Development:The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

This page details development materials of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

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Hugh Riley Creature Showcase

Around the time of Oblivion's release, developer Hugh Riley uploaded videos and screenshots of near complete models of a selection of monsters he made for the game, including the minotaur, ghost, zombie, and troll. In addition to a few small cosmetic changes on the ghost, Hugh provided his own insight on each creature.

Note: All spelling errors in these descriptions have been preserved as they appear on the website, and are not a mistake of the article.

Model Detail	Forward Movement	Attack 1	Idle/Attack 2	Comment by Hugh Riley
				The Ghost was built as 2 nested meshes, both with alpha'd textures which became fully transparent towards the lower part, analagous to a semi-transaprent torso in a semi-transparent, loosely fitting sheet.A very lo-poly transparent version of the mesh held emitters for the ectoplasmic smoky fx that surrounded it. The hands and head were animating morph objects, creating an amorphous, constantly-changing floating creature. When this creature died it dropped a havoked morphing blob of ectoplasm which pooled on the floor as the ghost apparently shrank to nothing. In fact the ghost was translated far from the player view but drawn in front of the background so appeared to shrink.
				Characters heads were separated from the body to allow expression morphs to be exported with the animation. Addition of skinned geometry to extra bones allowed more animation. I created an assortment of horns and other attachments which were assembled on differently scaled minotaurs to give creature variety. I assigned an additional texture to a scaled mesh to create a Minotaur Lord. Minotaur used melee plus 2 handed weapons in 1 hand, scaling weapon bone to increase weapon size.
				The Troll's look was derived from the previous Elder Scrolls games as he appears in many of them. I made several alpha'd flats attached at varied angles to give the impression of hair over a relatively low poly character. His movement was quadrapedal but he fought from a standing position. He was rigged with a jaw so he could roar and bite.
Model Detail	Forward Movement	Running Movement	Combat Movie	Comment by Hugh Riley
				Zombies were used in many places so for variety I created 2 unique meshes each composed of several bodyparts including split half-torsos, arms, legs, heads and hands.These body parts were interchangeable across the two meshes as they shared vertex positions on the joint lines. Arms and heads had internal caps on neck and shoulders so they could be optional. I created a variety of walk, run and attack animations and scripted each variant to use one set of these. In this way I was able to assemble several zombie variations and fill a room with a variety of creatures and animations, all sharing one texture and 2 base meshes.