Neverwinter Nights: The Making of BloodSpell Part 2

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The Making of BloodSpell Part 2

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

We continue our in-depth look at the making of BloodSpell with two key production elements: how it looks and how it moves. As any Toolset user knows, the key to great looking settings is not necessarily the tileset but the placeable objects and costuming of your world. Almost any setting can be created with the right elements of lighting, costuming, and props. A great set is only a pretty picture if nothing happens to bring the world to life. This is where animation comes in and the world is given motion. The very definition of Machinima is that it is a style of animation combined with the natural fit of film making.

View the official BloodSpell trailer.

Set and Asset Construction

Who are you and what do you do on BloodSpell?

Steve: I'm Steve Wallace and I do a bit of everything, from asset creation to nit-picking. I worked on our character designs, customised body parts and textures, turned sketches into sets, created custom placeables, hacked about with NWScript, raked through thousands of existing assets to find a handful for approval, tried to keep our assets in some semblance of order, tracked down bad lines, and pointed out plot holes.

As well as all that, I helped put our animatic together, suggesting shots and manipulating characters, and did the same thing with our trailer and our main shoot.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process Strange Company uses to create the art assets for BloodSpell?

Steve: Our custom assets all went through a number of iterations. Hugh would start by giving a brief, which could range from thumbnail sketches or a quick sentence or two to something more substantial, and then I'd go off and put a rough version together. For maps and textures, we'd then take a look at them (in-game and in the Toolset for the maps, and in NWExplorer for textures and models), keep what we liked, and ditch what we didn't. This regular review process meant time wasn't wasted working on something that would end up rejected, and everyone could get involved in the asset development process.

All of our maps were created using the Aurora Toolset, our models were created and edited with 3D Studio Max and the NWMax plug-in, and our texture work was done using Adobe Photoshop. Other tools we found useful were PLTEditor and DDS Converter to get our textures in and out of the game, NWArmoury to scale our characters to make them more individual, and NWHak to create our .hak files.

Most of our modeling was simple - on my end, anyway. Occasionally, we'd find an existing asset that was ideal except for one little thing; clipping the offending part off in Max was nice and simple. Some of our maps needed custom walkmeshes, and we found the best solution was to copy an existing walkmesh from an existing featureless tile, paste it into out custom tile, and then adjust it to fit.

We couldn't get the facial expressions we wanted with some of the models we had, so we used Max to tweak their facial structure to give us better control over their expressions, but not before Hugh had used a character head with dancing eyebrows in a book on Machinima.

What tips do you have for designing characters in Neverwinter Nights? How do you get them to look good?

Steve:

What to Wear

The first thing to do is figure out what you want a character to look like - it's worth doing before you even fire up the Aurora Toolset so you have some idea of what to look for when picking body parts. If you've got no idea what you're aiming for, you'll find yourself spending a lot of time flicking through body parts for no real reason.

Take Notes

There are some body parts you'll end up wanting to use regularly - single coloured Pelvis parts for example. Spending some time noting down matched body parts (Cloth1 Thighs and Pelvis, Cloth2 thighs and Pelvis, etc.) can save you a lot of time when you're making 30 or more characters.

I often found I'd end up with a choice of several Torsos to use. Noting down the body parts in question meant I could edit copies of the outfit and quickly produce three or four versions by going to the right parts straight away.

Colour Co-ordination is for the Weak

Before starting on a character's outfit, start off by setting Cloth1, Cloth2, Leather1, and Leather2 to different colours. That lets you avoid putting an outfit together that looks great and then finding that it's severely limited or has crippled your colour options.

Muscle World

It's worth noting that every character in NWN has a honed physique with rippling muscles. This may not be what you want, so get used to the idea of long sleeves on your characters.

One Size Fits All

All of the characters of a species in NWN are the same size - all humans are yay high, all elves are that high, and so on. Using NWN Armoury, you can scale the human body parts to make slightly taller or shorter characters and add some variety to the mix.

Looking Good

We found it best to start with a character's legs and work up. The Pelvis and Thigh parts should match (unless your character is spectacularly badly dressed), as should the Shin parts (unless you want your character to be wearing boots, that is). Ideally, the Feet should be a different colour, as you can apply one of the black metallic colours to them for a leather effect, or otherwise make them stand out from your character's pants.

Torso-wise, we found there were roughly 5 styles, combining the CEP and the main NWN assets - Armoured, Leather Fetishist, Generic Fantasy, Naturist, and Flash Gordon Meets Elvis. For Bloodspell, we went for Generic Fantasy with a dash of Flash Gordon Meets Elvis. We couldn't find much use for a lot of the body parts, which are pretty specific to D&D-style fighters and barbarians, but a few of our low-life background characters use a smattering of them.

The Torso/Pelvis divide proved to be a bit of a problem when making characters who would be seen close-up, but luckily the Belt parts can cover up a multitude of mismatched parts or break up the straight up-and-down line of some characters.

Shoulder parts can tie armoured characters together nicely, but we didn't find too much use for them on our unarmoured characters. If you use Shoulder parts, be careful, we found some of our characters were turning into Flash Gordon rejects when we tried adding them.

Biceps match pretty well to Torsos, even though there are a limited number of styles. Forearms work much the same way, although the shortage of cuffs can make some of them look a little funny.

We found Robes to be useful (for a Cathedral filled with monks, they were great), despite the odd clipping issue with some other body parts.

What about organising such a massive project? Is it harder to work on a very large project than a small one, and if so, what steps does the team take to keep it under control?

Steve: First of all, a quick word about organisation. If you keep your assets organized, you'll save yourself a lot of time in the long run. We found out the hard way about that, and wasted a lot of time trying to find our most recently modified assets.

All of our custom character assets went into one .hak file, making it nice and simple to include our custom characters in our maps, and we set up an .erf file containing all of our character blueprints. A single character .erf made it easy for us to implement character changes and apply them to every map. We used a similar approach for our map files, keeping them all in a single .hak file for easy management.

Organisation wasn't as bad as you may think. Our initial development was carried out with a very small team, and we could simply keep a "Most Recent" directory and update it as we finished initial versions of our various assets.

By the time we had moved on to tweaking those assets, we had a larger team and there was some conflict between modifications we were making - one of us could be working on scripts in a map, and someone else could be making revisions to that map.

We ended up using one PC as the core machine with master copies of our assets. That way, map changes could be implemented on the core machine, while other assets could be completed on other machines, exported as .erf files, and then imported into the core maps.

Animation

Who are you and what do you do?

Justin: I'm Justin Hall, the animator of the team. I trained traditionally in 2D drawn animation, stop motion, etc., but all of my professional work to date has been CG, some game fmv, in-game character animation, and a TV series, Tiny Planets. This is my first Machinima project but I'm hoping to exploit all of the system's potential to make BloodSpell a piece of animation to remember.

How have you found animating for Neverwinter Nights so far? How is it similar or different from work like this you've done in the past?

Justin: It is an interesting system to get into, most of my other work has been fairly conventional, straight pre-rendered stuff, game fmv, and TinyPlanets. I have done some games' character work, but I've always been used to animating within standard bone systems, so it's taken a little getting used to working with the NWN Dummy skeleton. So long as you have some model elements visible, it all works okay.

What tips would you give other people who are looking to create character animations for NWN?

Justin: Anyone can make things move around on a computer, that doesn't really make you an animator - I trained for three years and I'm always learning.

From my experience so far, NWN allows for some pretty sophisticated animation, so you don't have to just hack sketchy movement together. Learn your tools and learn the craft, take the time to find out what is possible, and learn how to do it. Get some books or look up some tutorials on-line. It's not going to be Pixar, but it is still pretty powerful. You want to convince people and create something they remember for the right reasons, not because your main character slides around like a body-popping robot with loose parts.

Next week: how to bring everything together and keep it organized along with the nitty gritty on coding this beast.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3