#currupted

Skyrim: Creature Remixes

In games as large and expansive as Skyrim there is always a demand for more content. For each part a of development great consideration is given to how we can create the maximum amount of content from the production pass on the game. What I try to add on top of that is (hopefully) clever reuse of existing assets to solve specific problems or just squeeze out more value for the player from what we already have. One key example of this from my work is character “remixing.”

The origin of the character remixes came from my first job in the industry as a character modeller. As I was adding FX to creatures I was noticing some wasteful practices in the art and set about optimizing them. This was not a critique of the art it was all beautiful I just had fresh eyes and was able to see ways to improve the efficiency without compromising the in game result. I would run mesh reductions and re-skin heavy meshes and mirror textures. After any optimization I would create a side by side in game for the original artist to review to make sure quality was maintained. While the super high quality of the character art was not always necessary for the in game model I found that extra quality made the creatures hold up better during the various remixing techniques.

Frost Giant

The Frost Giant was the first time I attempted to use the technique of blending two creatures together to create a third. I had the idea of blending 2 or more and then baking the textures down using the same re-baking technique I used to mirror the dragons.

I found this old creature Karstaag as a guide. I then built a similar looking creature on the giant rig using the giant and the troll models by Jonah Lobe. For this workflow I worked entirely with the low poly in max but Jonah was not sold on the final quality. He helped my spruce up the final version a bit and pushed me to look for ways to pull more details from the source meshes in the future.

I re-projected the multiple texture sheets down into one and then polished them by unifying the color scheme and paining out seams and baking errors in the normal map.

Feral and Vampire Falmer

For the Dawnguard DLC we were going to focus on the falmer. As they usually had very distinctive clothing and armor I made some naked “feral” variants to use in some dark dungeons we were creating.

For the final boss fight Daryl Brigner and I designed for the Falmer Valley area we needed waves on enemies so I made a frozen vampire version as well by adjusting their coloring and teeth.

Flaming Thrall

Designer Phil Nelson came to me one day with an idea he had mocked up for a flaming thrall. A spell you learned to summon a dog that chases your enemies and explodes. I took the wolf mesh and made a scrolling fire version with a particle fire trail. The beauty of being able to handle the meshwork, rigging, and FX work myself made me a one stop shop for requests like this. If Phil had gone through the normal channels to request his thrall he probably would not have been able to get it because it would theoretically require 3 different peoples time to get done. I was able to hand him something back we shipped with later the same day.

Labyrinthian Spectral Draugr

Another level designer Joel Burgess had a dungeon he was trying to make extra special and he wanted some unique enemies to populate it.Based on what was happening in the dungeon we decided on some ghost draugrs and their spectral hounds. I had no time to slot in his request as we were pushing hard to finish the game so I made it my fun bonus project to work on at the end of my day. Even at 2 in the morning sometimes I would pull them out once I hit my scheduled goals for the day and chip away at their look and spectral weapons.

In the end I delivered him 4 new creatures and 3 new weapons he could use to add a special flavor to his dungeon. My initial shortcut of color remapping the normal maps as the diffuse maps would later come back to haunt me as in the final shipped version of the game normal maps were processed down to a format that could not be remapped and I had to go and fix every asset I had made. The final result was not a nice looking as my first pass but that is the reality of game development.

Naaslaarum and Voslaarum

While riffing on ideas for the Falmer Valley with DLC lead Jeff Browne I had the idea to use a furniture setup to allow dragons to punch in and out of a frozen lake. Using our expertise in ambushes and FX we are fairly confident we could pull it off without any issues. For these unique dragon I wanted to create unique models.

When I initially touched the dragon meshes to optimize them I also played with some ideas to get more dramatic variants from the base meshes without a full remodel. In the end our variants that were in the base game ended up being mainly texture swaps for time considerations. I felt with some creative thinking you could break the repetition and similarity that exists in texture variant models. I used a combination of UV sliding, mesh tweaking, add on meshes, and texture re-baking to try and visually break my dragon from the base game dragons. Character artist Ben Carnow added some texture polish to the final result.

Corrupted Shades

One of my favorite examples of creatively tackling a task that came my way. The task was for necromancer magic effects for the final boss in a dungeon. I went to the designer and got some more information on the dungeon and then pitched this alternate backstory: the necromancer is ripping souls from dead bodies from the civil war and making these enemies and then actually becomes one himself for the fight. I felt this added way more excitement for the player than a human with different magic at the end and I could do it in the same amount of time.

I kit-bashed together a few variants of skeleton and soldier armor and painted them all black in the low poly meshes using vertex color. I created black smoke fx and red glows to cement the look. I did the same for the necromancer but skinned it to the dragon priest rig.

In order to sell the idea the dungeon was filled with desecrated corpses of soldiers I build cheap blackened physics corpses and set them up in the editor as containers to allow the player to loot them.

In all of these cases there was one goal in pushing form more and unique creatures in the game: player value. If I can take items we have lying around and give the player a whole new creature that would have otherwise taken too long to create than I feel I have been successful at adding some. I was never really sure weather or not I had achieved it (other than the lack of Kotaku posts about the handful of shitty add on creature in Skyrim) until I was writing this post and discovered actual fan art dedicated to the creatures I had added using these techniques:)

Twin dragons art:

https://amnis406.deviantart.com/art/Twin-Dragons-375467352

Corrupted shade art:

https://edwarddelandreart.deviantart.com/art/Corrupted-Shades-538688974

As a special bonus the work I added has found its way into other Elder Scrolls titles:)

LOADING....

LOaaadiiding...

FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,FAILURE,

REPEATING ATTEMPT... FAILURE

REPEATING ATTEMPT... FAILURE,

REPEATING ATTEMPT... FAILURE

NO AVAILABLE SPACE, ERORR CODE 123 THE CURRENT FILE IS MISSING OR CURRUPTED.

[ KOR: CURRENT CONECTION IS TOO WEAK FOR DOWNLOADING THIS FILE. ]

[ KOR: NOT ONLY DO WE REQUIRE MORE RELAYS, THE SEVERS ARE CURRENTLY CASCADING, FAILURE IS EMINENT AND SPACE IS AT ITS LIMIT...]

____________________________________________________

6 months later...

____________________________________________________

[ KOR: Cascade Erorr was permitted to occur due to the lack of support by the collective as a result 54 Files were lost permanently, in addition several original completed files have been Erased by an attack Coming from the The Antartic Circle. This includes File [ Starlight ] and [ Little Bear ]. The Taken Relay has suffered critical damage. Current Insight Condition is at 3%. Agents 99 and 98 efforts successfully expanded the availablespace by 90%]

[ MOTHER THIRDA ]

Rebel, leader of the Third Ring, part the first resistance against The ######## Empire witch ultimately failed.

Forced into slavery after the fall of her home planet Nereva by the ##### Forces, she grew to become a Mama to the younger prisoners. Whit time she grew to gain the trust of her captors, allowing her to become influential within their circles and even starting her own Slave Trading company. Under the gaise of witch, she smuggle people outside the range of the ###### empire as well as help the resistance transport suply across the quadrant whenever possible.

Thanks to her unique skill as well as the wast network or Rebel slave trading companies, over 75 trillion species avoided being sold into slavery. It is worth mentioning that the ####### Empire..."

[99: There's a link here for the File, but Kor can't get to it, sorry. ]

"...is the largest government in the universe and that her efforts, although not perfect, were ultimately the only choice.

Margaret Bennet - Buain A' Choirce

Pretty little gem why so shy,

you're the crystal of our eyes.

Looking down from the sky,

sad little thing don't you cry.

Sooner or later you're going to die.

-

And then we'll sit and let you be,

and it will have nothing to do with me,

for you will fall into the sea,

leaving us here with what is key.

-

We'll keep it as you go away,

and here we will stay,

it would be a grand day,

that's all I have too say.

-

For it's a look at what may be,

a thing that's not a guarantee.

It's a key that allows us to flee,

the thing that makes us free.

And returns us all to the sea,