Thread by @pshenk

1/9 Today is BIG HEAD the 1st monster I did for D2. When I started there wasn't much to see in the game- A temp char, a skeleton, basic dungeon. All would be redone later. @mediumclawboy gave me the docs so far. This was the monster planning sheet for Act 1:
#d2memories

2/9 I recall none of those really grabbed me. Erich said "well those are flexible" so he let me just make something up. This is what I came up with:

3/9 Side note, I had come from a small shop w older PCs & had to justify software. At BLIZZARD- "well what do you want?" I was kid in candy shop! Back then for Max cutting edge was "MetaReyes" (metaballs) and "4D paint" (projection painting). I used both for Big Head!

4/9 So FUN. Even tried dynamic skin w "MetaMuscles" linked 2 bones. Cutting edge PC (Pentium II, Win NT) brought to its knees. Looking back this was crazy way 2 go but we weren't worried about realtime just pretty sprites. Almost nowhere 2 learn from so we made it up as we went.

5/9 Let's open the file and see what happens

6/9 Missing Bones Pro & MetaReyes & 4D Paint mods. Oh well I'll do my best. Here's the crazy mesh I was talking about. Now I remember how hard it was to skin & map. No Z-Brush no UV projection no sub-ds, no normal maps. All hand-placed splined metaballs that generated a skin.

7/9 It was too slow to even preview so I "optimized" the head.
My PC today is probably 1000 times faster than back then :P

8/9 Here's the textures on the model- good enough for tiny sprite. I don't quite remember why it needed so many sub-object materials. I guess it was just planar maps and then painted with 4DP? Probably. (The head isn't lined up cause Bones Pro not working & 2 lazy to move it :P

9/9 Here's one of the maps (torso)
That's it for this morning, time to get some work done!
THANK YOU all for your interest this is fun :)
Tomorrow I'll post some of the animation stuff and maybe dive into the basics of the in-house tools we used.

I meant "UV Unwrap" not "Projection :P