My first Blender object: the Strider, a dinosaur-ish creature planned for Bai Loki's desert terrarium. It was intended to be a skinnier relative of the Gnarler and would have looked something like a cross between a camel and an ornithomimid.

The Strider was eventually dropped from Bai-Loki, but its textures and model were later recycled and it ended up becoming the duck-billed dinosaur from KT.

My second model: the body and tail of a Naga Norn. It was based on a ball python rather than a cobra, hence the overall chubbiness.

I had no idea how to use UV maps, or even how to manipulate textures in Blender, so it took a lot of adjustments to the graphics to make a texture look right.

The head, body and tail of a Spotted Dolphin Norn.

An unfinished concept of what a Banshee might look like, although this one is more on the Grendelish side. Sadly a poor understanding of Blender's features can lead a person to disaster: I accidentally overwrote the file and lost the model.

A generic Grendel head, with Chaos Development's Yeren Grendel for comparison. This model doesn't look all that bad... in fact I'd say it's pretty cute, but in the end I never used it for anything.

The head and body of a Jaguar Norn, another breed concept for Bai-Loki.

I was already in the process of making Tulu when I started using Blender, so only a couple objects (like the dollies) were actually modeled by me. The pho-dgan and blackbird were made in Photoshop, and the "nice" 3D models like the tombstones, tree, bell tower, and pumpkin pie slice were borrowed from free stock renders.

The moonflower from the Tulu metaroom. It looks better than my first models because I was "cheating": I made it using Milkshape and only imported the model into Blender to render it. Milkshape was more comfortable for me at the time because I had already been using it to create new clothing for The Sims.

And this is why I stopped using Milkshape: Blender had issues importing a lot of models, like this one as you can see. This particular model also crashed any time I tried to edit it in Blender, so I wound up editing those weird "reins" out using Photoshop. Most of my Milkshape models also crashed when subsurfed. Nasty.

The first Norn heads I made in Blender sucked, so one day I got frustrated and modeled this head vertex by vertex in Milkshape. It was a stupid solution, but in the end I was very lucky—it ended up being one of the few models Blender would edit/subsurf without crashing.

The beginnings of the "Cave Norn world", which would later become KT.

The Sabertooth Norn head was also based off the Deep Norn head model above.

Another early experiment in making a metaroom background using 3D models.

Left: My first "prototype" model of Gaius. Not that different from the final version, except for his lack of knees. It was only during in-game testing that I realized that Creatures have trouble walking when they don't have distinct thighs and shins.

Right: Gaius as he appeared in the finished breed pack. In addition to having distinct "haunches", his head's also a bit smaller in proportion to the rest of his body.

The Yautja Norns were inspired by a breed idea posted on the Creatures Wiki by sam999, which I stumbled across at the same time there was a Predator marathon on TV. This turned out to be really convenient, because it meant I had the perfect reference for the Yautja Norn's expressions and how to pose their mandibles.

The Yautja Norns are one of only two breeds I've created that have distinctive-looking life stages. They start out as super cute babies (right), and eventually develop all kinds of spines and quills as elders (left). I would have given the adults a few spines to make the transition more gradual, but by the time I knew the Predators even had spines I had already finished the adult head sprites.

The design history of this metaroom—which wasn't even originally called Devil's Reef—changed several times during development. First there was a lighthouse, then there wasn't, then I made a better one, things moved, the lighting went crazy, and the original ship was traded out for the much nicer pirate ship.

The metaroom's name was originally Y'ha-nthlei, but once I had decided to release it to the community, I knew it had to change. Devil's Reef seemed a bit more self-explanatory, and easier for the average Creatures player to pronounce.

Left: My all-time favorite model is the pirate ship from Devil's Reef. This model was what made me say "okay, I have to release this as a metaroom."

Right: This is an early preview of a metaroom that was sadly lost years ago (although parts of it later worked their way into the Biodome). That metaroom was Hydrocea, and the background was modeled by the extremely talented Moe.

Although I had no hand in Hydrocea's development, it was probably the single biggest inspiration behind Devil's Reef. The pirate ship in Devil's Reef was intentionally based on the Hydrocea one, even though I was modeling it mostly from memory until Moe graciously lent me a copy of the old teaser pic.

Because the whole metaroom was intended to have a Massachusetts theme (down to the plaid fabric in the muffin basket), the Devil's Reef lighthouse is based on the Old Scituate Light.

Originally I toyed with the idea of making the lighthouse animated. Unfortunately it caused a huge lag on the game, and because the sprites have a limited color palette they ended up looking really sucky. So that feature ended up being left out.

The 3D models of the Portal agents, plus a regular portal gun which didn't make it into the object pack because how do you use something like that one-handed? The Intelligence Core doesn't entirely match what we see in the Portal games, but at the size it appears in Docking Station the difference isn't all that obvious.

Primordia version 1 was the first metaroom background I made in Blender, and it showed. For Primordia Redux I kept the concept the same but recreated all the models from scratch. It's also brighter, so Creatures can see where they're walking.

The new Banshee model I used for the Banshee Bust (right), compared to the old model I lost way back when. The new guy is based on the appearance of the C3/DS Shee, but his features were made to look more Grendelish.

The Dustdevil Grendels went through a couple different design phases in response to community feedback. In the end they looked a bit different than Gobbo's original concept (left), but I think everyone was pretty happy with how they turned out.

The "Button Norn" model. It took me a while to decide what to do with him... I was tempted to make him a Coraline-esque breed, but I had enough half-finished breeds sitting around already. In the end he became the basis for my Norndolls.

Boo, I didn't release very much in 2013. Except Freedom,
but who wants to see close-up renders of individual bricks?

Nothing to show here... yet.