Psygnosis’ Goblins

Goblin Run Cycle & SpinHere is a short fairy tale about Goblins. Once upon a time, 3d animation was a new technology in video games. I used to model and animate for a living in the video game industries early days. I became a specialist in modeling and animating low-poly object and characters. Even though processing power and system memory was pretty low in those ancient times, compared to these days, it was amazing what I could do with about 200 polygons and software with a good rigging system. This character was modeled in Lightwave and animated in Softimage. Softimage was not the best modeler, but it’s rigging and animation system was far better that what Alias PowerAnimator (soon to be Maya) had. Using Softimage’s advanced rigging and animation, and a great UV mapped Goblin skin texture created by my talented texture artist coworker, making a 200 polygon animate believably, was not only possible, it was fun too. Here is an animation test cycle for the Goblin game I was working on when I worked for Psygnosis‘ San Francisco office. It was called Goblins. Unfortunately the studio shutdown before Goblins was finished. Turns out rents in San Francisco were going though ridiculous hikes in those early days of Tech Bubble I. Eventually, I started doing other sorts of visual design.

The End.