art in itself. Not all 3D artists are good at painting textures, and not all texture artists can construct 3D models. If you need to bone up on this skill, you may want to search the Web or read books for more information.

Check out your model in the toolset again. Make corrections as needed. At the end of this process, you should have a diffuse map that you’re happy with.

Creating a Glow Map

If you need a glow map, you can base it on your diffuse map. My glow map is basically the diffuse map with the addition of an alpha channel that indicates which parts of the texture are supposed to glow. If your image doesn’t have an alpha channel, add one. In Photoshop, you can do this by clicking the “Channels” tab at the right side of the screen and clicking the “Create New Channel” icon at the bottom.

In the alpha channel of any glow map, the regions that should be glowing are painted in white. Everything else is black. For my model, I wanted the eyes of the model to glow, so I painted a couple of white circles where the irises should be. If you’re using Photoshop, you may want to make the RGB channel visible so you’ll know where the eyes are.

Save the image as another DDS file (same parameters as before) and put it in your NWN2 override folder.

Edit your model in 3DS Max and press the [M] key to bring up the Material Editor. Add the glow map to your model under “Self-Illumination.” Export the model as an MDB file and put it in your NWN2 override folder.

View your model in the toolset to make sure that the glow effect is done to your liking. If you find that the glow is too bright, you may need to darken the color of the glowing region. (In terms of defining a color as a combination of hue, saturation, and brightness, you’ll have to lower the brightness of the color.) Correct the glow map if necessary until you’re satisfied with the results.

Like makeup on a person’s face, diffuse maps (and optionally, glow maps) can do much to alter a creature’s appearance. It takes skill and patience to paint a good diffuse map, however. Just as makeup can make a woman look elegant or cheap depending on how it is applied, diffuse maps can make models look great or amateurish. It’s well worth the effort to spend time on perfecting this art.

We’ve covered a lot of ground, but we’re not done yet. There are still a few issues to tackle, such as levels of detail and 2DA entries. We’ll discuss these issues in my concluding write-up.

Creature Modeling, Part 5: Normal Mapping

2009-01-12T22:06:00.032+08:00

This is a continuation of my series on building creature models for NWN2. Those who haven’t read the start of the series may want to refer to my previous blog posts.

Having created a UVW map for our model, we can now texture it. The NWN2 engine uses four kinds of texture maps for its models:

Diffuse – Diffuse maps, along with tint maps, set the colors of an object. In the absence of a tint map, the diffuse map will completely determine what colors an object has.

Normal – Normal maps are used for making low-poly objects look more high-poly. Normal maps seem to raise or lower the surface of an object like carvings on a bas relief. This is done without straining the graphics engine the way a high-poly model would.

Glow – Glow maps identify what parts of an object glow and how intensely they glow.

Tint – Tint maps identify which parts of an object may be tinted. Tint maps will not be discussed in this tutorial because the creature I’m making doesn’t need one. Those who want to know more about this topic may read what Heed has to say.

Of these four types, only the Diffuse and Normal maps are required for all models. This blog post will show how a normal map may be created. In broad terms, the steps to be done are the following:

Create a detailed, high-poly version of the model.

Map the high-poly model to the low-poly model.

Check the low-poly model in the toolset for any problems the normal map may have.

A. Creating a High-Poly Model

You can use any modeling software to create a high-poly version of your low-poly mesh. Here, I’ll explain how to do it with ZBrush.

Run 3DS Max and load the MAX file that you worked on during your last session. Click the head mesh to select it then go to the “File” menu and click “Export Selected…” Export the mesh as a Wavefront Object.

Run ZBrush and import the OBJ file that you had saved.

We’re about to subdivide the mesh, but before we do, we need to “crease” it. In the “Tool” menu, click “Geometry” then click the “Crease” button. This will prevent ZBrush from creating wavy edges around parts of the mesh that have holes in them.

Subdivide the mesh by pressing [Ctrl]+D three or four times. This will add more polygons to the mesh.

Embellish the high-poly model with as many details as you like.

Export the mesh as a Wavefront Object.

B. Mapping the High-Poly to the Low-Poly Model

If you aren’t running 3DS Max anymore, run it and load the MAX file you’ve been working on.

Import your high-poly model. Make sure that the low and high-poly models overlap as closely as possible. Note that loading the high-poly model may take a while. The one shown here took 17 minutes to load on my computer.

Select the low-poly model then press the [0] key. This will cause the “Render to Texture” dialog box to appear with the low-poly model already selected.

Click the box under “Projection Mapping” beside “Enabled” to put a checkmark in it. Under “Mapping Coordinates,” click the button beside “Use Existing Channel” for both “Object” and “Sub-Objects.”

Click the button labeled “Pick…,” which is under “Projection Mapping.” This will cause the “Add Targets” dialog box to appear. From the list on the left side of the window, click the name of the high-poly mesh you had imported then click the “Add” button. The “Add Targets” window will then close. Note that a “Projection” modifier is automatically added to your low-poly model. We’ll deal with this modifier later.

Click the button labeled “Options…” This will bring up the “Projection Options” dialog box. Under “Filtering Options,” click the “Setup…” button to bring up a new dialog box.

In the new dialog box, look under “Global SuperSampling” and click the box beside “Enable Global Supersampler” to put a checkmark in it. Close the dialog box then close the “Projection Options” window.

Scroll down the window until you see the “Add” button under “Output.” Click the button. In the dialog box that appears, click “NormalsMap” then click the “Add Elements” button. This will cause the dialog box to close.

Scroll further down the “Render to Texture” window until you see six buttons under “Use Automatic Map Size.” Click the button that corresponds to the size in pixels of the normal map to be generated. For my model, I chose 512, which is good enough for run-of-the-mill monsters. While you’re at it, set the list box labeled “Target Map Slot” to “Bump.”

Go to the Modifier panel. (You don’t have to close the “Render to Texture” window just yet.) Click the “+” sign beside the “Projection” modifier to expand it then click “Cage.”

Scroll all the way down the Modifier panel then click the “+” sign beside the “Cage” rollout to expand it. Now click the “Reset” button. Under “Push,” click the button with the upward-pointing arrowhead beside “Amount” until the blue “cage” completely surrounds the model as seen in the viewports.

Click the “Render” button at the bottom of the “Render to Texture” window. (If you closed it earlier, press the [0] key to bring it back.) This will cause a normal map in TGA format to be output to the Image folder in your Autodesk\3dsMax installation. You may convert this image to a DDS file (DXT5) with 9 mipmaps using an image converter program. (The first part of my tutorial series mentions a couple of free ones that you may download.) 3DS Max also has an option to output the normal map directly as a DDS file, but to the best of my knowledge, you won’t have any control over the number of mipmaps generated.

When you’re done, move the DDS file to the NWN2 override folder. You may now close the “Render to Texture” window.

C. Testing the Normal Map

Select your low-poly mesh and press the [M] key to bring up the Material Editor. Assign your new normal map to the Bump material of the model. Close the Material Editor when you’re done.

Export the model as an MDB file. Make sure that the file name matches the name of the model. Copy the file to your NWN2 override folder.

Run the toolset and create a small exterior area. Put a ghoul in the area and zoom in on it. Because we’re modifying the ghoul model as a quick way to test the creature we’re making, we should see the creature’s head on the ghoul body. Make sure that the new normal map displays properly on the creature’s head.

If you notice any problems with the normal map, you may have to correct it in 3DS Max. Once the normal map meets your approval, delete the high poly mesh from your model and save it as a MAX file.

Is it worth the effort to make highly detailed normal maps for your models? Let your eyes be the judge.


Before	After

Normal maps can make low-poly models look far more complex than they really are. Nevertheless, without properly applied color, even highly-detailed models will look drab at best. In my next blog post, I’ll show how to create diffuse and glow maps for the creature we’re building.

Creature Modeling, Part 4: UVW Mapping

2009-01-09T16:04:00.035+08:00

This is a continuation of my series on building creature models for NWN2. Those who haven’t read the start of the series may want to refer to my previous blog posts.

In my last blog post, I showed an overly simple way to texture a 3D model. This method is good only for quickly testing the model in the NWN2 engine. We’ll need to do better than that for in-game use, however.

Before we can apply textures, though, we need to provide our model with a UVW map. This map tells graphics engines which pixels to paint over which parts of the mesh. For some humanoid heads, the mapping technique I showed in my last blog post may suffice. Nevertheless, this method is inadequate for the creature head that has been the subject of this series.

The screenshot to the right illustrates the perils of improper UVW mapping. The mouth’s texture has bled into the neck of this creature. I originally applied a cylindrical UVW map, which I had explained how to do in my previous blog post. The results were disastrous. This model requires a more complicated approach to UVW mapping. We’ll use a technique called Pelt Mapping for this. The following steps explain how to do it.

Run 3DS Max and load the MAX file that you worked on during your last session. (You did save it, didn’t you?) Click on the model to select it then click the tab on the Modifier panel. We’re going to remove the UVW map that we created last time, so right-click the “UVW Mapping” modifier and click “Delete” on the context-sensitive menu.

Don’t make the mistake of clicking the “UVW Mapping” modifier and hitting the [Delete] key. That will delete your model entirely. In case you did, press [Ctrl]+Z to undo the mistake.

Click the downward-pointing arrowhead in the “Modifier List” box and select “Unwrap UVW.” You’ll have to scroll all the way down the list to find it.

In the list of modifiers, click the “+” sign beside “Unwrap UVW” to expand it then click “Edge.”

Scroll all the way down the Modifier panel and click the “Edit Seams” button.

Click the model if it isn’t already selected then right-click it. From the context-sensitive menu, click “Properties.” This will bring up the “Object Properties” dialog box. In the “Display Properties” section, make sure that the box beside “Vertex Ticks” is checked. If it isn’t, click the box to put a check on it. Click the “OK” button to close the window. You should now see tiny blue square-shaped dots around the mesh. These dots mark the position of the vertices in the mesh.

Select the Back viewport and zoom in to focus on the creature’s mouth. (Remember that the Back view actually shows the model’s face.) You’re about the trace a seam around the edges of the mouth, so be sure to get a nice close-up. If the mesh is displayed in wireframe mode, press the [F3] key to switch to smooth + highlights mode.

Click each edge at the periphery of the creature’s mouth. An edge is a line segment that is between two vertices, so click the space between a pair of vertices to select the edge. Each time you do this, a cyan-colored line will appear, marking the edge that you clicked. This edge is a seam that we will use for pelt mapping later. Keep doing clicking edges until the entire periphery of the mouth is marked with cyan. If you make a mistake in selecting an edge, press [Ctrl]+Z to undo the action.

Let’s return our attention to the Modifier panel. In the list of modifiers under “Unwrap UVW,” click “Face.” When this option is activated, clicking a polygon will select it.

Set up your viewports so that you can see the Bottom and Back views of the model. Both views should be in smooth + highlights mode. Now hold down the [Ctrl] key and click each polygon inside the mouth to select it. Make sure that only the polygons that are within the seams that you had created earlier are selected. You’ll need to click the interior of the mouth as seen in the Bottom view to select the palate.

Scroll down the Modifier panel and click the “Pelt” button, which is in the “Map Parameters” rollout. Click the “Best Align” button as well.

Click the “Edit Pelt Map” button, which is at the bottom of the “Map Parameters” rollout. This will cause two windows to appear, one called “Edit UVWs” and another called “Pelt Map Parameters.”

In the “Edit UVWs” window, there is a box with the words “CheckerPattern (Checker).” Click the downward-pointing arrowhead in the box then click “CheckerPattern (Checker)” in the drop-down list. This will cause the mesh to be textured with a checker pattern, which is very useful for testing UVW maps. You’ll want to keep the distribution of checker patterns even within the map to avoid texture distortion. In the picture shown below, the UVW map is in bad need of improvement. For now, we’ll concentrate on the inside of the mouth and ignore everything else.

Go back to the “Pelt Map Parameters” window and click the “Simulate Pelt Pulling” button a few times. This will stretch the UVW map like an animal pelt being stretched over a frame. Don’t click the button too often however because you risk distorting the UVW map. See how the checker pattern is distributed in the mesh to gauge whether you’ve clicked the button too many times. Remember that you can always undo your action by pressing [Ctrl]+Z. Close the “Pelt Map Parameters” window when you’re done.

At the bottom of the “Edit UVWs” window is a squared-off section labeled “Selection Modes.” Click the “Face Sub-object Mode” button (the third one from the left) and make sure that the box labeled “Select Element” is checked. If the UVW map of the mouth is not highlighted in red, click it to select it.

Click the “Relax Dialog” option from the “Tools” menu of the “Edit UVWs” window. This will cause the “Relax Tool” window to appear.

The purpose of this tool is to minimize distortion in your texture maps. You can experiment with setting different parameters in this window and clicking the “Apply” button. Check the viewports to see how the checker pattern is distributed inside the model’s mouth. You may have to click the “Apply” button several times before you’re satisfied with the results. If the options you’re using aren’t working out, you may undo your actions by pressing [Ctrl]+Z as often as necessary. You may then select another set of options to experiment with.

When you’re done, close the “Relax Tool” window and the “Edit UVWs” window. Don’t be surprised to find that the checker pattern disappears when you close the latter window. That’s to be expected.

We’ve created a UVW map for the mouth interior. Next, we’ll create another map for the underside of the chin and front of the neck. Repeat steps 3 and 4 above. Next, click the edges along the underside of the chin and front of the neck to cut the seam. Much of this work will be done in the Bottom viewport, although we may work in the Left and Right viewports as well.

In the Modifier panel, click “Face,” which you’ll find under “Unwrap UVW.” If you don’t remember where to find this option, you may want to refer to the illustration in step 8.

Hold down the [Ctrl] key and click each polygon within the newly-created seam. The Bottom viewport is probably best for this purpose, but you’ll probably want to click polygons in the Left and Right viewports as well. Otherwise, you might miss a few of them. Either way, you may have to zoom in to make sure you don’t miss out any small polygons.

Repeat steps 10 to 14, focusing this time on the underside of the chin and front of the neck.

We’re now going to map the rest of the head. Under “Unwrap UVW” in the Modifier panel, click “Edge” again. Click the “Edit Seams” button then click the edges in the mesh where you want to cut a seam. In my case, I decided to cut along the side of the head, thereby dividing it between the front and back. I changed the Bottom viewport to display a top view so I could see the edges I was selecting at the top.

Under “Unwrap UVW” in the Modifier panel, click “Face.” Now select all polygons at the back of the head.

In the Modifier panel under “Map Parameters,” click the “Pelt” button, then click the “Best Align” button. Finally, click the “Edit Pelt Map” button and stretch the UVW map to get an even distribution of checkered patterns across rear of the model’s head.

Select the remaining polygons that haven’t been mapped yet and repeat the process of creating a pelt map for them. You know the drill.

In the Modifier panel, click the “Edit…” button, which is under the “Parameters” rollout. This will bring up the familiar “Edit UVWs” window.

At this point, there are several UVW maps that need to be arranged within the square boundary of your textures. You can select each map and right-click it to bring up a context-sensitive menu. You may then choose to move the map, scale it, or rotate it. You may have to do all these operations for each map until you get a neat arrangement. Make sure that the maps do not overlap with each other unless they are supposed to share the same texture mapping.

One last thing before we end today’s session: Save your work as a MAX file. We'll return to it later.

Using the “Unwrap UVW” modifier, we were able to apply a powerful technique called pelt mapping. This technique is much more complicated than simply using the “UVW Mapping” modifier, but it also gives you greater control over the outcome.

Now that the model has a UVW map, we’ll create some textures for it. I’ll discuss texturing in my next post in this series.

Creature Modeling, Part 3: Rigging Skin and Bones

2009-01-07T12:03:00.040+08:00

This is a continuation of my series on building creature models for NWN2. Those who haven’t read the start of the series may want to refer to my two previous blog posts. Be warned, however, that this is the longest blog post I have written to date. You might want to get comfy before reading it.

Author's Note, January 20, 2009:

Now that we have a head mesh, we can begin rigging it for in-game use. First, we have to decide what skeleton should go with this model. We won’t be creating any new animations, much less any new skeletons. That’s because I haven’t figure out how to do them yet. Anyhow, the creature shown here can use any of the medium-sized humanoid skeletons that come with NWN2, so choosing one of them shouldn’t be a problem.

The pose of the creature as depicted in its character design is similar to the idle animation of ghouls in NWN2. Hence, I decided to recycle the ghoul skeleton for use with this creature.

Setting Up the Working Folder

Having decided on what skeleton to base the creature on, we must now set up our working folder with copies of the ghoul model, textures, and skeletons. These can be found in the Data folder of your Neverwinter Nights2 installation. For most gamers using Windows XP, the name of the folder would be “C:\Program Files\Atari\Neverwinter Nights 2\Data”. There are several zip files in this directory. The following is a list of data types and the zip files where they may be found. Note that the asterisk (*) in the file names is a wildcard that means that other characters may or may not follow.

Zip File	Contents	File Extension
NWN2_Models*.zip	3D Model files	MDB
lod-merged*.zip	Skeleton files	GR2
NWN2_Materials*.zip	Texture files	DDS or TGA

Right now, we don’t really have much of a clue as to which files to get. To find out, we need to open the file appearance.2da, which may be extracted from 2DA.zip in your Neverwinter Nights2\Data folder. It’s easiest to read this file using a program that can separate tab-delimited data into columns. I prefer using Microsoft Excel for this, although there are free software applications at the Neverwinter Vault that can also do this.

After opening the file, we search for the row that has the word “Ghoul” under the “LABEL” column. Having found it, we need to look under the labels “NWN2_Model_Body” to find the name of the ghoul’s body model, “NWN2_Model_Head” to find the name of its head model, “NWN2_Head_Skeleton” to find the name of the skeleton that affects the ghoul’s head, and “NWN2_Skeleton_File” to get the name of the skeleton that affects the ghoul’s body. These names are c_ghoul, c_ghoul (yes, these are the same file), c_ghoul_Skel, and c_ghoul_skel. (Despite the slight difference in capitalization of the last two file names, they both refer to the same file.)

We can find the files C_Ghoul_Head01.MDB and C_Ghoul_CL_Body01.MDB in NWN2_Models.zip, and the file c_ghoul_skel.GR2 in lod-merged.zip. We should copy these files to our working directory.

We’ll also need the textures that go with the models, but we won’t find this information in any 2DA file. Instead, we’ll extract that information directly from the MDB files. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to use RunnerDuck’s MDB Cloner. By loading the head and body model files into this software one at a time, we learn that they both use the same set of textures. We should then copy all these textures from NWN2_Materials.zip to our working folder. These textures are C_Ghoul_CL_Body01_T.dds, C_Ghoul_CL_Body01.dds, C_Ghoul_CL_Body01_I.dds, and C_Ghoul_CL_Body01_N.dds.

Rigging the Model

We’re all set, so fire up 3DS Max and do the following.

Importing and Setting Up in 3DS Max

Import the ghoul head model in 3DS Max from your working folder. You’ll need to set the file type to “NWN2 MDB Importer (*.MDB, *.GR2)” to do this. If you don’t see this option, that means you haven’t installed tazpn’s 3ds Max MDB Importer/Exporter yet. You’ll need to install tazpn’s plug-in to import MDB files to 3DS Max.

When you click the “Open” button, a dialog window will pop up, showing a whole bunch of options for importing the model. Make sure that the box beside “Enable Face Mode” is checked, and leave the rest of the parameters alone. Click the “Import” button.

When you load the model, you’ll see what looks like a bunch of spheres and lines with a ghoul head somewhere in the mix. Although it’s not obvious at this point, there are actually three ghoul heads superimposed over each other. A lot of these objects are getting in the way of our modding. We’ll want to hide all of them except for the ghoul head with the highest poly count as well as the bones (the ones that look like thin lines forming a complicated sort of stick figure).

Click the “Display” tab at the upper-right side of the screen. It’s the one with a computer monitor icon. Make sure that the ghoul head is selected. If it isn’t, click on it first.

Now click the “Hide by Name…” button that is located under the “Hide” rollout. (Need a hint to its location? Refer to the bottom thirds of the above picture.)

A window named “Hide Objects” will appear. Scroll down the list of objects until you find the ones named “COLS00” to “COLS12.” These refer to the collision spheres, which are the ball-like objects that surround the ghoul’s skeleton. To hide them, click “COLS00” in the list then press the [Shift] key and click “COLS12.” All the collision spheres will be selected. While holding down the [Ctrl] key, click the objects named “C_Ghoul_Head01_L01” and “C_Ghoul_head01_L02.” These are lower-poly versions of the ghoul head. Since we don’t want them getting in the way, we’ll need to hide them as well.

Now click the “Hide” button, and you’ll be left with the main ghoul head as well as the skeleton itself.

Studying the Bones

Click the “Display” tab. In the “Parameters” rollout below the word “Bones” is a list of bones that affect the ghoul’s face. Copy this list somewhere. You’ll need it later.

Let’s take a closer look at the ghoul’s ugly mug. Change the Front viewport to show the back view instead. Use the Pan tool (the one with the hand icon) to center the head as you zoom the view with your mouse wheel. (Don’t have a mouse wheel? You’ll have to alternate between using the Pan tool and the Zoom tool. The latter’s icon looks like a magnifying glass and is located above and to the left of the Pan tool.)

Press the [F3] key to switch from wireframe mode to smooth + highlights mode. You’ll see the ghoul’s face rendered in all its glory.

Do the same for the Top view and the Left view to get a rendered close-up of the ghoul’s head in these viewports.

We’ll want to see what regions of the head each bone affects, but it would be better to disable textures for now. Go to the “Views” menu and click the option “Deactivate All Maps.” A window will appear, warning you that the “Show Map in Viewport” flag will be disabled. That’s precisely what we want to do, so click the “Yes” button.

It may seem at first that all of the textures are still being rendered. If you click any of the viewports, however, the textures will be replaced with gray.

Under the word “Parameters” in the “Modify” panel is a button labeled “Edit Envelopes.” Click it.

Now take a look at the list of bones below the Parameters (also in the “Modify” panel). When you click the bone labeled “eyeL”, you’ll see that the ghoul’s left eye turns red. That means that the “eyeL” bone controls the ghoul’s left eye. If you click the bone labeled “eyeR,” it will be the ghoul’s right eye that will turn red.

In fact, clicking each bone in turn will cause a different region of the head to become colored. The colors are an indication of how much weight the bone has in each vertex of the head. Red means that the bone’s influence over the affected vertices is strong. Orange means that the bone shares influence over the affected vertices with one or more other bones. Yellow means that the bone’s influence is weak, and blue means that its influence is even weaker.

Go over each bone in the list you made and click each one in turn. Note what general regions of the head each bone affects. Be sure to put it in writing because you’re unlikely to remember them all. Check out each viewport because some regions aren’t visible in all viewports.

When you’re done, switch back to wireframe mode in all viewports by clicking each of them in turn and pressing the [F3] key.

Replacing the Head

Import the creature model that you last exported as an OBJ file. (It’s the one that was made in my last blog post.) You’ll have to set the file type to “WaveFront Object (*.OBJ)” to import the mesh. When the “OBJ Importer” dialog window appears, click the “OK” button.

We’re in for a surprise. The head we created is much bigger than expected. Also, it’s halfway in the ground. We’ll have to scale and position it properly.

Click the oversized head to select it then right-click it. From the context-sensitive menu, select “Scale.” You’ll see a yellow triangle with colored lines that extend from two or three corners depending on which viewport you’re looking at. These lines are labeled “x,” “y,” and “z.” Ignore them. Instead, bring your mouse cursor to the center of the triangle and click-and-drag to resize the head. You may have to do this several times to get it to the right size. It’s unlikely that you’ll have it done perfectly in one go.

When you think you’ve scaled the head correctly, right-click on it and select “Move” from the context-sensitive menu. Superimpose the head over the ghoul’s head by clicking-and-dragging the head or the green, red, and blue arrows. You’ll want to do this at each viewport to make sure that the head is positioned properly in three-dimensional space. You may zoom in with your mouse wheel to fine-tune the positioning of the head. (Again, if you don’t have a mouse wheel, you can use the Zoom tool instead, but you’ll have to switch to the “Select and Move” tool afterward.)

Click the old ghoul head and press the delete key. Now that we have a new head, we don’t need the old one anymore.

Making It a Skin Mesh

Since we’re effectively creating a temporary replacement for the original ghoul head, we’ll have to rename the mesh accordingly. The name of the head must match the name of the MDB file. Select the mesh and right-click it to bring up the context-sensitive menu. Click “Properties.” When the “Object Properties” window appears, click the text box labeled “Name” and type “C_Ghoul_Head01” without the quotation marks.

While still in the “Object Properties” window, click the tab labeled “User Defined.” Under “User Defined Properties,” type the following:

UIFlag = Alpha_Test | Cutscene_Mesh
Skeleton = c_ghoul_skel

The UIFlag property controls how the NWN2 engine will render the mesh. There are eight possible values of UIFlag, each of which is interpreted as a bit flag, which is the number 2 raised to some power. (Not that you needed to know that.) What may be important to know is that different values can be joined together using the “|” (pipe) symbol. Anyhow, the values of UIFlag may be any of the following:
- None = 0 (aka trans = 0)
- Alpha_Test = 1 (aka trans = 1)
- Alpha_Blend = 2 (aka alphablend = 1) #### SHOULD NOT BE USED
- Additive_Blend = 4 (aka addblend = 1) #### SHOULD NOT BE USED
- Environment_Mapped = 8 (aka envmap = 1)
- Cutscene_Mesh = 16 (aka head = 1)
- Glow = 32 (aka glow = 1)
- No_Cast_Shadows = 64 (aka nocast = 1)
- Projected_Textures = 128 (aka projtex = 1)
(I copied this info from tazpn’s description of the 3ds Max MDB Importer/Exporter.)

If all this information sounds as cryptic to you as it does to me, just set the UIFlag of your head models to “Alpha_Test | Cutscene_Mesh,” and you’ll be fine.

The Skeleton property defines which skeleton to use. Its value is the name of the applicable skeleton file without the GR2 extension.

Anyhow, enough talk. Click the “OK” button in the “Object Properties” window and move on to the next step.

The head mesh won’t animate unless we first transform it into a skin mesh. To do this, go to the “Modifier” panel and bring up the modifier list. From there, click the modifier named “Skin.” This effectively transforms the model into a skin mesh.

Attaching Bones

While still in the “Modifier” panel, click the “Add” button that is beside the word “Bones.” Now take out the list of bones that you made earlier. These are the bones that may affect the movement of the head mesh. In the dialog window, press [Ctrl]+click on each bone that appears in your list. When you’re done, click the “Select” button.

Now comes the hard part. We’re going to set how much influence each bone has on each vertex. The “influence” that a bone has over a vertex is called its bone weight. There are several ways to set these weights. We’ll use three such methods.

The first method is to wrap envelopes around the affected vertices. Envelopes define the regions of the mesh over which the associated bone has influence. Envelopes look sort of like wireframes shaped liked a couple of concentric lozenges. We can change the length of the lozenges as well as their diameter at each end, but we cannot change their shape. If the mesh is complicated, it may not be possible to wrap envelopes around all the vertices to be affected without wrapping them around vertices that we do not want to include. No matter. We’ll use the other two methods of weighting vertices to fine-tune our initial set of weights.

In the “Modifier” panel, make sure that the “Skin” modifier is selected then click the “Edit Envelopes” button. Notice the concentric lozenge-shaped wireframes in the viewports. You’ll see that some of the vertices are colored in accordance with their bone weights. These initial settings are bound to be wrong, so we’ll have to wrap envelopes around the vertices ourselves.

In the list of bones that appears in the Parameters rollout, click the bone that is labeled “Head.”

Look at how the Head envelope initially appears in all four viewports. Not only are they off-center, but they are also much too large.

Use the “Select and Move” tool to adjust the length and diameters of both the inner envelope and the outer envelope. The envelope must encompass the entire head but should ideally not go beyond the point where the cranium meets the neck. Don’t worry about wrapping the envelope too precisely, though. We’ll adjust the bone weights later.

Look at the screenshot below. By the time I was done wrapping the envelope around some of the vertices, the viewports showed that parts of the neck were within the Head envelope. We’ll correct that later. For now, let’s move on to the other bones and wrap their envelopes around the appropriate regions of the mesh.

When you’re done wrapping envelopes, move on to the next step.

Another technique for weighting bones is to “paint” weights on the vertices. Perhaps the best way to learn about this technique is to try it out. As before, the “Edit Envelopes” button will have to be activated. You can’t paint weights otherwise.

In the “Modifier” panel, click the “Paint Weights” button. You may have to scroll down the panel to see it.

Beside the “Paint Weights” button is another button with an ellipsis (“…”) on it. Click it to access the “Painter Options” dialog box. Look at the box beside the label “Max. Size.” By default, the value in this box is 10.0. Change it to a much smaller number such as 0.02. This effectively decreases the size of the “brush” to a more manageable level. If you want repeated brushings over the same area to strengthen the bone weight there, make sure that the box beside “Additive” is checked. Close the “Painter Options” window when you are done.

In this example, we’re going to paint the weights for the bone f_jaw. When I wrapped the f_jaw envelope around my model, I felt that the right side of the jaw may not be adequately controlled by the f_jaw bone. I also felt that the influence of the bone on the jaw region was too weak overall. I switched my Left viewport to show the right side of the model and pressed [F3] to switch on smooth + highlights mode.

By “painting” over the vertices, I was able to extend the influence of the f_jaw bone. I was also able to strengthen the bone’s influence on the right side.

The last weighting technique that I’ll discuss involves the weight tool. Before using it, go to the “Parameters” section of the “Modifier” panel and make sure that the “Edit Envelopes” button is pressed and that the box labeled “Vertices” is checked.

Next, select a group of vertices whose bone weights you want to adjust by clicking-and-dragging your mouse cursor over them. In this particular case, I want to adjust the weights of the neck area, so I click-and-drag over the neck. In the example shown below, I wound up selecting not only the vertices of the neck but also parts of the ears and cheeks. I can de-select vertices by pressing the [Alt] key while clicking-and-dragging over the unwanted vertices. I can also add vertices by pressing [Ctrl] and clicking-and-dragging over the vertices I want to add. It may be necessary to look at the selection from different viewports to make sure that only the vertices we want to weight are selected.

Next, click the weight tool button. It’s the button beside the one that says “Weight Table,” the one with an icon that looks like a wrench. When you click the button, the “Weight Tool” dialog box will appear.

For the vertices I selected, I want to set the weight of the Neck bone to 1.0. First, I have to select the Neck bone. If it appears in the Weight Tool, such as what is shown in the above picture, I can click the word “Neck” in the dialog window. Otherwise, I’ll have to click the one that appears in the list of bones in the “Modifier” panel. Now I can set the bone weight. One way to do this is to enter the number “1.0” in the box beside the “Set Weight” button. I can then click this button to set the weights. There are other ways to do this, but I’ll leave it to you to figure out. (Hint: the buttons with numbers in them might mean something.)

Continue to fine-tune the bone weights of the vertices until you’re ready to test them. One way to do this is to move the bones in 3DS Max and see if any vertices start getting unruly. To select a bone to move, press the [H] key, select a bone from the “Select Objects” dialog box that appears, and press the “Select” button. In this particular example, I want to test the vertices with respect to the f_jaw bone, so I click “f_jaw” in the list then press “Select.”

At this point, there will be arrows that appear at each viewport. Clicking-and-dragging these arrows will move the f_jaw bone.

Let’s see what happens when I move the bone in this example.

Sweet Cyric on a pogo stick! Looks like I didn’t weight my vertices properly.

Weighting vertices is easily the most time-consuming task when it comes to modeling creatures and armor. Ferreting out unruly vertices and putting them in their place often takes a lot of work.

Simplistic Texturing

The iron test for checking if the vertices are weighted correctly is to test the model with the NWN2 engine. The model won’t display without diffuse and normal textures, however, so we have to make a rudimentary UVW Map and assign placeholder textures to the mesh.

UVW Maps are how graphic engines know which pixel in a texture map goes to which part of a 3D mesh. We don’t have time to delve deeply into this topic right now. All we want to do is to check if we’ve rigged the bones to our skin mesh correctly.

Let’s apply a fast mapping method: From the Modifier List, click the “UVW Mapping” modifier. In the Mapping Parameters, click the radio button labeled “Cylindrical” then press the “Fit” button. The model now has a UVW map.

The diffuse texture we’ll apply is a 128 × 128 swatch of gray. The normal texture is basically converted from the diffuse texture using either nVidia's Photoshop plug-in or the CrazyBump software. Both textures are DDS files.

To apply these textures to the model, bring up the Material Editor by pressing the [M] key. Expand the “Maps” rollout by clicking its “+” sign.

Click the checkbox labeled “Diffuse Color” then click the button labeled “None.” This will bring up a window called the “Material/Map Browser.”

Double-click the word “Bitmap,” which appears at the top-right side of the window. This will bring up another window that will prompt you to select a bitmap image file. Navigate to where the diffuse map is stored, click the name of the file, then press the “Open” button. The window will then close.

Next, we have to add a normal texture to the same material. In the Material Editor, click the “Go to Parent” button, which is the second-to-the-last button below the picture of the six spheres.

At the “Maps” rollout, click the checkbox labeled “Bump,” and use the same process that we did for choosing a diffuse texture, but this time, choose the normal texture instead. When you’re done, click the “Assign Material to Selection” button then click the “Show Map in Viewport” button. If you’re not sure where these buttons are, just hover your mouse cursor over the tiny icons below the spheres until you find the tooltips that identify the buttons you need to press.

You may now close the Material Editor.

Testing with NWN2

Next, export the model as an MDB file named C_Ghoul_Head01.MDB. If you’re saving this in your working folder, you’ll probably wind up overwriting the copy of the file that is in it. That’s all right, go ahead and do it.

Save your work as a MAX file as well. We'll be returning to it later.

Now copy the newly saved MDB file, as well as its diffuse and normal texture files, to your NWN2 Override folder. For most Windows XP users, that folder would be “My Documents\Neverwinter Nights 2\override”.

The moment of truth is now upon us. Run the Neverwinter Nights 2 Toolset and create a small exterior area. Put a ghoul in it. Since the head we’ve created replaces the ghoul’s head, we should see the new head on top of the ghoul’s body.

In the model shown above, there are a few holes where the neck connects with the body, but that’s fine with me. I’ll be making a new body for this creature anyway.

If you made a mistake in rigging the model, you'll probably see some problems with it at this point. Among the potential problems that you might find are the following:
- The model does not appear.
- The model freezes in place instead of running its idle animation.
- The head is not sized correctly.
- The head is not positioned properly.
- Polygons are protruding like jagged spikes around the model.
If any of the above occurs, you’ll have to fix the problem in 3DS Max.

Removing Zero Weights

Once you are satisfied with the way you’ve rigged the bones to the skin mesh, there’s one last thing you can do to decrease the size of the MDB file somewhat. In 3DS Max, make sure that your model is selected. Click the “Modify” tab to bring up the “Modify” panel then click the model’s "Skin" modifier. Scroll the panel all the way down and click the “+” sign beside “Advanced Parameters” to expand the rollout. Now click the button labeled “Remove Zero Weights.” This will remove unnecessary data pertaining to bone weights with zero values.

Save your file both as a MAX file and as an MDB file. Congratulations. You’ve just survived one of the toughest parts of 3D modeling.

If you’ve read this blog post from start to finish, you probably intend to create your own creature models. If so, good for you. I hope to see your submissions at the Neverwinter Vault. Nevertheless, we’re not done yet. I haven’t explained how to texture models properly. Unless you’re happy with giving your creatures a bland, gray look, you may want to know more about texturing. That will be the topic of my next three blog posts, so stay tuned.

Creature Modeling, Part 2: Bringing the High-Poly Model Low

2009-01-05T20:25:00.047+08:00

This is a continuation of my series on building creature models for NWN2. Those who haven’t read the start of this series may want to refer to my previous blog post.

Author's Note, January 20, 2009:

Having created a very high-poly model in ZBrush, I have to bring down the number of polygons to a more playable level. My model had 24,578 vertices and 49,152 polygons at the start. I wanted to bring the number of polygons to below one thousand. The following steps show how I did it.

Import your model in 3DS Max. To do this, click the “File” menu and select “Import…”. In the dialog window, navigate to the folder where you stored your model file. In the “Files of type” box, select “WaveFront Object (*.OBJ)”. Click the name of the file that you had exported earlier and click the “Open” button.

The “OBJ Importer” dialog window will then appear. Just click the “OK” button.

When the model is loaded into the program, you will see four different views of the model; namely, Top, Front, Left, and Perspective. The Front view is actually a view of the model from behind. (Don’t ask why.) If you want to see the model’s face, you can right-click the word “Front” in the upper left corner of the Front viewport, position the cursor over the “Views” submenu, then click “Back”. You can change any of the views by right-clicking the name of the view in the viewport that you want to change.

Because the model is displayed as a wireframe in all but the Perspective view, it’s hard to tell how the model looks when rendered. If you want to preview the model, click on the view that you want to use and press the [F3] key. This key switches between wireframe mode and smooth + highlights mode. For now, let’s keep all but the Perspective view in wireframe mode.

If the model isn’t centered in one of the viewports, you can adjust the view with the “Pan View” tool. This is located at the bottom-right corner of the screen. When you click it, the mouse cursor changes to a hand icon, which you can click-and-drag over a viewport to reposition the view.

When you’re done positioning the view, click the “Select Object” icon toward the top-left of the screen to restore the mouse cursor. This icon looks like an arrow pointing upward and to the left. Alternatively, you may click the “Select and Move” icon, which looks like a cross made up of arrows.

Now that the viewports have been adjusted, we can begin the actual process of decreasing the polygon count. First, select the model by clicking it at any of the viewports. Next, click the “Modify” tab at the upper-right portion of the screen to bring up the “Modify” panel. This is where we’ll be doing most of the polygon-reduction work.

Click the downward-pointing arrowhead at the box labeled “Modifier List” and click the word “MultiRes” in the drop-down list. This will put the MultiRes modifier on top of the Editable Mesh in the modifier stack.

In the “MultiRes Parameters” rollout, click the “Generate” button and set a checkmark in the box beside “Vertex Merging.” Set “Vert Percent” to a suitably low number then click the “Generate” button again. This will reduce the number of vertices and faces (i.e., polygons) in the mesh.

Notice that the vertices and polygons are no longer symmetrical. We’ll try to restore symmetry to the model, but first, we need to know which side looks best.

Click the Back viewport to select it and press [F3] to render the model. Choose whether to mirror the left or right side of the model to its opposite side. I preferred the right-side of the model (in other words, the one to the viewer’s left), so this is what I chose to retain. Press [F3] again to return to wireframe mode.

Go to the modifier list and add the Slice modifier. (You may have to click the model first in case it isn’t currently selected.) When you've done this, click the “+” sign before the word “Slice” and click “Slice Plane.”

If you look at the viewports, you will see a square-shaped plane cutting across the model. (In some viewports, the plane will appear as a line.) You’ll need to position the plane to cut between the left and right sides of the model.

At the Back viewport, right-click on the plane and click “Rotate” on the context-sensitive menu.

At the bottom of the screen, you will find three text boxes labeled “X,” “Y,” and “Z.” These constitute the Absolute Mode Transform type-In. We want to make the slicing plane vertical, so enter “0” in the textbox labeled “Z.” (You may also use the mouse to rotate the plane in the viewports, but the entering a number is more accurate.)

Right-click the plane and select “Move” from the context-sensitive menu.

Move the plane so that it completely bisects the model. Although you may do this by clicking-and-dragging the mouse over the plane, I prefer to type numbers in the Absolute Mode Transform Type-In. For this model, I set X to 0.5, Y to -0.5, and Z to 0.15.

On the “Modifier” panel, click either the “Remove Top” or the “Remove Bottom” button, whichever gets rid of the unwanted side of the model.

Click the “Modifier List” button to bring down the list of modifiers. From there, select “Mirror.”

Under the parameters for the Mirror modifier, set “Offset” to 1.0 and click the “Copy” checkbox. This will create a mirror copy of the mesh and place it in its opposite side.

From the Modifier List, select “Vertex Weld,” set its “Threshold” parameter to 0.01, and press Enter. This ought to connect the two halves of the mesh into one whole.

In case holes were accidentally created in the process, add the “Cap Holes” modifier from the Modifier List. Just leave the default parameters as is.

Export the mesh as an OBJ file. First, click the “File” menu, then click “Export…” In the dialog box, navigate to the folder in which you want to save your model. In the “Save as type” box, select “Wavefront Object (*.OBJ).” Type in an appropriate file name and press the “Save” button. In the “OBJ Exporter” dialog box that then appears, hit the “OK” button without changing any parameters.

If you wish, you may also save your work as a MAX file. Just click the “File” menu, select “Save As…”, and do what comes naturally.

The process of decreasing the number of polygons may have changed the appearance of the model in ways that you do not want. You may tweak the position of the vertices to adjust the appearance of the mesh. While this can be done in 3DS Max, ZBrush makes it easier to do.

Load ZBrush and select the “Open Model (OBJ or ZTL)” option that appears when the program starts up. Navigate to the folder that contains the OBJ file that was exported and select it for loading. By default, left-right symmetrical editing is turned off for imported OBJ models, so press the [X] key to turn it on. Use the Tweak brush to adjust the vertices to your liking. When you are done, export the model to a new file.

At this point, the mesh may still have too many polygons to be usable in game. You may repeat the above steps until the polygon count is low enough for you.

In addition, you may also select a group of vertices and weld the ones that are closest to each other. To do this, go to the Modifier List, click the “+” sign beside “Editable Mesh” in the list of modifiers, and click “Vertex.”

You can click-and-drag over any of the viewports to select a group of vertices. If you’ve selected too few vertices, you can add to your selection by pressing the [Ctrl] key while clicking-and-dragging over more vertices. If you want to take away some vertices from your selection, hold down the [Alt] key while clicking-and-dragging over the vertices you don’t want to include. When you’re satisfied with your selection, go to the “Edit Geometry” rollout in the Modifier panel. Under the word “Weld” is a button marked “Selected.” Beside it is a box that has a default value of 0.1. Change this figure to some lower value such as 0.01 then click the “Selected” button. This will weld the vertices in the selection that are within 0.01 units from each other.

When you're satisfied with the appearance and polygon count of your model, export it as an OBJ file.

After a painstaking process of reducing polygons and adjusting vertices, I eventually brought my model down to 471 vertices and 927 polygons. The pictures below show how the model looks in ZBrush.

Over the next several days, I continued to work on the model, eventually reducing the polygon count to 840 but at the cost of increasing the number of vertices to 523.

My next blog post in this series will show how to transform this mesh into an actual creature head that can be viewed from the toolset or in game. Stay tuned.

Creature Modeling, Part 1: Sculpting a High-Poly Monster Head

2009-01-04T20:55:00.031+08:00

“He who teaches himself hath a fool for a teacher.”
– Ben Franklin

This blog post is the first in a series on building creature models for use with Neverwinter Nights 2. I suppose one could call this a tutorial, but I hesitate to dub it as such. I’m really just a noob at 3D modeling for NWN2, and my workflow isn’t particularly efficient. I’m sure there are others who know more about this topic than I, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them have written any complete and detailed tutorials.

How I got into 3D modeling is a story in itself. Because the upcoming module from bouncyRock Entertainment will require new creature models, I volunteered to make them. Ideally, Jonny Ree would have built them for us, but he’s currently busy with other projects. We do have other 3D artists on the team, but none of them make creature models. I managed to convince Dirtywick, our project leader, that I could build them despite never having created any kind of 3D model from scratch before. Lack of experience has never stopped me from doing any modding-related work. I figured that if I could compose music despite having no prior experience at it, building creature models ought to be a cinch.

For over a month, I scoured websites and conducted a series of failed experiments to learn the secrets of creature modeling. Progress came slowly but surely. I knew I was on the right track when I managed to get the creature’s head to appear in the toolset. Eventually, I got the creature’s body to appear as well. When I had the creature fighting in game, I was certain that my knowledge was adequate at the very least. I decided to document my process lest I forget what I had learned. Perhaps others may benefit from this write-up and populate the Neverwinter Vault with new and exciting creatures. Here’s hoping that they do.

Requirements

Those who intend to build creature models for NWN2 will need the following:

Neverwinter Nights 2 (of course)

3DS Max version 4.2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 2008, or 2009. I use version 8.

3ds Max MDB Importer/Exporter by tazpn. I understand that only version 1.17 is good for creating skin meshes and that later versions can’t do it for some reason. (See what barrelofmonkeyzz has to say about this.) Version 1.17 of this plugin is no longer available at the Vault, however, so perhaps version 1.19 might do the trick. I really wouldn’t know because I have version 1.17 in my computer.

RunnerDuck’s MDB Cloner

Optional: A more user-friendly modeling software such as ZBrush. To be honest, I haven’t really learned how to create models in 3DS Max yet. I prefer sculpting in ZBrush, which feels more natural to me.

Image editing software that can handle layers. I use Photoshop, but hobbyists on a budget may want to look into Gimp, which costs absolutely nothing.

Software for converting image files to DDS format. If you use Photoshop, you can download and install nVidia's Photoshop plug-in. If Gimp is your image editor of choice, there is a DDS plug-in that you may download and install. Otherwise, you can use the stand-alone program DDS Converter instead.

Artistic talent. You should be skilled enough to draw people and animals realistically. If you can sculpt people and animals in clay, so much the better. You will also need the ability to create meshes in your favorite modeling software, whether it be 3DS Max, ZBrush, or something else. This write-up will gloss over the details of my actual sculpting process.

Character Design

The first thing we did was to design the creature’s look. Dirtywick and I drew a few crude sketches and passed them to each other over Skype. I initially thought of making the creature look something like a wraith, but Dirtywick’s idea was to make it look more like an axe murderer with gashes across its body. Eventually, I came up with a rough painting that met with Dirtywick’s approval.

At this point, we should have had several detailed paintings that show how the creature looks from various angles. The depiction of the creature should be well-lit, not shadowy, so that all the details that the 3D modeler needs would be plainly discernable. This was the point when I started wishing we had a dedicated concept artist who could paint these designs for us. Although I have some skill in the visual arts, it takes me a long time to come up with anything detailed. Besides, it would have been better if we had a concept artist who was much more skilled than I. To save time, I decided to do without the detailed paintings. Being the scripting manager as well as one of the writers and artists in the group, I find that time is a limited and precious resource.

Sculpting with ZBrush

Using ZBrush, I created a high-polygon model of the creature’s head by following the steps outlined below:

Load the PolySphere tool by clicking the “Load Tool” button, selecting PolySphere.ZTL from the dialog window, and clicking the “Open” button.

Draw the sphere by left-clicking at the center of the drawing window and dragging the mouse cursor toward the bottom of the window.

Go into Edit mode by clicking the “Edit” button at the upper left of the screen.

Work on a lower-polygon version of the sphere by clicking the “Geometry” rollout to expand it and setting the SDiv (i.e., subdivision) level to 1. Alternatively, you can press [Shift+D] three times.

Make sure that when you edit one side of the sphere, the opposite side gets edited as well. If you hover your mouse button over one side of the sphere, you should see a red dot over both the left and right side of the mesh. The [X] key toggles left-right symmetry, so if you see only one red dot, hit the [X] key.

We’ll want to shape the sphere into something that looks roughly head-shaped, so click the “Tweak” button at the upper-left side of the screen.

Because we want to affect large parts of the sphere, set the Draw Size of the tweak brush to 256.

Position the mouse cursor at the bottom-right side of the sphere. (You should see a red dot at both the bottom-left and bottom-right of the sphere.) Now elongate the sphere by clicking-and-dragging the mouse downward and toward the center of the sphere. Flatten the upper sides of the mesh a bit by positioning the mouse cursor there (either left or right side) and click-and-drag it slightly toward the opposite side. You should have something that now looks roughly head-shaped.

Shift to a side view of the mesh. To do this, position the mouse cursor outside and to the right of the shape then click-and-drag the mouse until you get a nice side view. Tweak the mesh by bringing the chin portion forward a bit and raising the bottom of the cranium somewhat. You’ll want to decrease the size of the brush when working on the chin.

Extend the bottom portion of the cranium to form a neck. You’ll need to adjust the size of the brush several times to shape the neck properly. You’ll also have to shift the angle of the model to tweak it from different sides.

Raise the subdivision level of the model by pressing [D] three times. This will allow us to work with more polygons. If you need more polygons, press [Ctrl+D] to subdivide the mesh further.

Select the standard edit brush by clicking the “Std” button. We’ll be using this brush from here on.

Now shape the mesh as if it were clay. Clicking-and-dragging the brush over the model will raise the affected areas. Pressing the [Shift] key while clicking-and-dragging will create depressions in the mesh. You’ll want to adjust the size of the brush several times to affect smaller or larger areas as the need arises. Keep doing this until the model looks sort of like the character design depicted earlier.

Save your model by clicking the “Export” button. Enter an appropriate file name then click the “Save” button. If you wish, you may set your model to a slightly lower subdivision level before exporting it. I chose to set the subdivision level of my model to 3. At this level, there are fewer polygons to contend with while retaining a fairly high level of detail.

With so many polygons, the resulting mesh won’t be useable in game. We’ll need to create a lower-poly model if we hope to see it in an NWN2 module. That will be the topic of my next blog post in this series.

Kill and Deliver: Are These the Only Types of Quests?

2008-12-31T17:15:00.006+08:00

Good day, hero. The acorns you are holding are magical and may only be planted in a specific grove. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to deliver said acorns to our queen at the Windspear Hills. She will know where to plant the acorns. As always, should you or any member of your party be killed on your way there, we will not recompense you for your carelessness. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

All right, that’s not exactly how my player character received this quest in Baldur’s Gate 2, but the gist of it is there. The type of quest described here, which is known as the delivery or Fed Ex quest, is a staple in many role-playing games. It is often done poorly, which is probably why players complain when their characters are asked to fill in for the mailman.

Another common type of quest is the kill quest, which involves having player characters kill one or more creatures or NPCs. Because a typical role-playing game is already brimming with hostile creatures, kill quests tend to feel like more of the same to players.

It would be great to spice up the role-playing experience by varying the types of quests that player characters receive. As an aid to accomplishing this, I created what I believe to be a complete list of quest types to draw upon. It may sound audacious of me to claim that my list is complete, but as of this writing, I haven’t found a more extensive list anywhere in the World Wide Web.

A Complete List of Quest Types

In the list below, I make references to characters that are the object of each quest type. In this list, I make no distinction between persons or monsters, lumping them instead under the category “characters.” These are almost always non-player characters, although I imagine that in a multi-player environment, player characters might be the object of some quests.

Kill, incapacitate, or apprehend one or more characters.
Destroy one or more objects.
Find one or more characters who may be heavily guarded or well hidden (or both).
Find or acquire one or more objects that may be heavily guarded or well hidden (or both).
Go from Point A to Point B (preferably in one piece). In situations such as races, the PCs have to arrive at their destination before other characters do.
Escort or follow one or more characters from Point A to Point B, with or without their knowledge and without getting them killed.
Bring one or more objects from Point A to Point B or to another character without getting the objects destroyed.
Change the physical or mental state of one or more characters (e.g., by casting a spell to heal them or talking to them in a manner that would change their minds).
Build, modify, activate, or deactivate one or more objects (e.g., a bomb or a power generator), possibly at a specific location.
Occupy an area for a specified period of time and prevent enemy characters from occupying the area during this period.
Prevent one or more enemies from achieving their objective, which may be any of the above.

Building Interesting Quests

Most quests are built from more than one quest type. For example, to rescue a princess from an evil wizard, the following quest types may be used:

Enter the wizard’s castle without getting killed.
Find the princess.
Release the princess from her prison – pick locks, deactivate traps, or maybe bash the prison door in and try to heal whoever gets caught in the traps.
Escort the princess out of the castle without getting her killed.

Some quests may have a time component to them. For example, a bomb may be set to go off in one minute. The player character has to find the bomb, dispatch enemies that get in the way, and deactivate it within that period.

With all quests, especially those of the Fed Ex type, game designers must try to minimize the back-and-forth traveling that the PC has to do. Keeping everything needed to complete the quest in one area helps. If travel between areas is necessary, one may have “portals” to reduce travel time. These portals may be as fantastical as teleportation nodes or as mundane as horses that bring the PC to other areas when interacted with.

Some quests are deliberately designed so that they cannot be completed but must be replaced by some other quest. This is done to throw in a complication that adds dramatic tension to a game. Let’s take my earlier example of the princess who has to be rescued from an evil wizard. The quest may be scripted so that by the time the player character arrives at the prison, the princess is already dead, and the wizard has taken her memories and physical form. The wizard escapes through a passage that he seals, but not before summoning a bunch of monsters to fight the player character. In his new form, the wizard can get close enough to the king to assassinate him. The PC’s quest may then be changed to neutralizing the wizard before he leaves his castle. Of course, the PC may have to dispatch those pesky monsters that the wizard summoned first.

Every quest must have an appropriate motivation for PCs to engage in them. I’ve seen some quests that involve two or more NPC strangers bickering with each other over something that is of no concern to the PC. What breaks my suspension of disbelief is when the NPCs allow the PC to step in and settle the argument for them. In real life, if I were to attempt to resolve an argument between two strangers, I would probably be told to shove off.

The PC must have a stake in seeing the argument resolved (other than to get experience points) for the quest to make sense. In fact, all quests must have an appropriate motivation for participating in them. The profit motive is valid, of course, but if the motive can be made personal, players may appreciate the quest even more.

Linking Stories and Games, Part 4: A Brief Example

2008-12-30T16:08:00.005+08:00

This is my fourth and final post in a series on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my three previous posts to put this into context.

A few years ago, I created a hakpak for NWN1 called the Vampire Hak Pak. Included with the downloadable file was a short demo module entitled “Vampire Kobolds from Outer Space.” I deliberately made the module silly because I didn’t want to waste my better ideas on a mere demo. Nevertheless, the plot follows the basic formula that I outlined in an earlier blog post on story writing.

Act 1. A band of wights attacks everyone in the village where the PC is staying. The PC has to find out where the wights are coming from before more of them return.

Act 2. In a nearby cave, the PC discovers a large group of vampire kobolds from outer space led by Count Alucard, another vampire kobold. The kobolds plan to turn all the villagers into undead creatures and have been creating wights for that purpose. While trying to chase down Count Alucard, the PC steps on a magical trap that divests him and his cleric henchman Virginia of all their items. Without armor and weapons, the PC and Virginia will surely fall to the touch of the vampires.

Act 3. Virginia calls upon her deity, who grants them a powerful weapon that is especially lethal to vampires. With it, the PC can dispatch the remaining vampire kobolds and their leader with ease.

Because this was a demo module, I did not provide multiple endings for this story. As an exercise, we can do this now. Here are the ones I came up with:

The PC kills all the vampire kobolds, thereby making life at the village safe once more.

The PC willingly allows Count Alucard to turn him into a vampire and leads a fresh pack of wights to transform the villagers into undead.

The PC willingly allows Count Alucard to turn him into a vampire and, with the help of Virginia, dispatches Alucard and his minions, thereby paving the way to becoming the vampire lord of the village.

Considering the small scope of the story, three alternative endings should more than suffice for the module. In addition to the above, I thought of a fourth ending in which the PC flees the village, leaving it open to Count Alucard’s depredations. I eventually rejected this idea because having the PC give up without a fight is ultimately unsatisfying. If I’m going to make a few alternative endings, I might as well stick with the ones that are interesting.

Having come up with the above endings, I have to check which portions of the plot need revising to accommodate them. The first ending I listed above already goes with my original plot, so no changes are needed there.

The second ending suffers from a lack of motive, however. Why would the PC hunt down whoever was creating the wights, only to join forces with the enemy? I need to provide the PC a suitable motive. Perhaps the villagers are xenophobic and immediately treated the PC with suspicion and contempt upon the latter’s arrival. Perhaps the mayor and his bodyguards extorted a significant amount of gold pieces from the PC to allow this complete stranger to roam around freely instead of rotting in jail. Despite this ill treatment, a good-hearted PC may still save the villagers from the undead, but an evil PC will now have the motivation to give the villagers their comeuppance.

On the other hand, why would Count Alucard agree to this plan instead of turning the PC into a more dispensable wight? This is where the PC’s skills may come in. The PC can probably make a Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate check to convince Alucard that his abilities would go to waste if he were transformed into a wight. As a vampire of no mean skill, however, he can make himself exceedingly useful to Alucard.

This module is too short for me to show the consequences of the PC’s evil deeds. Had the module spanned several quests, I would have made the PC’s dialog sound more paranoid over time. I would also have added different kinds of vampire hunters to vex the PC.

The third ending has a similar problem to that of the second one. It’s easy for a power-hungry PC to find the motive to become a vampire lord, especially if the villagers haven’t been kind to him. The PC will need the aid of his henchman Virginia to pull this off because once he becomes a vampire, he will never raise a hand against the one who turned him. But why would the undead-hunting cleric Virginia agree to the PC’s plan?

Convincing Virginia to go along with the PC won’t be easy. Nevertheless, if Virginia is blinded against her better judgment by her love for the PC, she may be compelled to do whatever the PC wants. This means that opportunities for romance are in order.

As may be seen, coming up with alternative endings requires that some groundwork be laid out to accommodate them. If too much work is needed for a particular ending, a developer may choose to scrap it. In the above example, I’m thinking that the third ending and the requisite romance seem like too much work to handle. If I were to accommodate alternative endings in my demo module, I’d probably implement only the first two.

This concludes my series on linking stories with games. I hope these musings have been helpful to the game designers among us. As always, the things I write are just suggestions that readers are free to apply or ignore. I make no claim to being an expert, but I do have a few ideas that may be helpful to others.

Happy modding, everyone.

Linking Stories and Games, Part 3: Evil Choices

2008-12-29T16:30:00.005+08:00

This is the third in a series of posts on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my two previous posts to put this into context.

Game designers don’t seem to have much difficulty in coming up with meaningful choices for good-aligned characters. Creating dialog options and story endings for evil PCs, however, has been something of a challenge. Few game designers seem to understand how to come up with evil options that aren’t petty and nonsensical. Because of this apparent lack in designing well-thought-out evil options, I’d like to tip the balance by sharing a few insights on creating them.

The first thing to understand is that evil manifests in different ways. Serial killers are not the same as spree killers, and both are completely different from terrorists, even though they all kill large numbers of people. What differentiate “evil” people from each other are their methods and their motives.

For example, spree killers don’t go on a rampage for no reason. Over a long period of time, something ticks them off. Perhaps it’s a long-standing frustration over being socially rejected at the school they go to. Maybe it’s the hurt that they have suffered through years of verbal abuse from co-workers and customers at the postal service. Whatever the reason, these people have been simmering in their own stew for years until finally they explode in a murderous rampage that ends with the spree killers’ capture or death. Often, the targets of their attacks are the kinds of people who, in their minds, have been oppressing them for years. There is method in the madness of spree killers, and more importantly, there are motives behind their seemingly random acts of violence. It is unfortunate that some people who just happened to be in their way get killed as well.

Note that a spree killer’s suicide, which sometimes occurs at the end of his rampage, is as much an indictment on himself as it is a way to escape the justice and retribution of others.

Here’s another example of an evil person, one who does not stoop to killing. A powerful noble may balk at murdering her enemies because it goes against her values. Nevertheless, she is vengeful toward those who oppose her and will use the criminal justice system to send her enemies to jail. She’ll dig up whatever dirt she can find on the targets of her ire. If none can be found that is sufficiently damning, she will manufacture the evidence and bribe “witnesses” to the crime. The thrill of the hunt tingles throughout her body as she lays out the web that will ensnare her victims. With the influence and resources at her disposal, it is not wise to get on her bad side. This noble’s methods – and to a certain extent, her motives – are different from those of a spree killer, but both may be considered “evil” just the same.

This noble is a master of manipulation and deceit, but there is a price to be paid for her sins. She is forever uneasy at the prospect that she might one day be caught or, worse yet, have to face trumped up charges from someone who beats her at her own game. Each person she unjustly sends to jail fuels her paranoia, causing her to see intrigue and betrayal where there is none. Her anxiety might make her careless someday. Perhaps then, she will be reunited with the very people she has sent down the river.

Those are just two examples of “evil” people. There are many more that writers and game designers can come up with. If you’re fishing for ideas, just read the papers, and try to identify with the people you read about to see what made them do the things they did.

The next thing to understand is that if you want to offer player characters evil choices that make sense, you’ll also have to provide them appropriate motives in the game. Allowing PCs to go on a killing spree just because they are evil is inane. If murder is an option for your PCs, you may create one or more NPCs that can tick the PCs off. Over time, the abuse that evil PCs receive from these NPCs will eventually provide the motive for them to exact vengeance.

If you want to go the extra mile, provide different methods for PCs to manifest their evilness. A killing spree is one option, but it isn’t particularly creative. Logically, the keepers of the peace should be mobilized in large numbers to take down spree killers, so you may want to script this event in case a PC goes on a rampage. (Incidentally, a good reason for not encouraging PCs to run amok in your game is that there should always be large armies and bands of renowned heroes that are ready to take down spree killers.) A better option may be to allow the PC to plan the perfect murder, one that cannot be traced back to him. Alternatively, digging up dirt and manufacturing evidence to frame NPCs can be fun if done right.

Finally, consider that any truly evil act comes with the anticipation that what comes around goes around. Those who spread hurt and pain may not admit it, but the fear of having to pay for their sins will always be with them. For example, street thugs with their extortion rackets will be on the lookout not only for cops but also for other gangs looking to muscle in on their territory. It is often the case that those who prey on others will themselves be preyed upon. Game developers may take this into account by scripting in appropriate consequences for the evil that PCs do. They may also reveal the evil PCs’ descent to ever-increasing levels of paranoia, angst, or self-loathing through the dialog options that are open to them.

Next up is a brief example on making an interactive story. Hopefully, this example will clearly illustrate what I’ve been trying to say since my previous blog post. Stay tuned.

Linking Stories and Games, Part 2: Creating Meaningful Choices

2008-12-28T18:29:00.010+08:00

This is my second blog post in a series on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my previous post to put this into context.

Few Branches

Role-playing games from Bioware and Black Isle/Obsidian are noteworthy for allowing players to affect the outcome of the games’ story. Nearly all of the opportunities for directing the flow of the plot are presented through dialog. Most conversation options don’t affect the story, though. If we set aside conversation nodes that deal with gathering information from NPCs, much of what we’re left with are there just for flavor. For example, in the official campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2, PCs may speak with Daeghun bitterly or kindly, but none of these dialog options will affect how the story turns out. They give players the impression that they are role-playing their characters, and a good number of these dialog options may change the PCs’ alignment. Even so, few of them will affect the story in any way.

In the OC, how PCs treat their NPC companions does affect the story in small ways. By conversing with their companions over time, PCs affect which companions turn on them or abandon them. PCs may even affect whether one of their companions switches to a different class. PCs also affect the story when they choose to side either with the city watch or the shadow thieves. This decision is made in the middle of the game and is one of the determinants of the game ending that the player sees.

Ultimately, however, the number of significant ways that the story branches out is few. This fact is apparent when you consider that there are only a handful of possible endings for the OC, almost all of which involve rocks falling on the PC’s party. Because of constraints in the game production process, players’ ability to affect the story is necessarily limited and mostly illusory.

Even with these constraints, there are ways to make players feel as if they have greater control over the plot. To tweak a story for more interactive control, begin with the endings in mind.

Begin with the Endings in Mind

A story where players can make meaningful choices will generally have multiple endings. The word “multiple” in this case can mean as few as two or as many as seven. Designers might never finish making their game if they have much more than that.

When you’ve outlined your basic plot, think of the different ways that the story may end. For instance, you might take inspiration from the D&D alignment system and make an ending for each of the alignment extremes: chaotic evil, chaotic good, lawful evil, and lawful good. Alternatively, you might focus on how the PC may turn out in the end – an iron-fisted baron, a weak and paranoid ruler, a happy-go-lucky adventurer, or a lonely and misunderstood nomad. The types of endings you come up with will depend on your story, of course. Try to make the alternative endings varied enough that playing through them will generate different experiences.

From there, examine the plot to see what branches may lead up to each ending. This is where you put your story-affecting decision points. If you can incorporate these decision points in your story without too much difficulty, well and good. If it looks like putting them in will require you to write a whole new story, however, consider dropping the alternative ending. It may not be worth the effort to implement it.

That’s all there is to it. If you were to start from the beginning and work your way toward the alternative endings, you run the danger of making your endings either too similar to each other or unsatisfying to players. By focusing on the endings, you can ensure that they are divergent enough to be interesting while giving a proper sense of closure.

My next blog post in this series will focus on creating role-playing options for evil PCs, something that I believe has been poorly implemented in many computer RPGs.

Linking Stories and Games, Part 1

2008-12-27T20:52:00.007+08:00

Players of the Neverwinter Nights games sometimes complain when the role-playing choices open to their characters are limited. They want their characters to act the way they imagine they would when faced with the situations that the game presents them with. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, the options they would have wanted to take are sometimes not available to them. Perhaps the game designers had not thought of making those options available, or maybe they deliberately left them out because these options would have led to certain defeat. It’s also possible that time constraints prevented the creators of the game from implementing them.

The question of what story choices to present players with is not a simple one to answer. With the current state of game technology, it is impossible to implement all possible choices that players may want. Nevertheless, this question has to be answered during the design phase of each game or module.

This blog post is the first in a series wherein I attempt to show how game designers may handle the question of story choices.

No Story-Affecting Choices

The term “computer role-playing game” has been loosely applied not only to games such as Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 but also to the likes of Diablo, Final Fantasy 7, Jagged Alliance, and X-Com: UFO Defense. As long as player characters have stats that may improve over time and that affect their in-game abilities, the game that these characters appear in are described as “role-playing.”

The last four games that I mentioned above have two things in common: (1) they were hailed as great games during their time; and (2) none of them presents players with meaningful choices that affect the game’s plot. Of these four, only Final Fantasy 7 was commended for its story. Like the other three games I mentioned, however, Final Fantasy 7 does not have options for changing the direction of the story in any significant way. There is no good or evil ending for Cloud Strife, just one successful ending. The game does not even allow players to create their own characters. You always play as Cloud Strife, although you can choose what abilities and stats to improve as the game progresses.

It’s all right to produce games in which the story is not interactive. In fact, the game may still come with a great story, albeit not an interactive one. Some players may complain if you create a Neverwinter Nights module where story-affecting choices are not presented to players. Nevertheless, if the module is done well, those complaints may be few or non-existent.

One of my favorite NWN1 modules is Bone Kenning I: Art of the Thanaturge by Wes Lewis. To date, this module has an average rating of 9.65 compiled from 361 votes. With over 42,000 downloads, “Bone Kenning I” has earned its rightful place in the Neverwinter Vault’s Hall of Fame. The atmosphere in this module is wonderfully eerie, and the gameplay is great fun. The story isn’t interactive, however. Player characters will always be power-mad necromancers of sorts, and there is only one successful ending to the game. I honestly don’t know if anyone has ever complained about the lack of story-affecting choices in “Bone Kenning I.” I’ve no interest in sifting through all 670 comments on the module to find out.

In the next blog post in this series, I will describe what goes into an interactive story and how such a story may be designed.

Merry Christmas to One and All

2008-12-24T17:17:00.002+08:00

After a quick spurt of posting tips on story writing, I haven't been updating my blog lately. Much of my time has been spent trying to learn how to create new creature models. So far, my progress has been slow but promising. I'll be sure to document my model-making process in the hope that others may pick up on it and create creatures of their own.

Anyway, I interrupt my blogging silence to wish everyone a merry and joyous Christmas. May you receive great video games this season, and may you find the time to play them.

Story Writing, Last Remarks: Where to Go from Here

2008-12-13T19:59:00.003+08:00

This is the fourth and final chapter of my three-part series on story writing. (If that sounds confusing, let’s just say that I should have planned my blog posts better.) The content herein does not list all the techniques that I use when creating interactive stories. Nevertheless, there is enough material in this series to set aspiring writers on the path.

Everything that I’ve written in this series of blog posts counts as suggestions. If my techniques don’t work for you, ditch them and try something else. Those who are serious about writing may want to buy books on how to craft fiction. Although most books on this topic deal with writing non-interactive fiction such as novels and screenplays, much of the material therein is applicable to interactive fiction as well.

It helps to read a lot of fiction with an eye toward studying what the authors did that makes their work effective. Even if you aspire to write exclusively in the science fiction or fantasy genre, include a lot of mainstream fiction in your diet of books. My favorite novels include Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Shella by Andrew Vachss, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (not to be confused with the movie of the same name), and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (a surprisingly brutal novel from a 19th century country girl). In the fantasy and science fiction genre, my favorite books include Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Doubtless, you’ll have your own list of favorite books. One can learn much by studying the works of the writers you admire.

Reading will not get aspiring writers anywhere unless they set themselves working on their own fiction. Don’t worry if your first stories are amateurish. Even the masters started with baby steps on their path to greatness. They got better with practice, and you can too. So dust off your favorite game toolset and start making the interactive stories that you’ve been wanting to write.

Story Writing, Part 3: Little Computer People

2008-12-12T14:29:00.005+08:00

This is the third part of my series on story writing. To put this blog post into context, readers may want to refer to my two previous posts.

Having created the plot and decided on the setting of our module, we writers started pitching ideas for the main NPCs. By this time, we all had an idea of what types of non-player characters we needed; e.g., town mayor, companion #1, villainous mastermind, etc. All we needed was to provide specifics on personality, background, and character classes.

At the bouncyRock website, the members of our team have a private forum for discussing all matters related to our project. We created a thread in this forum for anyone to post their character write-ups. Although we stated that more than one writer may post different write-ups for the same character, in actual practice, hardly anyone provided alternatives for characters that had already been suggested. If we had more than one candidate for each role, we could have chosen the one we liked best or maybe even merged some qualities together. Perhaps most people have difficulty creating intriguing characters. If so, this blog post may help to illuminate a few mysteries of character design.

Entire books have been written on developing fictional characters, but I won’t even begin to touch the surface of this topic. Instead, I’ll provide only a couple of tips on character design. Don’t be misled by this seemingly meager offering, however. When applied properly, these tips will add considerable depth to any character concept.

Two Tips

Here’s my advice to beginning writers on how to create characters:

1. Write a back story for each significant character with a focus on the emotional problems that the character faces, how and why these emotional problems came to be, and what it would take for the character to resolve them.

2. Put your characters in situations that force them to confront their emotional problems in a way that will advance the story.

Significant characters are NPCs whom the PC will probably interact with more than once to move the story along. A character whom the PC will meet only once (and possibly kill off in the same encounter) does not count as a significant character, even if that meeting advances the story. Other NPCs that are not vital for moving the story along also do not count as significant characters, even if the PC will probably interact with them several times. Most merchants are a common example of this type of NPC. Writing back stories for such characters is completely optional, although better use of one’s time may be found elsewhere.

Not all significant characters are equally important. The PC’s companions would rank high in significance, but NPCs involved in minor side quests may be at the bottom of the scale. The more important an NPC is, the more detailed that character’s back story should be.

Back Stories

A back story should be focused on the emotional problems that the character is currently facing. Problems that have an impact on how the character relates with others are especially interesting. The back story should explain how and why these problems came to be. Details such as the name and breed of the character’s pet dog when she was ten years old, if they don’t shape the characters present emotional problems, are trivial and may be left out.

The ability to write a convincing back story requires empathizing with the characters to be created. It’s probably easiest to do this with characters that are pleasant or likeable, but most people seem to find it difficult to empathize with psychopathic characters. Consequently, these characters appear two-dimensional at best and cartoonish at worst. For me, Xzar the wizard from the game Baldur’s Gate is one of the worst offenders. Xzar objected to every good deed that the PC party did for seemingly no other reason than that his alignment is evil. If that isn’t a cartoonish character, I don’t know what is.

When people hear about random acts of violence that someone else has committed, most of them explain these actions by saying that the perpetrator is insane. As an explanation, insanity is woefully inadequate. It makes about as much sense as saying that the reason why a ball bounced off the floor is that it’s made of rubber. That may be so, but that fact does not tell us what motive force had set the ball bouncing. Did someone throw it to the floor, or did an earthquake dislodge it from a high shelf, or did Godzilla lash it with its tail? Besides, not all rubber objects bounce. My son has a toy monkey that’s made of rubber, and it rolls, not bounces, when thrown to the floor. Similarly, not all people who are mentally ill kill people. While I don’t have any statistics to back me up, I believe that most people with mental illness are not a danger to people other than perhaps themselves. Writers worth their salt had better find a deeper explanation for why their villains are “bad.”

Think on why your fictional characters act the way they do. Is your serial killer’s inability to relate to other people a result of being raised as a ward of the state during his formative years? Were the older boys violent to the younger ones when adults were not around? Did the adult caretakers abuse their wards? Was there a particular type of girl that the serial killer yearned for but who was repulsed by him?

By the way, please note that I am not implying that a person raised in a particular manner will always grow up to be a menace to society. A person’s free will and perspective in life may in fact be more important in determining one’s outcome. I once read the true story of two brothers who were raised in the same poor and violent environment. One grew up to be an outstanding cop, and the other acquired a long list of criminal charges. One’s past is not an accurate predictor of one’s future, but it is usually a major influence on how a person changes over time.

I realize that it can be very disconcerting to get under a psychopath’s skin, even a fictional one. To see the world through a murderer’s eyes, to think what he thinks, to feel what he feels – what sane person would want to do that? Writers, that’s who. Anyone who wants to write believable scenes of senseless violence will have to be the perpetrator – momentarily, of course, and never in real life. Don’t act out those evil thoughts, please. Save them for your fiction.

Once you’ve described the emotional and psychological issues that your characters bear, add a sentence or two on what it would take for those characters to resolve those issues. It’s entirely possible and maybe preferable that those issues will never be resolved in your story, but it helps to hint at possible avenues for growth to help understand your characters better.

The Emotional Journey

People are not static. They change. They grow. Life hammers them with emotional pain the way a sculptor chisels on marble. If people can see their lives the way an art connoisseur appraises a marble sculpture, would they like what they see? Might they see that a few changes here and there would make their lives more pleasing to them?

People acquire and carry a lot of psychological issues as the years go by. Some learn to let go of those issues and come out better for it, but not everyone does. The ones that cling to their pain are the ones that are most hurt by it.

Like their real-life counterparts, fictional characters that readers or gamers can empathize with undergo an emotional journey of sorts. The problems that beset them as they live out your story should strike them where it hurts most – at the emotional or psychological issues described in their back stories.

The back stories that you write for your characters are not for them to launch into long expositions on why they grew up to become the persons that they are now. That is seriously boring stuff.

Criminal Mastermind: Wanna know why I became the way I am? It all started when I was a newborn child swaddled in a basket at the steps of an orphanage. Nobody loved me. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

Hero: Cry me a river. Wake me up when we’re about to fight.

Please don’t even think of writing conversations like that. Long conversations with hardly any point to them are not what make role playing games exciting. Back stories are there to provide the motive force that explains why your characters act the way they do. Much of the material that is in your back stories may not even be revealed in your fiction. Make sure that every portion of a character’s back story that makes its way into your main story is used to advance the plot. Everything else should be kept to yourself.

Let’s take an example from the Harry Potter series. (I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but those who haven’t read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are hereby warned that this paragraph has a few of them.) In the first four books, Professor Snape’s contempt for Harry Potter is obvious, but it wasn’t until the fifth book that his attitude was explained. When Harry took a magical peek into Snape’s past, he found out what a bully his father had been to the young Snape. This revelation isn’t just filler. When Snape caught Harry indulging in magical voyeurism, he was so enraged that he refused to help the boy resist the mental manipulation of Lord Voldemort. Until Order of the Phoenix was published, Professor Snape’s back story served only to shape his attitude toward Harry Potter. Since revealing it would not serve to advance the plot of the earlier books, this back story was kept a mystery. It was only later that J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, revealed this back story in a significant manner. If Snape had volunteered this portion of his past early on, the revelation would have been inconsequential to the plot of the earlier books. It may also have puzzled readers as to why Snape would reveal such an embarrassing story to young Harry.

Part of a character’s emotional journey involves confronting the issues that are causing him or her pain. Those issues may or may not be resolved in the course of your story, but they will have to be faced if doing so will advance the plot. Issues cause characters to behave in ways that may not be in their best interests. They may inspire some interesting sub quests or may even take the story along alternative branches.

Consider Gann, an NPC companion in Mask of the Betrayer. Gann had a major issue that stemmed from his hatred for his mother, a hag who abandoned him when he was a child. A number of psychological studies have shown that the quality of a mother’s bond with her child during the first two years of its life has far-reaching effects in the child’s ability to relate with other people later on. Gann’s issue seems to have engendered a number of personality quirks, including his callousness toward other people, his inability to feel attached to any place long enough to settle down, and his desire to wreak mischief in the dreams of farm girls everywhere. In the game, the PC has a chance to either feed Gann’s hatred or to slowly wean him away from it. Gann even has a chance to confront his mother. What the PC says determines the outcome of this encounter. How the PC deals with Gann affects what bonus feats the PC may attain and what branches of the story the PC takes. Gann clearly undergoes an emotional journey in MotB. Regardless of how players may have felt about this character, the way the writers handled Gann makes a very good case study on creating NPCs.

Story Writing, Part 2: The Plot Thickens

2008-12-10T13:08:00.005+08:00

When it comes to writing plots, I have some very definite views on the matter. I count myself fortunate that Dirtywick, Anduraga, and Indira Lightfoot have indulged me in expressing these views and applying the structure that I advocate. Here, I share the plot-writing method that I use. Readers who find this technique useful are free to apply them to their own work. Please note that this is not the only way to write a plot, but it is the method that I personally use.

I once wrote in this blog that regardless of a story’s length, I find it useful to structure its plot as a three-act outline. In fact, I have a specific formula for how the acts are written.

Act 1. The hero (that is, the PC) becomes aware of a problem to be resolved.

Act 2. The hero tries to attain an objective, to which a strong antagonist is opposed. At this point, the hero gets a complication that makes it more difficult to attain the objective.

Act 3. It seems that the hero has no chance to defeat the antagonist. Nevertheless, the hero can still prevail, but only with the help of one or more third parties that tip the balance in the hero's favor.

The three acts, as written above, are expressed in general terms. Nevertheless, writers need to make their plots more specific. Where does the hero come from? What is the problem that the hero seeks to resolve? Why would the hero care to resolve this problem? Who is the antagonist, and why is this person opposing the hero? These questions and more need to be answered.

In the first act, heroes may or may not be aware of their antagonists. They may not even know what their objectives are at this point. Nevertheless, antagonists may make their influence felt in Act 1 even if they don’t make an appearance yet. By the second act, however, heroes usually know who their antagonists are and will take on a number of increasingly difficult challenges to thwart them.

The complication that occurs in the second act is a curve ball that gets thrown to the hero. It is an unexpected event, one that the hero may not be prepared to deal with. Complications make it more difficult for heroes to accomplish their goals and raise the level of excitement in stories. They can drastically change the relationship of certain characters with each other. The betrayal of a trusted ally, for example, is an oft-used complication in many stories.

The third party that helps the hero in the third act is not necessarily a person, although in non-interactive stories such as movies and novels, it generally is. In Lord of the Rings, for instance, Frodo would never have destroyed the One Ring without the unwelcome intervention of Gollum. In video games that make use of this plot device, however, the third party is often an object that makes the final encounter with the antagonist easier. In the NWN2 OC and in MotB, this object may have been the Sword of Gith, although for many players, it is actually the set of items that the player creates that help save the day.

In non-interactive stories, if the hero loses, it’s usually because of some tragic flaw in the hero’s personality. In video games, however, the hero losing is generally the fault of the player, a situation that is easily resolved by reloading a saved game.

To some degree, plot structures can be sort of fractal in nature. Writers can add more depth to their plots by putting miniature three-act structures within each main act. Some of the mini-acts may also have their own three-act structures within them. How far to take this is up to the writers to decide.

So far, this discussion has been very abstract. I’m going to make it more concrete by providing an example. Here is the top-level three-act structure for the movie The Matrix starring Keannu Reeves.

Act 1. Neo becomes aware of mysterious agents trying to capture him.

Act 2. Neo seeks to awaken his power, of which the Oracle has foretold. Agent Smith seeks to stop Neo by killing him. Cypher betrays Neo and the rest of the Nautilus crew by attempting to kill all of them while they are helpless.

Act 3. In his final encounter with Agent Smith, Neo almost dies. Trinity confesses her love for Neo just as he is dying, thus inspiring him to unleash the power of The One.

In the above example, Neo is the hero, and his objective is to awaken his power. His antagonist is Agent Smith, with whom Neo has a series of encounters. The complication comes when Cypher manages to kill some of the members of the Nautilus crew but is fortunately thwarted before he can kill Neo. Their numbers reduced, Neo and the Nautilus crew stand less of a chance against Agent Smith and his cohorts. In their last fight with the agents, Neo almost dies. It is only when Trinity confesses her love to Neo that he becomes The One who is able to single-handedly defeat Agent Smith and put the entire Matrix at risk.

The formula for creating plots that I expounded on here is one that I have observed in many non-interactive stories. It is possible to deviate from this formula, but whoever does so had better be a very good writer to pull it off.

Since plots are situated in time and place, the setting naturally arises out of the development of the plot. Most of the time, writers create their plots with a specific setting in mind, but sometimes, a better setting might suggest itself as the plot is created. This was what happened in the course of our discussions. Although we had initially set out to create a module in the Forgotten Realms, we eventually wound up creating a custom setting.

Stay tuned for the final chapter in this story writing series.

Story Writing, Part 1: Storming the Brain

2008-12-09T16:07:00.006+08:00

For the upcoming module from bouncyRock Entertainment, our writers’ first task was to come up with the story premise, from which the plot, setting, and characters were eventually created. The initial story development involved Dirtywick, Anduraga, and me. Eventually, we were joined by Indira Lightfoot, as well as a couple of other writers who later bowed out because of real-life commitments. One of these writers was ScarlettThorne, whom I feel deserves to be listed in our credits. ScarlettThorne created an intriguing non-player character that we will be using in our module. (Thanks for your contribution, ScarlettThorne, and best of luck in all your endeavors.)

As may be guessed, having several minds trying to bring the story together was tough. Each of us had our own ideas on where to take the story, and since we had never worked together on a story prior to this, we had difficulties trying to develop it. I won’t go into all the details of what happened at our meetings. Instead, I’ll discuss the techniques and concepts that worked well for us over three blog posts, of which this is the first. These may be of interest to those who would like to learn more about creating stories, particularly those who need to do so in a collaborative setting.

To decide on our story premise (in other words, the general idea of what the story is about), Dirtywick, Anduraga, and I agreed to hold a brainstorming session. We gave ourselves twenty minutes to generate as many ideas as we could, during which no idea would be criticized. We allowed ourselves to suggest any idea, even those that were deliberately silly, in the hope that these may lead to better ones. Afterward, we voted on three of the ideas that we liked best. We then picked the idea that was chosen by most of us. In case of a tie, we’d find a way to break it somehow. Our lead writer could choose which idea he liked most. We could also nominate whoever seemed to be the most impartial among us to break the tie. Alternatively, we could simply discuss the ideas that we had at that point and eventually come to an agreement.

Later, we used brainstorming to get us out of any form of writers’ block, whether while hammering out the plot or deciding on the module title. We’ve found it to be an effective technique to use during our group discussions, but only when we were stuck in a rut. Otherwise, it's better to let the flow of our discussions take us along its natural course.

Mystery Group Unmasked

2008-12-05T10:06:00.004+08:00

Yesterday, I asked the project leader for the new module that I’m working on if it’s okay for me to reveal who the rest of our group members are. He said yes. All this time, I had kept everybody else’s names secret because I wasn’t sure if those can be made public knowledge. Since I’ve been given the green light, I shall now unmask the perps. (Drum roll, please.)

The new module (whose title shall not be revealed at this time) is being developed under the banner of bouncyRock Entertainment. Only two members of the group working on this module are members of bouncyRock, however. The rest of us were recruited specifically for this project.

To the best of my knowledge, I was the first person recruited by the bouncyRock guys. Over the past two months, more people were recruited to the group. Only yesterday, we welcomed a new team member, and there’s a chance that we’ll be recruiting at least one more. A few people were recruited but had to bow out later because of pressing commitments. There were also a couple of promising individuals who were interviewed for scripting positions, but because we realized that the scripting assignments were very light relative to the number of scripters we already have, it was with much regret that we did not bring them aboard.

Without further ado, here are the current developers of this new module. (I apologize if I missed out anybody and will immediately rectify the error in case that transpires.)

Dirtywick: Project Leader, Lead Writer (member of bouncyRock)

Anduraga: Area Design Manager, Writer (member of bouncyRock)

Elysius (aka Frank Perez): Scripting/Programming Manager, Writer, 3D Artist

Barry the Hatchet: 3D Artist

Chaos Wielder: Area Designer

Gallaen Frost (aka Jaesun999): Composer

Indira Lightfoot: Area Designer, Writer

Nytir: 3D Artist

Orion1966 (aka Man_From_Geldar): Scripter

Palafoxx: 3D Artist

Telanor: Scripter

Special thanks go to Jonny Ree and Liso66 for their guidance in this project.

Rammaq's Theme

2008-12-04T09:54:00.000+08:00

Admittedly, I haven't been busy with Faithless lately, but fortunately, Henry Solberg continues to compose music for my module. Some time ago, he created a somber piece for an NPC who made his first appearance in Mask of the Betrayer. This NPC's name is Rammaq, of whom I shall say no more.

I feel that Henry's music captures my version of Rammaq perfectly. Those who want to listen to the music may download it from the following link.

Rammaq's Theme

Teamwork

2008-12-01T22:03:00.003+08:00

In my last blog post, I mentioned that I have been recruited to work with a group that is building a new NWN2 module. To the best of my knowledge, nearly all of us have not worked with any of the other group members before, so some of the growing pains that we’ve been experiencing involve learning how to work together. The fact that the members of the group are scattered across several states or even countries doesn’t make it any easier.

In this group, I’m the head of the scripting team, but I have also been deeply involved with creating the story, painting concept art, and making 3D models. (More on those in a later post.) During our meetings, a lot of ideas get bandied around, most of which are rejected in the course of our discussions. Only a few ideas are eventually approved, usually with modifications suggested by other team members. As a member of the writing and art team, I’ve had my share of rejected ideas as well as approved ones, although there seem to be more of the former than the latter. As head of the scripting team, I’ve had to accept and reject the ideas of other people.

The way I see it, the key abilities of the lead position in any team is being able to discern what ideas to accept or reject and being able to convince the rest of the team to follow one’s lead. In both cases, having a proven track record for delivering quality products is a must, whether those products be scripts, writing, area designs, or art work. The team lead must have a very good feel of what works and what won’t and must be able to motivate the rest of the team to do what needs to be done. Considering that we’re all unpaid volunteers, these are challenging tasks indeed.

Thus far, we’ve employed two methods of decision making: voting on which of several suggestions to implement and having the team lead make the decision after hearing the pros and cons of each issue. Each method has its place. When getting the support of the team is at stake or when trying to get a sense of whether a new idea will be widely accepted by our players, putting the issue to a vote is a good way to resolve it. On the other hand, if a particular decision will have a significant impact on the work that other people produce, or if there is a risk that some part of the module may become incoherent if the wrong decision is made, the team lead has to make that decision after due consultation with the group members who will be affected by it.

In both cases, it is the team lead who chooses which method of decision making to employ. The leader calls the shots, but if the other members of the team aren’t happy with those decisions, they just might quit. For the team lead, it isn’t enough to be competent in one’s field. It is also important to keep open channels of communication with the rest of the team. Each time a command decision has to be made, the team lead must make a check on his Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate skills.

Working in a group entails sacrificing one’s independent vision and direction to accommodate those of other group members. Make no mistake about it; this kind of sacrifice can be painful, especially to a creative person. Nevertheless, when the people who comprise the group are very talented, that sacrifice is worth it. Even a module of moderate size can be done much better and faster with several people working as a coordinated team.

I have high hopes for this new group I’m in. If our first module is well received by the NWN2 community, it might be the start of more modules to come.

Picture Credits
The painting in the pseudo-motivational poster shown in this blog post is by Dieric Bouts, a Dutch painter from the 15th century. The quote at the bottom of the poster is attributed to Doug Smith. I'm not sure who he is, but I think he's this guy. Combining the painting and the quote to make this motivational poster is the work of my twisted mind.

Apologies

2008-11-25T13:08:00.003+08:00

It has been some time since I last posted anything here, and I feel that an explanation is in order. Shortly after blogging about the Temple of Kelemvor, I started work on another outdoor area, Bloodstone Village in Damara. Unfortunately, I made a stupid mistake that caused irrecoverable file corruption. Because I create a separate module for each area that I work on, the damage was limited to Bloodstone Village alone. None of my previous work was affected in any way. Nevertheless, I was so disheartened that I haven't worked on Faithless since then.

About a week before this incident, I had been approached by a talented group of NWN2 modders who invited me to work on their project. The strong track record of these guys was reason enough for me to accept their offer. I haven't been given the go signal to provide details on this project, although I expect that we'll all be promoting it by January or February of next year.

This is my first time to work with a team on a module, and I must say that my past experience in software development had not prepared me for the travails to come. The fact that the team is bristling with talent is both a blessing and a curse. During the initial phase of developing the story, everyone had their own ideas that did not necessarily sit well with everybody else. The creative process is generally painful and is sometimes likened to giving birth, but it becomes especially difficult with so many people claiming paternity.

Nevertheless, out of this orgiastic free-for-all arose a plot that is refreshingly different from the modules that are currently at the Vault. There is much potential for greatness in the plot, but whether that potential gets realized depends on our execution. This is where our ability to work together will be tested. We'll probably have a good sense of whether the story is developed well during the testing phase.

In the meantime, I have not abandoned Faithless. I'm still working on it, although my module is currently taking a backseat to this new project. My blog is mostly about my effort to create Faithless, but other NWN2 projects sometimes grab my attention along the way, and these deserve to be written about as well. I'll continue to update my blog, although my posts will mostly be about the new project that I'm currently involved with. I'll try to find time to post the occasional writeup on Faithless.

Happy Halloween

2008-11-01T00:06:00.006+08:00

Rejoice, players of NWN2, rejoice, for the Halloween 2008 campaign from BouncyRock Entertainment is now available at the Vault. This campaign is packed with delightful tales of horror from over twenty module makers. Decapitated heads, blood all over the floor, entrails from a corpse -- what's there not to like? My son says that this is the most fun he has ever had with a computer game. Isn't he the most precocious three-year-old?

The Temple of Kelemvor

2008-10-24T21:19:00.007+08:00

Atop a hill in Eternity's End stands the Temple of Kelemvor, a place where the records of the dead are kept. Those who have played Mask of the Betrayer may remember this temple because it is one of the few places in the Fugue Plane that are featured in this game. The design of the area was certainly adequate, but it could have been better, in my opinion.

As is my usual practice, I ripped this area from MotB and attempted to improve on it. Taking a cue from Anduraga (a.k.a. Josh), who did a marvelous job of giving the Basilica of Lost Hope a face lift, I laid out the area using the RWS Pocket Cathedrals hakpak from Robinson Workshop. I changed a few placeables and visual effects here and there and applied the same lighting that Anduraga used in the Basilica of Lost Hope.

The result is a hauntingly beautiful piece of work, if I may say so myself.

Eternity's End, Upended

2008-10-21T00:46:00.006+08:00

It has been a long time since I last posted in-game screenshots of areas from Faithless. It's high time that I end this hiatus by presenting pictures of Eternity's End in the grip of war. Although I kept OEI's original design of this area mostly intact, I made a number of significant changes to it. As mentioned in my previous post, I replaced a few houses with burnt shells. I also replaced two of the buildings with piles of rubble.

Aside from these cosmetic changes, I put up a number of makeshift barricades along some of the pathways. These barricades are made from whatever the locals would conceivably have on hand -- crates, wagons, pieces of wood nailed together, those sort of things. Characters may attempt to destroy these barricades, but they stand the risk of being mowed down with missile fire while they are at it.

Perhaps the most striking change that I did to this area was to put a very large crater in one of the streets. In the Forgotten Realms, things that go boom are sometimes employed in warfare if the combatants can afford them. Since Faithless will be an epic-level campaign, it stands to reason that such things will be used to blast the opposition.

Hot Curbs

2008-10-19T13:49:00.008+08:00

Making the Halloween module that I submitted to Bouncy Rock took a lot out of me, so much so that I decided to take a week off to relax a bit. Well, I'm back in the saddle now, plugging away at the toolset once more, this time for Faithless.

The next area that I've chosen to work on is Eternity's End, which I ripped from Mask of the Betrayer. In MotB, Eternity's End looks dreary but pristine, nothing like one would expect from a war-torn city. I decided to roughen it up a bit by replacing some of the houses with burnt shells.

Of course, the ground on which the houses stand must look sooty. Normally, a modder would create this look by coloring the ground grayish-black. In Eternity's End, however, the houses all stand on city curbs, which are placeables just like the houses. The only way to make the curbs appear sooty is to re-texture them. I didn't want to do this because not all houses that stand on the same type of curb will be burnt. Hence, the parts of the curb that would be sooty will vary from one instance to the other.

Fortunately, I found a way to work around this problem. The ground in Eternity's End uses the desert cobble texture, which looks sort of like the texture on the city curbs. I can color the ground sooty black, but I can't use the Color tool to color the city curb. What I can do is raise the ground under each burnt house so that the ground rises slightly above the curb. I'd have to make sure that all placeables have their Height Lock property set to True to keep from accidentally changing their height from the ground. To raise the ground, I used the Flatten tool with the following brush settings:

Size: 3
Outer: 3
Height: varies, but generally more than 0.3 and less than 0.5
Pressure: 100%

The next step is to try to match the color of the raised ground with that of the curb. It's difficult to get an exact match, but I was able to get one that is close enough by using the following settings:

Brush Size: 6
Brush Outer: 0
Brush Pressure: 100%
Color: R = 117, G = 117, B = 133

Finally, I color the ground beneath the house using various shades of grayish black. For this task, my settings are as follows:

Brush Size: 2 or 3
Brush Outer: 0
Pressure: 100%
Color, Least Sooty: R = 61, G = 61, B = 61
Color, Sooty: R = 33, G = 33, B = 33
Color: Most Sooty: R = 5, G = 5, B = 5

Voila -- crispy fried curbs.

I Submit

2008-10-13T01:35:00.004+08:00

Yesterday, I submitted my Halloween horror module to Jclef of Bouncy Rock. A few hours ago, he sent me feedback on my module. Here's what he had to say about it:

Dear Frank,

Played through last night with no bugs/issues. The module had an intuitive system, and the gameplay was scary and fun.

Oh yes... they will scream.

Frankly, that was frankin' amazing - Great work, buddy!

I felt really good about Jclef's feedback, particularly since I poured a lot of effort into my module. I was worried at first that it might be too frustrating to play, but Jclef dispelled those concerns. It's especially good to know that my horror module is actually scary. Trying to elicit chills and thrills without resorting to splatterpunk gore isn't easy, but it can be done even in a computer game. Here's hoping that the Bouncy Rock Halloween Campaign will give us NWN2 players a fun and scary experience.

Now that that's done, I shall be working on Faithless once more.

I'm Ready for My Voice Work, Mr. DeMille

2008-10-12T04:14:00.004+08:00

My little contribution to Bouncy Rock's Halloween campaign will be the first (and perhaps only) module that will feature me as a voice actor. Since my alter ego, Elysius, will be greeting player characters at the door, there was really no question as to who would lend his voice to the role. Of course, I could have settled for having all conversations play silently, but I felt that my module would have made more of an impact if it had actual voice overs.

Over a span of three days, I recorded, edited, and finalized thirty sound files to be played during the conversations with Elysius. It wasn't easy. Each sound file is the product of several recording takes, from which I chose the best segments to splice together. To make matters worse, I have an awful voice and a bit of an accent. I wasn't too worried about my accent, which I felt may lend an air of mystery to my character. It was my voice that needed fixing. I wanted Elysius to sound sinister, but my voice normally sounds bland.

Fortunately, the problem wasn't too difficult to solve. By speaking in deep chest tones, I was able to attain the effect that I wanted. I can't raise the volume of my voice without raising my pitch as well, which I was trying to avoid doing. Hence, I needed to amplify all my recordings to make my voice audible. The effect is better than if I were to speak in my normal voice and use the recording software to artificially lower my vocal pitch. It would have made me sound as if I were trying to speak underwater with cotton in my mouth.

During the editing phase, I kept all my voice files in WAV format. When I was reasonably satisfied with the results, I converted my files to MP3s. I then used the MP3toBMU software to convert them to BMU format. I made sure to enable the option to rename the BMU extension to WAV so that the NWN2 engine could play them in conversations. I don't know why the engine doesn't play the BMU files as is. It's one of the great mysteries of the NWN2 modding world, I guess. All these conversions may sound like too many hoops to jump through, but the effort is worth it. The converted files are about a fifth or a sixth of the size of the original WAVs.

From there, I packaged all my sound files in a hakpak, which also contains a bunch of other custom stuff for my module. My hakpak wound up being almost twice the size of the module itself. Even when compressed, sound files take up a lot of space.

I asked my wife to playtest my module. When she heard Elysius speak, she immediately recognized his voice as mine. I had thought that the pitch of my recorded voice was so low as to be unrecognizable, but that did not turn out to be the case.

My wife didn't get very far in my module because she really isn't a gamer. She was too frustrated with the puzzles for her to go on. Nevertheless, I found it immensely satisfying when she screamed during one of the scary moments of the game. It just goes to show that I can put together a decent horror module when I set my mind to it.

The Devil in the Details

2008-10-09T01:28:00.008+08:00

My Halloween module is almost done, but there seem to be a million and one details to take care of before I can declare it completed. There are bugs to be squashed, placeables to be retextured, sound effects to be added, and who knows what else. I've playtested the module repeatedly, and each time, I find something new to add to my list of tasks. Considering that I've been working on the Halloween module for about a month, I find it somewhat appalling that I can play it from start to finish in a matter of minutes.

At the start of my Halloween module, player characters will meet my alter ego, Elysius. This NPC resembles my avatar at the official Neverwinter Nights boards. I'm seriously considering recording a full set of voice overs for the conversations with Elysius. The advantage of this NPC's costume is that his helmet hides his mouth, which means I won't have to worry about synchronizing his lip movements with the voice overs. Nevertheless, voice work takes a lot of time to accomplish, and if I'm pressed for time, I'll have to ditch it altogether.

It looks like my cutscenes are going to outnumber my combat encounters by four to one. I have only two combat encounters in this module, neither of which are terribly difficult for a single fifth-level character. Actually, the final encounter will be easy if the player characters make proper use of the objects that they find in the module. Fifth-level characters that don't will probably be thrashed.

The scene of the final battle is shown in the picture to the left. I'm having second thoughts about using the visual effect that is shown here. If I can find something better in the short amount of time that I have left, I may replace it.

About the boss monster in this module, the only information I will divulge is that the creature looks absolutely freaky. I didn't create any new monster models. I simply used what is available in the toolset, but I used them in a way that made the boss creature look freaky. At this point, the only way anyone will see what the monster looks like is to play my module. Players won't have long to wait. Bouncy Rock will release the entire Halloween campaign in a few weeks' time.

Which means, back to work for me.

Halloween 3

2008-10-01T22:52:00.011+08:00

This is my third post on the Halloween module that I'm making for the Bouncy Rock campaign. Yes, it's the third successive week that I haven't been working on Faithless, but it looks like I will be able to finish the Halloween module by the end of this week. After that, I'll be plugging away at Faithless once more.

Although I've made several rooms for this module, I'm showing only a couple of in-game shots in this post. I'd like to keep the rest of my areas under wraps if only to retain some element of surprise for players.

The picture on the right is a view of the kitchen, one of the most important rooms in this game. Anyone who hopes to complete this module must know their way around a kitchen. Those who can't tell a potholder from a panhandler need not worry. There will be recipes scattered around the house, all of which will be simple to follow.

The design of this module is similar to those of adventure games such as The Longest Journey and Syberia. There will be several objects in the game that may be combined with each other to overcome various hurdles. Players may right-click items in their inventory and select the "Activate Item (Touch)" option from the menu. The player may then click any other item or placeable to combine the two objects together. For example, if PCs have a pot in their inventory, they can activate the pot and use it on the stove to put the pot on the stove. This simple action is one of a series of steps for PCs to open the path from the ground floor to the second floor.

Another type of puzzle involves interacting with placeables through dialog. The picture on the left shows an example of this type of puzzle. The puzzle shown in this screenshot is a lot easier than it looks. In fact, all my dialog-based "puzzles" really don't require much thinking. They are mostly there for ambiance, nothing more.

This brings me to the topic of cutscenes. I have quite a few of them for such a short module. There are only two areas in this game, but I have four cutscenes so far. I also have a fifth cutscene in the works. Each cutscene is brief, but they are all painstaking to create. I have to get the visuals, sounds, and timing of execution right. Without cutscenes, my module won't look particularly horrific.

Although I want my cutscenes to look frightening, I can't tell if they have that effect. Rather than being scared, I laugh each time I play my cutscenes. I once read that the creators of System Shock 2 could not tell if their game was scary while playtesting it. Perhaps it's impossible to find fear in something that is intimately familiar to you. I hope that players will have their adrenalin pumping like mad when going through my module. If not, I'll be satisfied if my cutscenes are worth a good laugh at the very least.

Double Take While Trick-or-Treating

2008-09-23T23:51:00.012+08:00

My upcoming module, Faithless, is still taking a backseat to another module I'm making for Bouncy Rock's Halloween campaign. I have less than three weeks to complete my little mod of horror, but I'm hoping to wrap it up by next week at the latest. I'm not going to say much about what my module is about. I'd rather have players find out for themselves when Bouncy Rock releases the entire campaign. To compensate for my reticence, I present the following pictures, each of which is worth a thousand words.

Early Halloween Break

2008-09-18T01:51:00.003+08:00

I haven't done any work on Faithless over the past week. Instead, I've been working on another module that will be part of Bouncy Rock's Halloween campaign. Deadline for module submissions is less than a month from now, so I'm prioritizing my Halloween module over Faithless. Hopefully, I'll be able to post a few teaser screenshots of this new module over the next few days.