Kraken creature model

The kraken was my last creature model for Neverwinter Nights 1, created for a cancelled premium module. Though it was never finished (as is evident in the textures), I felt it important to include in my portfolio, as it involves perhaps the most technically sophisticated animation work I've done.

There were a couple big challenges in producing this model. First, I had to take an unnatural behavior (a giant squid floating in-place, in combat with a comparitively smaller human) and make it look natural. The greatest challenge, however, was the complexity of the skeleton. The kraken has eight fully animated tentacles, which resulted in a skeleton consisting of over 75 bones. This made the kraken one of the most complex and ambitious creature models to ever be made for Neverwinter Nights.

On top of this, technical limitations (NWN1 was a game released in 2002, mind you) meant that the deformable skin mesh had to be seperated into pieces, one for each tentacle. An other, much more tedious limitation was the fact that all animation had to be done with linear animation controllers (no tweening) and limited IK. The NWN model exporter was quite simplistic in what kinds of animation it could export, taking position and rotation keyframes and essentially nothing else. Any sense of momentum within a single animation had to be implied through manual keyframing.

Here is a short animation demonstrating the kraken's attack animations. The floating red sphere indicates roughly where a player character would be positioned during combat. This was rendered in 3dsMax, but used linear tweening, and so should look roughly identical to how it would have appeared in-game.