The Harvest Moon Consortium

Progress post 12 (2020): New findings - Characters

And Now for Something Completely Different!

A while ago, I discovered, that Thrikreen (a member of DLA back then) is on Discord. I contacted him and he did answer. Thank you for that! He said, he would see, if he manages to find DLA-backups and he actually came up with something, that I thought, is lost forever: DLA-characters, which have not been published by LISA (or other DLA-members)!
I couldn’t resist to take a closer look and begin to play around with what is there!

For the beginning, I checked out Tass, because I just “finished” the Tass-tileset group and I thought, that this fits. So here is are some screens with Tass in front of his home:








Regarding the Textures:
There are no textures for Tass within the findings of Thrikreen - except for the head. So what you see here is a rough test. I took an Elmore drawing as reference and applied textures, which kind of fit.


(Painting by Larry Elmore - book cover Dragons of Winter Night)

The textures are lacking details! It is just a test! Anyways, Tass now can walk Solace!

Some of you might remember the promo of ThriKreen’s Lord Soth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIy5c4V ... e=youtu.be

Well, it is included in the recent findings of ThriKreen! There are 2 versions in those folders:

Version 1 has danglemesh (only) and a_ba as supermodel. That Soth- model was somehow rotated by 180° in comparison to a_ba, which didn’t work IG. Well it’s fixed and this version works IG.
Version 2 has a skinmeshed cloak and a big set of animations of its own. Also its general tint is set to be a bit darker. It also works IG.

So here is a screen of Lord Soth IG in a (non DLA) Dargaard Keep tileset:

In the screen is version 1, because screenshots don’t really show the differences.

*** Addition ***
Toro posted a question on the vault:
"Nice. Can you clarify version 2 ? Is the entire model model skinmesh with new animations or just the cloak ? Regardless it’s awesome !"

My answer to this:
"Sorry. I was not too precise. For version 2 “only” the cloak and the kilt are skinmeshed. The rest are parts. The helmet has no danglemesh (version 1 has danglemesh on the helm and cloak)."

These new threads are really cool B.R. Let me know if you get DLCR up again. Might want to think about a conversion to EE.

Thanks Winterhawk! So here is a new one: A barmaid version of Tika!

This model is part based made up of a skinmeshed robe and a separate head.

The robe (= body mostly) is rigged, but I found no finished rigged version. One robe version had most of the weights in place, so I took that one as a base. I did some adjustments and it's now complete.
Luckily the archive already contained the PLT for this part. There was a piece of texture missing on the rim of the dress, thus here it was showing the “pure silver” of the NWN1-models. I added the missing texture part and now it looks good - I think.

I also got the head finalized. It needed a few UVW- and Z-position-adjustments. There is a complete texture file for the head, but no PLT-version. So I had to create the PLT, too.

Luckily there were some reference screens of DLA's original works, so I could recreate the maybe planned tinting of the robe:

(One example screen of the robe/dress with a NWN1 [= non DLA] head)


So here is the barmaid version of Tika in the interior tileset of the Inn of the Last Home (with the Tika-head model):





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An addition to the files of the characters:
When uploading unpacked files to somewhere, the "problem" is, that the original date might get lost. Luckily, some of the files were packed and the archive showed the original date of the files. So here are some “production date” information:

The Tasslehoff files date to something around April 2004.

The Lord Soth files, which I made to show up IG, are based on two findings:
The scene of the skinmeshed and animated version contained “20060916”, so I assume, that it is September 16th 2006.
The other version is unpacked, so the original date is lost (at least for me). But there are Maya-Scenes dated June 2004 and a Soth-texture archive, that dates back to 2003-06-24

The Tika-robe is based on the contents of a ZIP-folder containing files dating from 2003-12-11 to 2003-12-17.

Can’t stop myself fiddling with these Characters to see them IG and thus get distracted from the Solace tileset … So here is Flint!

Those folders contain 2-3 approaches, as far as I can say: One full body version (files date around April 2004 ) and a body armor version, which is designed to be a robe part (files date around July 2004). In addition to that, there are 2 head variations: One with a helmet and one without one. Danglemesh is only on the head without a helmet.
There are no real texture approaches for the full body version (except for the finished head texture) - only UVW-layouts:

(Gmax screen)

For the armor only version, there is a pretty nice texture, which I’d call “finished”.

To get an idea of the maybe looks of and to better distinguish the parts, I applied very simple textures to the whole body version. Simple means real simple: I mostly painted single colors onto the UVW-layouts (and shaded them here and there a bit, so it doesn’t look too dull). At least for the armor I got an orientation because of the texture for the robe version (see further below). Here is a result of my first try:

(Blender screen - I’m not sure anymore, why I chose green for the gem. I remember finding hints for green in my early checks, but I can’t find it ATM.)

So, why are there no textures for the whole body approach?
My guess is, that the reason to this is a problem with the lower (pelvis) parts of the armor: If this is designed as a belt or pelvis part or even is a part of the torso, it will move into the tights while eg. walking, because it’s not moving with the legs. Designing it as a part of the tights makes it difficult to have a nice connection between the upper legs and the pelvis/torso. So, a solution is to make the armor a skinmeshed part. And the armor only version is skinmeshed!

I believe, that the tendency somehow went into the direction to make certain parts available as parts, so the player or module builder has more freedom in designing the looks of a character via different body parts.

I did get the robe version IG. For this I had to create a PLT out of the texture. For the test I was lazy and just added the whole texture to the cloth layer. My main goal was to test the rigging IG, so a simple PLT would do. Here is a screen of a dynamic NWN1-dwarf wearing Flints armor:


Well, there are no other separate body parts for Flint and the vanilla ones are not really fitting (IMO). But I wasn’t eager to port all the parts from the whole model over to body parts and create all the PLTs for them! So I came up with a more economic (well - lazy…) way: I ported the part based (skinmeshed robe) armor over to the whole body model. This way, I have the original Flint-look with the nicely textured armor! And since that aror is skinmeshed, it moves nicely with the rest of the model!

But what about the looks of the rest of the textures?

I assume, that, for reference, DLA used a drawing by Larry Elmore (DragonLance Adventures game source book p. 99):


and the cover painting of the paper module DL1 - Dragons of Despair by Clyde Caldwell:

(I still have both paper versions! )

I also found a colored version of the Elmore drawing, but I could not make out the original (paper?) source:


I also found quiet a few pictures with flint having blue pants. But the DLA Flint armor texture gives a hint:


And that part is mapped to the pelvis part:

(Blender screen)

So I assume, that that the pants were supposed to be of a redly color.

As mentioned in the beginning: There are 2 Flint head versions: One with a helmet and one without. The one without the helmet is danglemeshed and designed as a body part. Another hint, that DLA was going to do a body part based approach for Flint.


So here are some screens of the result (whole body approach):

Flint IG - in front of his house (Solace tile set):


Flint IG - having a chat with Tass:


Flint IG without the helmet (here, the head is a part of the whole model, not a separate body part) - again having a chat with Tass:


As to the current textures on Flint: It is not the simple painted texture anymore, but they are still simple versions, so the model doesn’t look too dull. But they’re lacking a lot of detail and are far away from being called “final”. It’s the same “economic” approach that I used for the Tass textures.

Very Cool! It's been awesome to see that the NWN enhanced edition is making so much progress. Even better to see some of the pioneering work in Modding by DLA come back to life. Great find and work on moving with these materials.

Christopher wrote: ↑

Wed May 06, 2020 7:36 pm

Very Cool! It's been awesome to see that the NWN enhanced edition is making so much progress. Even better to see some of the pioneering work in Modding by DLA come back to life. Great find and work on moving with these materials.

Yes, I'm glad, that they'll hopefully will not be lost, but finishing them takes up so much time! First release will be a classic 1.69 release. At least, that's my aim.