NWN2 Dark Sun Project

This page details a small project I pursued for Neverwinter Nights 2, started a few months prior to the game's release, directly after my Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion project. It was based off of a now-defunct post-apocalyptic fantasy setting called Dark Sun — think Mad Max set in the bronze age — the goal being to recreate the setting in NWN2. Unfortunately, this overarching project proved unrealistically ambitious and was shelved. . . though not before a modest collection of art was produced.

Though this project marked my first work with NWN2, virtually all of the real-time models you see on this page were completed much more recently. My initial work with this project was almost exclusively limited to high-poly models, produced for normal maps (you can read more about this process on my Oblivion project page). Click here for a sample of some of the hi-poly work for this project.

The bulk of this project is in the Thri-kreen character model. Thri-kreen are a race of mantis-like humanoids emblematic of the Dark Sun setting. A few pieces of official art exists for the Thri-kreen, an example of which can be viewed at the bottom of this page, and my design is based largely off of them.

While these models were all produced ostensibly for NWN2, by the time I got around to finalizing them, my focus was to prepare them for this website, and not necessarily to produce playable, game-ready content. As such, the Thri-kreen is unanimated, and polycounts are slightly higher than I might like them to be, had I intended them to be playable content.

In addition to the Thri-kreen, I created models for a few of the setting's more ubiquitous weapons. Dark Sun is a setting where metal is extremely rare, so weapons would commonly be fashioned from strange materials. In this case, an axe crafted from the jawbone of a large reptile, a longsword of volcanic glass, and a polearm composed of... well, some blue material I left purposely vague.

Here are the weapon textures. Click for higher resolutions.