With our Trac system in place, we will shortly be ready to distribute our first dev build. We now have wiki documentation for all aspects of our project, allowing new modders to join our team and get up to speed in a short time. We also now have a Twitter Feed, which we hope to update regularly on the more day-to-day progress of our project.
More placeables have been created, including the mephit spawning machine, the water tank and the portal, complete with VFX. Textures have been prepared for use on the rooms throughout level 1. Additionally, our first NPC has been set up and dialogue created as a tech-demo which so far looks very promising.
Focus On: Heads
Written by mikemike37
Friday, 29 January 2010 17:25
The characters in Baldur's Gate are critical to the narrative, and getting them looking the way we had imagined while playing the Baldur's Gate games is essential. For the Irenicus dungeon portion of the game, the following character heads are required: Irenicus, Imoen, Jaheira, Minsc and Yoshimo. Each of them have presented a different challenge and it's worth exploring what we've been able to learn in the process. All content is subject to revision.
Irenicus
Aside from a simple head morph, we needed to give Irenicus the facial scarring that makes him such an intimidating and frightening character. They had to be visible even from a short distance and his skin had to look genuinely deformed. A custom normal map was used to achieve the effect.
Naturally, we have yet to give him his hood or armour, but already I think we've got a face that looks unique and identifiable.
Imoen
DarthParametric was able to make use of the Leliana similarity to get a head morph that closely resembles Imoen and use a hair which is already very close indeed, but matching the hair colour was less straightforward. A custom tint file has been used to match the hair colour and a normal map to give the scar.
Jaheira
Jaheira's portraits in BG and BG2 are really quite different and we settled on using the BG2 one as our inspiration. While the face could be matched without too much trouble, it didn't look very Jaheira-like with the hair available. Kzelsama was able to produce a custom hair to fit the bill though and the effect bears a good similarity.
Minsc
Although Minsc's head was easy enough to get an approximate likeness, we had to apply a custom tattoo to get the feel right. We're a little up-in-the-air over whether to use a Qunari head/body to get the physique, but Minsc shouldn't be too difficult to pull off.
Yoshimo
Anyone see any asian-looking faces in Dragon Age? Not really - which made Yoshimo's head morph very difficult. Pile on top of that hair unlike anything in the DA toolset and facial hair which simply isnt the same, and Yoshimo proved to be the hardest head of the bunch. However, a custom hair again by Kzelsama, a custom face texture to provide the facial hair and a LOT or head morph revisions later and we've got something that's near enough!
Original pictures copyright Wizards of the Coast.
Welcome to BGR's home at Gamersnexus!
Written by mikemike37
Friday, 29 January 2010 17:06
Baldurs Gate Redux (BGR) is a mod team working to recreate the Baldur's Gate experience in the Dragon Age engine. Our FAQ thread answers many questions you may have.
If you've got some skills you think might be useful to our effort and want to get involved, introduce yourself on our forums.
Be sure to check back here for progress updates. For now, check out our latest video walkthrough:
testest
Progress Update 1
Written by mikemike37
Friday, 29 January 2010 16:42
While this is the first progress update, we are well underway now: almost all level 1 rooms modelled out, NPC head drafts for all major characters and we're moving towards being able to distribute our first developer build for our members to test their contributions. Headway had also been made on extracting BG2 text and audio, modelling custom creatures, custom spell VFX, integrating entirely new classes, and more.
We're looking now to our issue tracking system which will be set up in the near future and allow us to co-ordinate our efforts more effectively.
