General:The Dragon's Eyrie/Battlespire/Characters

''I was responsible for the character 'Sprites' in Battlespire. Built, textured and animated in Alias on the SGI machines. Hand drawn art was utilized for the character creation screens, for which Louis Sandoval provided some lovely artwork.

right|Old Man Chimere
 

An example of my character design from Battlespire. The old man Chimere was rendered using Alias once again. After experimenting with Alias' particle hair system on Daggerfall, of which the horses mane and tail are examples, I decided that for most of the character in Battlespire I would use the traditional "sausage" hair. This gave me more control, and for the resolutions we were going to use, looked better.

In the animation from which this image is taken Chimere would look deep into the flame and then raise his head and wag his finger at you in a stern, knowing sort of way. All of the dialogue animations were saves as "FLICS" an Animator Pro animation format. This had the benefit of giving us very clear, crisp animations without taken up too much space on the CD, albeit they only had a palette of 256 colours per FLC. Despite the relatively small size some had to be taken off the CD as the Segue and Intro animations were so big. This gave less variety to the final dialogue sequences but no one seemed to notice.

 

 left|Fire Daedra
 

The fire Daedra started life in Daggerfall. This version is obviously larger and has more animation frames, but the undeying model has also been tightened up, before adding in the particle effects. .

 right|Clannfear|link=General:The Dragon's Eyrie/Clannfear
 
To the right is a small sample animation of one of my favourite creatures I created in my time with Bethesda. The animation cycle shown here is 16 frames. The actually game characters used only 8 frames, still this was a big improvement over Daggerfall's 4 frames.  Click on the walking image to the right to see a large animation of the Clannfear strutting his stuff. (663 KB) 

   
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The Clannfear was all my own design. We were in pinch as our monster design guy Mark Jacksonwas busy and did not have time to complete his sketch of the proposed Clannfear, a bird like creature with a nasty temper. It fell to me to come up with something quick and the green guy you see here now is the result. All textures were designed using Alias' extensive procedural texture facilities. To the Left is a larger example of the Clannfear. The Clannfear itself was built to be used in advertising and possible TV commercial work and is thus very detailed. Most of this has been lost in the game.. page.
 right|Clannfear
To the right is an early test render of the head. Note the back frill is not quite complete at this stage and the red patterning has yet to be introduced onto the frill. 
   
Twenty years later I revisited the Clannfear, using ZBrush, to create something closer to what I had originally intended.

Click the graphic to the left to read more about that. 

   
left|Xivilai
  Xivilli, another of the Daedric ruling class. Near the end of the project characters were being introduced that had not been originally in the design. These had to created within a few hours. Fortunately most were humanoid in basic design and were only needed in the dialogue screen. The graphic to the Left is an example of this. 

right|Spider Daedra
 

The Spider Daedra pictured to the right is an example of another of the weird denizens of the Battlespire. Originally he supposed to have a human hand but I thought a Preying mantis look would seem more threatening to the player.) 

   
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One of the critisms of Batlespire was its use of sprites and this character was ill fitted for a world of gloomy corridors and tight passage ways. Being so wide his legs would clip through the wall edges which resulted in rather wierd enemy, certainly not the threatening preying mantis creature I originally envisioned. 

right|Vermai
 

The Vermai was the first creature I modeled for Battlespire. Again this model was built with the intention of using it for press release and possible TV advertising. It's very detailed and was intended to stand up to close scrutiny.

    

left|Vermai|link=General:The Dragon's Eyrie/Battlespire
I made the decision to model it this way early on as we had come across problems with Daggerfall when we had tried to used some of the models for other, non game, purposes. The models just did not stand up to that kind of work, nor were they intended to. So with Battlespire I took time to ensure that we would not run into the same problems again. For an early version of the model ratating 360 degrees click on the image to the right (226KB) 

right|Clarentavious
 

Clarentavious the mage. One of the characters you meet during the course of Battlespire. The image here comes from the dialogue screens. A variation on this theme appears on my title page, which has a combination of old man Chimere and Clarentavious. This was done in my own time and I will eventually design the old Bethesda web-mage in 3D.(See gallery for more detail) Here though Clarentavious has a similar animation to the old man Chimere and will gaze into the light at the end of his staff before answering your questions with a knowing look. 

left|Daedra Lord
 

This Daedra Lord may look familiar as it was used for online banner advertising of the game. I wanted to give the character horns that felt heavy. Similar to the movie "Legend" s Tim Curries's Demon character, although mine don't bounce!

  

right|Daedra Lord
This Daedra Lord may look familiar as it was used for online banner advertising of the game. I wanted to give the character horns that felt heavy. Similar to the movie "Legend" s Tim Curries's Demon character, although mine don't bounce!

  

 right|Dark Seducer
  She is in fact the same character from the cover of the game. Originally these characters first appeared in Daggerfall and there she would morph into the winged creature that you see at the top of this page. The transformation scene was scrapped from Battlespire to save memory and time. By the way Daedra have no toes, so her feet are intentionally toeless. Honest! ;-)

 
	
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  Many of the characters in the game were added as we went along as the design was still evolving as we started production. The character to the right, Imago, was added late in production as a sort of supporting character. I'm actually unsure if he made it to the final game. Again, like some other later additions, only a few hours were put aside for characters such as these which explains his general humanoid appearance.

 

 thumb|right|  
 

The scamp became one of the more enduring characters from the game. Originally intended to be just a two legged version of Daggerfall's rat his personality blossomed with the joining of Ken Rolston, the internationally renowned game designer of Paranoia, to the team. Ken's own acting skills enabled me to have a really good understanding of these pesky scamps and I was able to add additional animations to their dialogue, such as scratching themselves and hopping up and down. To the left a scamp scratches his ear.

 

 left|Sumeer
 

Sumeer, another of the Daedra. I was pleased with the way he came out as he was very close to the original sketch which gave him the attitude, I thought, of a genie. If you look closely at his clothing you can just make out Daedric symbols. A whole alphabet was designed for the game which used these symbols. The battlescythe had them embossed onto the blade for example, and some of the games puzzles required some knowledge of them.

 

 right|Herne
  The Daedra are a demon-like race that feature heavily in the Elder Scrolls world. To the right is a Herne. Virtually all modeling, animation and rendering had to be completed within two days for each character. To make this possible I used Alias's batch processing facility. I would line up the renders before I left at night and write a batch file to render and process them over-night. Using this method I only had minor processing to do on the PC the next morning and then continue to model and animate.

 

 left|Zenaida
 

The Daedra are a demon-like race that feature heavily in the Elder Scrolls world. To the right is a Herne. Virtually all modeling, animation and rendering had to be completed within two days for each character. To make this possible I used Alias's batch processing facility. I would line up the renders before I left at night and write a batch file to render and process them over-night. Using this method I only had minor processing to do on the PC the next morning and then continue to model and animate.

 

 right|Jaciel
 

Two versions of some characters were produced. One for "family" audiences and one for "Mature". Basically the 'Mature' versions featured nudity. BOTH versions featured hacking people to death with sharp pieces of metal.

 

 left|Faydra
 
Another character, barely clothed.

 

    
 

Another character, barely clothed.

 
 

Notes
These images were obtained from an older archive. The images were changed, but the new ones were never archived.
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