Cozy Mudpod (Patreon)

I got my start in the video game industry with Morrowind modding. Although I've ended up as a producer (project manager), I still get to use a lot of the skills I picked up in modding to better understand my teams, their technologies, and our limitations. 

But sometimes it's fun to make stuff, you know? This weekend I got caught up in the development spirit and decided to recreate the cute Argonian houses from Elder Scrolls Online for TES3 Morrowind. Why Morrowind? Besides holding a special place in my heart and being a perfect place for an Argonian house, 2002 was a far simpler time for asset creation. After 11 hours worth of work (some of which was fumbling about and googling to remember how to use Maya), I have two essentially finished meshes. Skyrim's higher fidelity would increase that work significantly, and making this a modern mesh would stretch it into weeks worth of work in multiple specialized programs. 

This is the result so far. 

(Placed assets copied from an existing Bethesda interior for mockup purposes. Click to embiggen.)

There's still a few important details to do here, such as collision and vertex painting (vital due to lack of self shadowing), as well as creating an optional second story piece for the interior kit and a door to fit the doorjambs. And cleaning up some of the stretchy textures around the windows, which might lead into a general topology cleanup pass. When it's done, I plan to release it both as a house mod for Morrowind and as a modders resource for larger projects like Tamriel Rebuilt and the Project Tamriel confederacy.