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Morrowind-in-Oblivion Project

After my work with the first Neverwinter Nights had come to a close, I felt it important, before attempting to jump into the professional realm, to catch up with more current-day art techniques than NWN1 utilized. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, at this time, approaching release, and made for an ideal opportunity to familiarize myself with normal maps and higher-poly modeling.

Normal mapping

As I mentioned, my modification work with Oblivion marked my first work with normal maps. My initial technique was fairly straightforward: box-modelling out both a high-poly and a real-time version, and then using a freeware program called xNormal to generate the normal map.

As time went on, manually modeling out so many details in the high-poly model proved to be prohibitively time-consuming and, though it produced a strong base from which to work, a good deal of texture work still was often necessary. I wasn't aware at the time that industry artists use programs like Zbrush and Mudbox for their normal mapping.

Rather than ditch the high-poly box-modeling approach entirely though, my technique evolved, using high-poly models only to establish overall shape and form, and producing most fine detail and texture in Photoshop. As of this writing, many of my most recent normal maps (especially environmental maps, as seen on the Gatehouse) were produced entirely within Photoshop.

What this project was

The goal of my little project was to bridge Oblivion with its predecessor, by injecting a small slice of the familiar Morrowind flavor into Oblivion, in a way that was compatible with the game's lore and spirit. I was to add two new locations to Oblivion: a dark elf "embassy", of sorts, and then the Imperial garrison of "Septim's Gate", at the border, a location mentioned in the lore, but omitted from the game world.

The image below shows the Dark Elf embassy. This blocky adobe architecture is a recreation of a style ubiquitous to Morrowind. The model itself is quite complete, unwrapped and texture-ready, but was never given the proper texture lovin' it would need. The textures shown here are tiling adobe textures (example) that likely would have been used as a base for the final textures.

This image shows Septim's Gate, an imperial border garrison. In Morrowind, and to a lesser extent in Oblivion, the Empire had a particular Imperial Roman flavor. I decided to run with that, and based this structure closely off of Porta Nigra, an ancient Roman gate in Germany. Seen here, it's untextured, but the plan was to use, where possible, existing textures from Oblivion's 'Imperial City' architecture, which itself had a Romanesque style.

The interiors were never produced, but a collection of 'clutter' objects were. These are simple little mundane items used to populate homes and interiors. They were all implemented in-game, with functioning physics/collision meshes.

Why it was not completed

After the game was released and a few months had passed by, art modification tools were somewhat slow in progressing and knowledge was hard to come by. Once I came to the implementation stage, this proved to be a real impediment, and I found that the majority of my time was spent debugging and testing. Eventually I had to face the difficult decision of whether to shelf my Oblivion work and move on or to keep moving forward in the hopes that better tools and techniques would become available. Neverwinter Nights 2 was, at the time, moving towards release, and familiarity won out. My Oblivion work went on hiatus and I chose to jump over to that modding scene.

The time I spent on Oblivion was certainly not fruitless though. Though nothing was released, I did manage to get pieces of my work implemented in-game, at a time when few others had been able to do so (Summer, Fall of '06). In addition to the above clutter objects, my bonemold armor was functioning in-game as well. Unfortunately though, there were significant issues with how normal maps were rendered — I'm inclined to think there were flaws with how the model plugins exported tangent space data.

In assembling this site, I went back to touch up a lot of my work, including what you see on this page. I was pleased to find that the Oblivion modding community has progressed quite far, and many of the kinks have been worked out of the user-made tools. Normal maps now display correctly, as you can see in the screenshots above.

Oh, and one last thing

I imagine that some viewers of this page might be confused as to whether I actually created these models or just took existing models and adapted them to a new game engine. Let me assure you that, while the designs originated from existing designs, all of the modeling and texture work are fully my own, produced from scratch.

If you're interested in comparing the work on this page to their counterparts from Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, here are a couple shots: Bonemold armor. Chitin armor.