Riftrunner Peek of the Week #2

The second installment of RPGVault’s “Peek of the Week” feature for the upcoming Divine Divinity sequel is now available. This time, Larian’s Marian Arnold talks about the switch to 3D characters in the upcoming RPG. Take a look:

One of the enhancements that sets Riftrunner apart from Divinity 1 is the 3D character system. The characters in Divinity 1 where done in 2D, which had the advantage that the minimum specs were low and that as an artist, you had full control over the render quality.

Unfortunately, it also had the disadvantage that we needed a tremendous amount of data to store it all. If I recall correctly, we needed 1.3 CDs alone for the hero animations in all their variations. The six heroes in Divinity contained together over 900,000 frames of animation, and the dragon you meet at the end of the game contained over 100 MB in uncompressed data. As a result, we animators had to keep the frame count relatively low, and because of that, the quality of the animations was compromised.