Lovis

While I have no fresh rendershots for you at this time, I do have a (minor) update. The base mesh of the Mind Flayer is finished as well. Unfortunately I destroyed the hires mesh through inattentiveness, so I will have to redo that. The good news is that this did not take an awful lot of time to create in the first place. I also see it as an opportunity to improve on my original work. I also think about giving Sculptris by Pixologic a try.

Hooray, this means that my critters will really make it into the game :)

I've been working on the mind flayer model a bit. As I see it, nobody has figured out the import issues, so far. This is really bad, but hopefully Bethesda will say something about in the next podcast episode as the question has come up several times in the thread over in the official forums where they were collecting topics. Anyway, here's what the hires mesh of the mind flayer looks like ATM: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7068/6851658764_6ec5c1da06_b.jpg mindflayer_render by LovisTabletop on Flickr http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7280/6851659012_0e75d2a598_b.jpg mindflayer_render_2 by LovisTabletop on Flickr If things really don't work out, I'll have to create my own RPG ;)

Couldn't motivate myself to dive into NifSkope so far... Anyway, I did something else that of you might find interesting: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7059/6821878622_3ce5a618a6_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7044/6816109196_cc16e76da8_b.jpg Here we go, the model is rigged now! Unfortunately I'm struggling with a nasty cold ATM, so I kinda lack the drive to sit down on my home PC after work to proceed with this bugger. Anyway, I'll have a look into NifSkope on the weekend.

Having not much time to spare at the moment, so it took me quite some time to get the rig done. Now it is - almost - finished. I will post new screenshots tomorrow, showing the beholder in new poses. After that, the work in blender is finished and I will have to figure out a way to get the model first into NifSkope and then into Skyrim. Interesting times ahead ;) I'll keep you posted.

Really impressive. I love the style!

Thank you for the encouragement. I actually started with the rig as well last night. This will indeed take some time, but I am confident that I can get it right. I will be working on the creature tomorrow night but after that there will be some downtime, probably until 7th March. Then however, I plan to do an animation marathon and hopefull finish the work on the beholder that can be done in Blender within a week. Meanwhile, I will do some research on how the beholder can be brought to Skyrim - if at all.

Here's the promised update: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7061/6936089301_95851d481f_b.jpg The texture map is now almost finished, just need to add some detail to the teeth and tongue. The render above comes pretty close to what you can expect the creature to look ingame as it is rendered with pretty basic settings (aside from SSAO which can be activated in Skyrim using a mod, however). Next step would be the rigging/animation then... I hope you like it!

*gasp* This is truly awe-inspiring. There obviously is a huge difference between interested dilettantes (me) and professionals (you). What program did you use to create this model? Big, big, big thumbs up!

Here we go, the promised render with better lighting: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7063/6920853961_81effb4fd3_b.jpg Won't have much time to proceed until next week, though. Expect an update Monday night.

Nice! Concerning the shaders: I have not looked into if and how Skyrim allows you to add custom shaders, and whether you'd use DirectX's HLSL, OpenGLs GLSL or something completely different (some games do offer a high-level shader programming lanuage that might offer only a subset of what the underlying technology could actually do but are easier to understand and learn). Anyway, this article could be a point to get you started: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~kerwin/refraction.html

You are certainly right about this. I would like to at least finish the base version of the critter, before I involve the community in this, though. For now, I am busy with texturing and I think that I will not finish this step before next week. Alternate skins or model variants could be something to create in a community effort as could be the quest line (reminds me that I wanted to to contact the people making the Vigilance of Stendarr mod). BTW, I just realized that the last screenshots are a bit dark. I will provide new screens tonight with better lighting. Considering the behaviour topic: As I see it, I could create a new race in CK, copy one of the existing behaviour files and have the animation events defined therein trigger the custom animations that I will create. So as I understand it, it should be possible to add the Daedric Perceiver to the game, but I might be mistaken. What's not possible is to add new behaviours. Thus I need to use the behaviour of a existing creature that provides halfways suitable states for my beastie. Again, I might be wrong as I have not yet dived into the details of this issue. One last thing: Been collecting ideas about which other creatures from D&D would be worth creating, and I think I will definitely create a gelatinous cube at some point as it is easy to do, iconic to D&D and cheesy as heck ;) Most interesting part might be the creation of some kind of refraction shader, actually.

I'm watching u! http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7045/6915206901_1ea75fa6dc_b.jpg Texturing well under way but still far from being finished. Tedious work, actually (if you want it to look halfways decent). Still, the blender texture painting tools are truly great. As for the animation problems. I am pretty sure that there will be some workaround for this sooner or later. For now, I don't worry too much that I won't be able to import this fellow to Skyrim as it will take me quite some time to get to that point anyway. Multiple variants of the mosnter might be an idea as well. I plan to release the critter as an endorsable mod that only contains the monster. For that, I might include different variations of the same monster. For my story mod, there will be only one beholder, though. Still a good idea.

Oh, the actual critter to fight in the quest line will be called Xanathar as an hommage to the original Eye of the Beholder game ;) (or maybe Xanathor to avoid trademark issues). As for the name of the "species", I like the Daedric Perceiver or maybe it'll be Daedric Observer or Daedric Watcher.