Fawn at Sunset
Check thou this out, Dragons and Dragonettes:
[singlepic id=866 w=550 h=309 float=center]
Pretty in pink!
You know, if Fawn were a real place, it would probably look like this every morning and evening, wouldn’t it? City of Beauty indeed!
Thepal is crafting what is shaping up to be a phenomenal-looking remake of Serpent Isle…dude has talent, for sure.
(Of course, this makes my job as Lead Worldbuilder for Ultima Return that much harder; Sergorn has already told me we need to deliver something that looks as close to this good as possible.)
Awesome!
I’ve always thought that Oblivion would be the ‘construction tool of choice’ for anyone hoping to re-create Britannia.
My eyes are going to be glued to this – thanks for sharing!
I’m looking for a good Oblivion-constructed ‘Sosaria’….
To say its looks awesome is a goddamn understatement. And it looks just SO MUCH like the original game it is mindboggling.
I gotta ask Thepal, how did you manage to craft this? Did Oblivion had already prefabs that fit with the Fawn look ?
Oblivion created an amazing gameworld. I only played that game for hours to look around rather than questing. Hopefully we get some more Ultimas with such beautiful graphics.
Let’s petition EA to let them Obsidian do the next Ultima:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/25/obsidian-entertainment-playing-in-other-peoples-worlds/
When I see Feargus Urquhart saying THIS: I can only beg EA to hire them!
“And if Obsidian had their pick of any property to update and make their own? ‘I’d like to do Ultima,’ says Urquhart. ‘I think doing an Ultima would be awesome. I think it’s been long enough since Ultima 9. Those Ultima games that Garriot did were cool, and I think doing an Ultima would be awesome.'”
Oblivion had *most* of the models I used. I had to retexture them all, of course, and make some minor modifications as well. For the interiors of the palace (which I’ve been working on for the last week) I’ve had to model almost everything myself.
It is really hard doing Fawn, which is why I’ve put it off for so long. It is the one place in the game that I knew I would need to do a lot of modelling (which is very time-consuming if it is done right). If I was to make Fawn look the way I actually want it to, then I would need to spend far too long modelling pillars and other things that would make the City of Beauty match up to its name. Instead, in order to get this finished in the time-frame I have in mind, I do need to rush through a lot of things, and use as many assets from other sources as I can.
The city has turned out far better than I thought it would. After about five re-creations, the palace interior is finally mostly complete. First it had an interior, and a seperate middle that was an exterior. Then I made it all an interior. Then I made it all an interior that acted like an exterior. Now the entire thing is an exterior, including the interior parts. Sounds strange, but it lets me:
– Have awesome lighting from the sun
– Have real reflections in the water of the pool
– Have balconies looking over the pool that are seamless
Once I’ve finished the palace, I’ll upload some new screenshots that will make the previous screenshot look like what it was… a work in progress.
Wow, this is looking really nice. Good work. This will give me yet another good reason to get around to installing Oblivion again.
Oblivion rocks. Serpent Isle rocks². Thepal rocks³.
<– PS: Do you like my avatar?
Looks like pure awesome, and so do the Return to Ultima screens! Your probably both sticking close to the U7 isometric maps, but with two different engines and artists imagining how the land looks in 3d, it’s bound to look a fair bit different I expect. You might mitigate this by collaborating between projects, though that can slow things down too. Or maybe on a continent with Chaos storms, and some 20 years between games, these sort of changes can be explained easily.
Well, in Return’s case, we are setting it quite far in the future. Using — let alone relying — on that fact to excuse changes in the shape of the land is, in one sense, a standard feature of the Ultima games, and in another way is really just a cheap cop-out. As such, we’re trying to build a land that pays good homage to the original Serpent Isle. It is a bit of a challenge in 3D, though.
My game should be fairly close to the original, and since Return is based off the original too, it should be fine. I’m staying away from collaborating with anyone for this mod, in order to make sure it gets done as fast as possible. No team means I only have to worry about me delaying it.
Thanks for the details Thepal! I’m not quite sur if NWN2 has th emodels we need or not, but we suffer from our main issues: we have no 3D artist even to simply retexture stuff. Building over water will probably require some creative thinking too. Originally I considered not to have Fawn in the game for this very reason, but this is such a great city it would be a waste to have if we can craft it.
Regarding world design as a whole, one thing to keep in mind about Return is that we are using a dual scale map which we can’t simply translate the Serpent Isle as it is and have to do take creative freedom. For instance this is uterrly impossible to have Moonshade spreading the entire half of the Isle of Beyond and covering the area from the lake to the coast because it wouldn’t make sense. So it’ll only be focused around the lake. Likewise for Monitor. The way the original world is designed worked fine with the seamless nature and the size of the world back then – it just wouldn’t make in dual map perspective though, which is why we need to rethink things a bit.
We can actually modify the colour of buildings in NWN2 a bit…if they’ve been properly set up. Not in the sense of re-texturing, but in the sense of re-tinting; there’s an element in the toolset UI that let you define tint colours on assets.
So that might help us. Capturing Fawn’s architectural aesthetic, on the other hand…