Talking Heads

After completing the second update for the BTH Shield Pack I wasn't sure in which direction to take my modelling and so I volunteered to contribute some custom content work for a Middle Earth themed NWN2 Persistent World - Heroes of the Third Age (HotTA). I like the world that Tolkien put together and I'm a big fan of the LOTR books and the movies. One of the Heavy Shields in my shield pack uses the White Tree of Gondor as a design. I figured making LOTR based models would be fun. And it was for a while.

A couple of months into the project I found I had lost my custom content mojo. Instead of an interesting pass time it all became a bit of a chore. I stopped modelling during the week and only managed to drag myself to the workbench on weekends where I half-heartedly went through the motions of creating the architecture models for Rivendell. I'm sure this is a phase that most creative people go through at some time.

I continued to push through it when my attention was captured by a post on the HotTA forum where a player had requested trophy models like orc ears and human scalps as an aid to role play. Well, it brought to mind an idea I'd had about trophy heads and had never really followed through with. So I raced home from work with ideas pumping through my head and I set to making a proof of concept model that I could use to demonstrate the idea.

This was just the panacea my flagging model making mojo needed. I've always enjoyed working with the darker side of custom content. The BTH Swamp with its dank pools and the BTH Forest with its gritty ruins were my favourite NWN1 works. I recall writing at the time I was making ruined houses for the NWN1 PW I was involved with, that it was an interesting reflection on my personality that most of my best work had consisted of things that were broken and ruined. And so I relished the work I was doing with the severed trophy heads. I even made a nice little dripping blood visual effect to compliment the model.

It was a little unfortunate that the lead developers from HotTA didn't share the enthusiasm that the severed heads had generated on the forums. They felt that the modelling efforts should be spent doing more appropriate things. But it was already too late from my point of view, my mojo was back and I would not throttle it back down.

My leaving the HoTA project was probably overdue. I should have read the signs of my flagging interest and spoken up earlier. Instead I had become one of those volunteers that every project loathes; the guy that promises and then doesn't follow through. There was more to it than that, of course (there always is). Ultimately, I told the HotTA team I would finalise one last model for them and then step down as a contributor. From the moment I announced my departure I became persona non grata as far as the lead developer was concerned. Another indicator that the decision to leave was the right one.

Anyway, I hope the HotTA project gets some use out of the new Watchtower models. Although they were not part of the HotTA scope of work, the new models and the textures were made with the idea that they could be used for the construction of the walls and defences for a rustic/rural setting like Edoras.

And what became of the severed heads? I added a couple more head models and released them onto NWVault. I have since experimented with blood splattered NPCs and bloody weapons. I think this guy would make an excellent NPC Butcher, or maybe a surgeon.


At some time in the future I will expand on the severed heads by adding the NPCs and a few other gruesome oddities.

BTH Severed Heads can be found on NWVault here : http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=362