General:The Dragon's Eyrie/Battlespire/Cover

Here you will find a behind the scenes look at the creation of the Battlespire Box cover, which came from some animation I was toying around with.

Re-creating an old character using modern techniques. First, the sketch ______________________________________

Above is the cover I designed for Battlespire Originally it belonged to an animation designed for the intro of Battlespire. The Daedra Seducer that is pictured on the cover would end the animation by rising from a crouched position and holding the Battle-scythe blade aloft, whilst unfolding her wings. Unfortunately after the animation was almost completed Bethesda decided they would use an outside company, XL Translab, now merged with Bethesda, for the animation in the game. As with all my Battlespire graphics it was done using Alias, on an SGI. 3D Studio Max, using PCs, turned out to be a less costly and more useful combination. Below is an early test render of some animation. A simple 'Ping-pong' to work out some kinks and block-out the scene.

Below is a very early animation i was blocking out near the end of Battlespire. This uses an older model of the Daedra Seducer, and some decidedly dodgey camera work. There's a whole host of issues with this but it served its purpose to demonstrate some ideas.

Much of the artwork that is produced for a game is never used in the final release. Characters are revised, or deleted. Story lines change and artwork that cannot be accommodated is discarded. Sometimes we can reuse artwork. In this instance, the animation on the left was cut up and used in some E3 video.

Artwork is never really 'wasted' as lessons are learned in each case, and the final results are usually of a much higher quality.

Above is an early cover concept based on these early animations.

And here is a game animation of the Daedra Seducer,it's interesting to see how she differs from the initial model. One thing to note is that the cover version is naked, albeit in heavy shadow. I remember the sales department was very concerned about that, and kept asking for the shadows to be bumped up. Click any graphic to return to the main Battlespire page.