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[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

Having got all that Doom Citadel stuff out of the way (the link is down at the bottom of the last page somewhere), I'm currently back in "India", continuing my rubbish crusade to make Maldrapur a really well-defined world of its own. This involves - wait for it - hitting trimesh blobs with big bricks a lot until they miraculously start to resemble many, many new monsters and characters from Hindu mythology and a great many Indianesque buildings and things...

Here, by way of example of what's coming in the second wave of Maldrapur Chronicles stuff, you can see the great palace of Rajatnur, capital city of Maldrapur, home of the Maharani and, latterly, of Kali herself (as she got fed up with the Death Pits of Shmashana)...

For anyone even remotely interested, you can see Rajatnur's location in that map of Maldrapur way back, halfway down page 4...

The thing about Indian architecture is that it tends to be intricate. This is a bit of a problem as intricacy and low poly counts do not go together... In point of fact, a creeping, insidious serendipity made it very clear that the palace of Rajatnur was WAY too high poly for NWN by the time I was approximately halfway through building it. Despairing and foaming at the muzzle whilst banging my head off the computer, I was about ready to hit myself with a brick when Fifi calmly said "Leave off, SoapSnout - Just cut the damn thing into sections."

This blisteringly obvious solution would, of course, have occurred to me too... eventually... had superior (and vaguely sarcastic) feminine insight not got there four days ahead. It is, of course, infinitely preferable to have the palace as a set of basic blocks, towers, windows, doors, domes, etc, because then you can make all sorts of different layouts...

That's what I intended all along. Honest.

It's not completely finished yet, but I'm reasonably happy with the architecture so far and it doesn't cause lag in tests with masses of Placeable jungle trees round it, lots of statuary and Kali fighting a horde of thirty Pisachas, so I think it's got the right balance between looks and practicality, more or less.

Anyway, LOTS more Indian stuff to come in the second wave, including more nice silks and cute furniture and some of the biggest and nastiest Spleen Monsters I've yet done for NWN...

[3RavensMore]

PHoD, on the first image, the waterfalls in the distance background, are those a skybox? 

[Ssythilac]

Great work, PhoD, and very inspiring as always. The city of Doom reminds me the work of Corben in Den (like cavegnome said before) and the style of the Indian architecture fits very well with the Sword and sorcery ambient. Some types of Indian buildings (Khajuraho style) are like an alien or prehuman architecture. Love it.

 

However; have you think in rework some of the placeables of the city of Doom to make them like ruins? That make the city like an ancient ruin of some evil prehuman culture, much like of R.E. Howard work or the ruins in the swamp of the novel of Karl Edward Wagner, "Bloodstone".

 

Anyway, great, great work.

[kamal_]

I saw this quote elsewhere... 

“He availed himself of the presence here of the plague to distil a liquid expressed from the spleen, the buboes and carbuncles of the plague stricken,” wrote the governor of Zara (Historical Review, doi.org/9fs).

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

3Ravens:- Yes; it's one of the new Maldrapur Skyboxes - Trying to get as seamless a blend between actual Area jungle geometry and the jungle on the Skyboxes... I've blurred the waterfalls on that one somewhat and, unless you just stand and stare fixedly at them, you don't really notice that they're not actually "falling".

Ssythilac:- Never heard of Corben and his Den before CaveGnome mentioned him and I looked it up, so I can't really comment on any similarities... One of the things mentioned by characters in Demoness Tales regarding the Citadel of Doom is that it's immeasurably ancient, apparently dead - yet seems eerily well preserved and not totally ruined (for which there are strange reasons). Which is why none of the buildings are actually in shattered disarray... but I am also working on a totally ruined city at the moment, but ruins are slow. You can build a wall in two seconds. But the wall lying around in heaps of, um, bricks, takes two hours.

As to Indian buildings, I'm expanding upon what I did for the first Kali Hak considerably and am throwing elements of Vesara, Dravida and Nagara styles of architecture into a sort of Maldrapuri hybrid form (somewhat as I did with the Jaiutmeer temple back on page 4). Trouble is the damn poly counts. I've already got two really nice temples that look amazing but bring the game to an utter standstill. Frustrating...

 

And now presenting the biggest, baddest, nastiest Spleen Monster in Hindu mythology...

The Timingila, a name literally translating as "whale-swallower", is an immense, horrifying Sea Creature, generally lurking in the depths but sometimes rising to the surface in order to obliterate everything in sight into a million pieces and crush everyone to pastes. As such things do.

The Timingila should be absolutely colossal - something like a thousand feet long from nose to tail. However, a Creature model that size is simply not practical in NWN. It just instantly jams on some squitty bit of walkmesh somewhere and sits there like a lump. Therefore I had to scale the horrendous beast down somewhat to a size where it could realistically interact with other characters in NWN but still look big enough to rampage in the fashion of a colossal gargantua. Even though Kali is ten feet tall, it still towers over her hideously...

So I just start to get somewhere on building the city of Rajatnur and next thing this honking behemoth comes along and starts knocking it to pieces...

Even when you're the Supreme Goddess of All Things, there are times, just infrequently, when you have to ask yourself the question "Can this really be a sensible thing to do?" Going one on one against the Timingila is one of those times, even for Kali...

Naturally the Module begins slowly enough, as villages along Maldrapur's north coast are found completely destroyed with no survivors to tell of what happened... then the Makara are driven from the sea, attacking various places (yes, there will be Makara too in the second pile of Maldrapur stuff) and as if this wasn't bad enough, the question arises of what is so terrible it has driven even the fearsome Makara ahead of it... And this thing is the answer.

Actual descriptions of the Timingila in Hindu texts are less than precise (though there are some mentions of the beast that infer vaguely Shark-like characteristics), leaving its specific appearance rather nebulous. It's massive, it lives in the ocean and it's jaws are enormous... so it's fairly open to interpretation. Mine combines elements of the jaw structure of assorted deep sea fish, notably Malacosteus and Grammatostomias, with ichthyic fins as well as paddles more akin to a Pliosaur, a few big spikes for good measure and some freakish crustacean elements, just to make it really weird and the exact, precise, identical shape of a Spleen.

The crustacean bits were also vaguely necessary to explain its ability to come crawling out of the ocean and demolish half of Rajatnur before Kali manages to find a cunning means of repulsing the foul-tempered thing back into the depths where, hopefully, it will stay.

I was moderately surprised during these tests of Kali vs Timigila fights that it was possible to actually get attack distances sorted out (eventually) that were more or less realistic despite the vast size of the Timingila.

The practice on that score I'm having with all my Dinosaurs was probably a help.

Testing Kali vs Timingila was also fun, hence getting stupidly carried away with screenshots...

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

The Maldrapur Chronicles isn't just one Ultimate Spleen Apocalypse after another, of course. Sometimes, it's actually peaceful.

This allows the people of Maldrapur to do such things as hold festivals.

Diwali, the Festival of Lights, is one of the biggest Hindu festivals - not to mention its importance to Sikhs and Jains as well - so naturally it had to be observed in Maldrapur, because it looks good with all the lanterns and the diya and the... Well, it would look good if there actually were hundreds of colourful Indian lantern whassname Placeables in NWN. Which there aren't weren't.

Now there are.

I'm still working on all the assorted Diwali festival Placeables, but I thought I'd stick a screenshot of some pretty lanterns up just as a contrast to the Gigantic Epic Level Spleen Monster in the previous post.

As with the first heap of stuff I did for Kali, this second (even bigger) heap is likely to be a bizarrely eclectic sort of collection.

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

Maldrapur, like India, as you will by now have gathered, is full of temples. Yet, in all the piles of Maldrapur stuff I put in the first Big Box on the Vault, there was no temple specifically dedicated to Kali herself...

Once she'd removed the point of the scimitar from my ear and I had abased myself on the floor with all due grovelling and sticking all four paws in the air, I rectified the omission.

The Kali Temple is one of three completely new temples (so far) to add to the ones in the first heap. I'm adding some specific rooms to the slowly evolving Maldrapur Interiors Tileset to match all the new temples, though Kali's Shrine is as far as I've got since I'm still battling the balance between lots of architectural detail versus actual practicality in-game with regards the palace interiors... Just don't talk to me of ornate peacock doors and farcically over-decorated elephant statues, 'cause I'll likely foam at the muzzle and pounce upon myself with eerie and improbable precision...

Anyway, concentrating on exteriors at the moment... As well as all the mighty temples and palaces of vast proportions, I also aim to do some lesser buildings; you know, actual little houses that normal people live in, that sort of thing.

As usual enforced restrictions on model complexity in NWN keep stamping on my ludicrously over-ambitious ideas. The Kali Temple was way over the poly limit by the time I'd done just the front door and porch... so I had to start again and be sensible. Still, Kali's probably happier now that there are pictures of her painted on walls and my ear can recover...

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

(Very busy at present - sorry for intermittent helpings of Maldrapuri weirdness...)

Anyway, switching from architecture back to rubbery Spleens again...

The Preta - ghosts of the disfigured and malformed... Though, according to Indian folklore, they are not necessarily evil, mine appear to have gone distinctly malevolent, though I don't think I did that deliberately during the process of trying to force evolve (with a brick) something essentially human into an obligate quadruped...

Despite my initial desire to make them appear tragic and pitiful, they've gone all Spleen-shaped and thus now appear to be more or less completely malign and spiteful types. Perhaps, if I have time, I'll do two versions, an evil one and a poor, suffering, almost friendly one... Assuming version 2 doesn't become even more nauseatingly evil than version 1. That happens a lot around here.

Anyway, lots more Creatures, buildings, statues, Diwali decorations and - of course - cute Indian furniture - still heading your way from the shores of Maldrapur... assuming anyone really wants blatant Spleen things like this looking at them...

[Mecheon]

While I haven't had to deal with Preta much in my gaming history, I have had to deal with Gaki, their Japanese equivalent in the whole 'hungry ghost' motif

 

And let me tell you, Gaki can be right bloody assholes, and a bit more monstrous, what with the whole "distended stomach and neck so small food can't pass through it" thing going on

 

Still looking great, though!

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

And suddenly back to architecture, just to confuse and disorientate...

There's a very distinctive kind of arch which you see all over India, more or less everywhere from north to south of the whole subcontinent. Very nice, very elegant, very damned unfriendly toward useless NWN polycount limitations.

Since I'm supposedly trying to create a genuinely Indian feel for Maldrapur, these arches, despite their near fractal infinity of curved recursions, kind've therefore have to appear. Tried using a texture cut - horrible; just don't go there... Tried getting the geometry correct - game froze up amidst hideous lag from the deepest pits of Naraka...

Have continued hitting arch geometry with huge bricks repeatedly and have finally now got a workable arch that still has the basic look without having a polycount that causes Cray mainframes to suffer debilitating diode aneurysms.

This is a relatively simple Shrine type thing in which assorted statues, Shiva lingam, etc, can be installed. Mostly done to test the viability of the arches. Considerably larger piles of Indian architecture still to come. Also more statues, some of which might actually fit in the shrine, some of which assuredly will not...

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

And here's one of those larger piles of architecture I mentioned...

Based on the buildings at the Candi Prambanan Hindu temple complex (and similar structures in other places) with their distinctive, elegant style of architecture which, in Maldrapur Chronicles, I'm using to represent the most ancient temples and vaults.

Naturally, of course, NWN polycount limitations have strewn atomic elephant droppings in my path at every turn like some depraved Dung Beetle from Mars, so the structures have had to be drastically simplified, but the general look is still there, more or less...

 

Fifi - do we have any Martian Dung Beetle Be Gone Spray?

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

There's something that you see almost everywhere you go in India... well, yes, granted, the sky; obviously the sky, it goes without saying, you don't have to mention the sky... On the ground, I meant...

You see them in cities, you see them in rural areas, you see them in huge piles beside roads and in markets, you see them everywhere, millions of them - you even see them balanced with eerie skill upon ladies' heads... This rampaging ubiquitousness makes it imperative that I have them to heap all over Maldrapur as well...

 

What am I talking about? Cane Baskets of Sundry and Diverse Shapes and Sizes, that's what. India's heaving with them... But the available cane/wicker baskets I've been able to find for NWN all seem to be either very small or somewhat rubbish or, in the vast majority of cases, simply non-existent...

How the hell can a game exist for, what, twelve years without a decent set of Cane Baskets?! Ridiculous!

 

But it's alright - I've dealt with it.

(Caution:- The Shabby Hyena Weirdo accepts no liability whatsoever for any loose cobras that may be found lurking in any of these baskets).

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

Apparently Maldrapur faces destruction by monsters as often as Tokyo does in Godzilla films...

A Goddess' work is never done...

Garuda, the great bird/man/phoenix of Hinduism is a single magnificent being acting as the vahana (steed) of Lord Vishnu. Depictions vary wildly between India, Bali, Thailand, etc... and Indonesia even calls their national airline Garuda...

In Buddhism on the other hand, the Garuda are not a single entity but a whole race of intelligent, socially organized, predatory, bird-like creatures...

In the Maldrapur Chronicles, these latter Garuda descend in numbers upon Maldrapur to conduct their eternal war with the serpent-like Nagas. Long suffering Maldrapur finds itself in the crossfire and Kali has to negotiate a peace with her usual tact and diplomacy (which involves more trampling enemies into dust than most consider diplomatic...)

As with many of these creatures, the precise size of Garuda is difficult to pin down, different texts citing a wingspan of several metres to several miles. This is compounded since there are assorted different Garuda(s) to choose from...

The PHoD version is thus, naturally, simply made to be practical within the limits of NWN and the purposes for which it's required in the Maldrapur Chronicles storyline.

The wildly differing depictions of Garuda vary from something looking exactly like a man to something looking exactly like an eagle... Mine leans more toward the interesting hybrid versions, mostly Balinese or Thai, with much spikier appearance and teeth in the beak. They seem to vary in colour between gold and red quite a lot too; mine had to be red since if they were gold they'd all vanish in the scenes set in the Nagas' subterranean golden citadel of Bhogavati.

(Hopefully the Nagas will be in this pile of stuff too, but I just scrapped them all and started again as I A, wasn't really happy with them and B, radically altered the design.)

[Drewskie]

awesome... that bird creature could work as a Vrock I think.

[Mecheon]

That is a rocking Garuda

 

Eager to see your Naga, though. Been meaning to make a more mythological version of them for a while, as I've never really been happy with the versions out there for NWN at the moment

[Drewskie]

That is a rocking Garuda

 

Eager to see your Naga, though. Been meaning to make a more mythological version of them for a while, as I've never really been happy with the versions out there for NWN at the moment

 

Me too.  The standard snake people models are yuan-ti purebloods and that's it.  There are a couple nice models in Q with the lower snake bodies, but those are medusae and merelith models, both female of course.  Good naga/yuan-ti abominations have been needed for a long time.  The standard Vrock model is just plain bad.

[T0r0]

PHOD,, you're a sick puppy and I love it !!  That preta is downright disturbing spooky !!

[Beccarte]

PHOD,, you're a sick puppy and I love it !!  That preta is downright disturbing spooky !!

  I concur. It's straight out of Dante's Inferno. I almost want to make a new module just for it.

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

Sick Puppy, moi?

You're the ones all hitting the like button on the reeking Preta and praising its filthy Spleen-shapedness... See, I called it a nasty, rubbery Spleen. You're the ones as like it, not me!

All I did was to carefully craft it in an unregistered genetic engineering facility via a series of pathologically disgusting and very painful experiments whilst cackling with sadistic glee. Anybody can do that accidentally.

 

Now, for some nice Maldrapuri furniture without the slightest trace of Spleen contamination... Yes, I know I did a ton of Indian furniture in the last Maldrapur Chronicles release, but there's no law as says I can't do MORE! And besides, I couldn't resist putting my favourite cupboard in NWN.

Fifi frequently accuses me of polishing the wood on those doors far more often than is strictly necessary. This is not so. It is a very rare and very sensitive wood which requires much delicate care and attention... Shut up.

 

Amongst the masses of Maldrapuri furnishings I did last time, there were one or two glaring omissions - caused by my getting all distracted by the nice Indian silks and forgetting what I was actually doing... One of these omissions was traditional Dowry Chests, which you find all over the place in India. No excuse for missing them out since they're a nice, easy model, so here they are. The pale one came from Gujarat if I recall correctly, I can't vouch for the provenance of the one with the coloured inlays.

No "Dowry Chests" jokes, thank you very much...

 

And some more stuff, the throne and octagonal display table have an old, patterned wood texture instead of the highly polished stuff I've used for most. Plenty more furniture to come. By the time I'm finished you'll be able to completely furnish an entire Indian house - he said surreptitiously displaying a cane basket again as he's starting to fixate rabidly on them...

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

It may seem that every single building in Maldrapur is either a huge, complicated temple or an immense, ornate palace.

Whilst there are a plethora of both, the average Maldrapuri citizen just lives in a normal house...

Starting to get some basic rural housing done now, but they need lots more work... The only thing good about them thus far is the cane baskets standing outside them. (No, I'm not really that rabidly obsessed with the cane baskets, I'm just making a random observation that cane baskets are present. Again.)

Though, be fair, I recall seeing large cane baskets outside almost every house I've ever been near in India - and those as didn't have any baskets were derelict - and so it makes perfect sense to have a few baskets in view and besides there's no point my making a load of baskets because India's full of baskets if I don't then cover Maldrapur with baskets so the baskets are completely justified and really I ought to have put more baskets and... aaaarrgh! Fifi, get off!

From further away... you can STILL see a cane basket or two though! Aaargh!

These simple houses lack all the ornamentation and convoluted lumpiness of temples and palaces and thus have a nice low polycount which isn't as low as it might be since I put extra verts in all the straight lines to make them less straight since crudely-built rural houses have no right to straight walls and must logically be possessed of imperfect lines and angles and possessed of bendy tree branches for bannisters and... and possessed of cane baskets too!

Look! There are more cane baskets up there on that upper level! They're everywhere! Fear the baskets for they are legion! Aaaaarrrgh!

 

Fifi wishes it to be known that the so-called Hyena Object will be taken away and subjected to a complete psycho-basketectomy which may or may not render him fractionally less surreal than usual.

[Grymlorde]

 

Beautiful work as always. Any plans to create a sari or two (or three. . .)?

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

I think it was Page 4 of this thread where I first mentioned my attempts to make saris.

You will gather by the fact that I haven't got any proper saris yet that my attempts thus far have been... disappointing.

 

(Fifi wishes it to be known that when then Shabby Hyena Loony says "disappointing", what he actually means is "miserably pathetic").

 

Thank you, darling; as unflinchingly supportive as ever... That's the last time I let you touch this keyboard whilst I'm posting rubbish whassname things...

ANYWAY, despite the fact that I have made more or less no satisfactory progress thus far with the saris, this dismal mushulizing has not squashed my dribblingly insane inability to deal with reality and I'm still not only attempting saris but also lehenga-choli as well. And poking vaguely at the idea of doing anarkali and churidaar type dresses as well IF the saris work out... And for the men, I'm trying to do a decent sherwani, which is hardly the world's most complicated garment, but... Well, I'm no expert when it comes to Robes. Hate robes! Hate their reeking skinmesh that sticks itself to itself if you let it and their utter inability to adhere to the underlying animation parts for more then ten seconds, rrrrrrgghh, foam, froth, gnaw the furniture, fall over with improbable velocity, stick all four paws in the air!

 

(It's the cane baskets that have done this to him, you know. He used to be quite norm... actually, it's probably nothing to do with the baskets).

 

Hm... Anyway, I'm still working on Indian attire - badly - but, he said apropos of absolutely nothing at all, if anyone else who was really good with Robe models wanted to do some, I wouldn't be objecting... The trouble with the sari is that half the darn thing is a sort of immense, veily, python-shaped curtain in freefloat over your arm and occasionally on your head having been wrapped around your body in assorted impenetrably complicated ways.

I spent some little time with my friend Vineeta (who's being my token India advisor), asking her to help me fathom how you'd create a NWN sari and she waved all sorts of bits of silk at me and tried to explain the mystical inner workings of the sari but the fog of confusion just grew thicker as figuring out how it all works just made it seem even more complicated despite Vineeta's ceaseless assertion of how simple it all is - so eerily simple she managed to end up tying herself to me inextricably and we fell over... and Fifi just dismissed the entire debased exercise as my fifteenth most imaginative excuse yet for trying to get a beautiful woman out of her clothes...

 

But you don't need to know all the fascinating and probably illegal behind-the-scenes manufacturing processes of the Maldrapur CC and so to completely change the subject - there'll also be more new statues. Here we start with the nice, easy, simple ones.

Basic Devi/Deva Statues, both available in a dark stone version for sticking in jungles and murky places and a pale stone version for nice clean cities like Rajatnur and temple courtyards and so forth.

[Mecheon]

I'd almost say for a sari you might want some sort of combination of robe and cloak might work. Somehow.

 

Of course I'm the type of person who has that exact same problem with skinmesh, except my attempts resulted in failed multi-headed linnorms who's other heads loosely flomped to the side and didn't animate. So slightly different situations there.

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

Just noticed this should've been in that other post...

Pale and dark stone versions of those ubiquitous Tantric Statues that get everywhere in Maldrapur... I've done "normal" ones, little tabletop ones and so now, through the not at all miraculous miracle of making them go all big, there are now Meganormous Versions. (No, they're not that big, but Meganormity is relative, you know...)

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

These were also floating about loose...

Some more additions to the set of Black Lacquered Furniture as piled copiously into the first Maldrapur Chronicles Heap of Lumps. With bits on.