From approximately 1998 through 2001 or so, I worked on Blizzard Entertainment's game Diablo II.
I was a character artist and animator and did a whole ton of stuff, some of which is down below.
All models were created and animated in 3D Studio Max without much concern for poly-count.
All images and charactes are copyrighted by Blizzard Entertainment.
The Sorceress
For Diablo II, I created two of the game's 5 player characters.
This task entailed concept design, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, and effects.
Each character had to be created with multiple sets of armor.
Here is the Sorceress in Light and Medium armor, modelled in 3DS Max.
The Barbarian
Here's the other of the player characters, the Barbarian
As with above, the concept design, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, and effects were all mine.
Because this was a sprite-based game, we didn't care all that much about high poly-counts.
If you'd like to see a game-play movie of what this character looked like in the actual game,
you can download a PC-only zipped 30mb gameplay movie here.
Keep in mind that all animation for the game was modular and program driven:
So, for example, all of the jumping was done programmatically, not by me!
Here are his different armor sets:
He had a fairly detailed face, fully animatable for the character selection screen:
Bat Demon
One of the minor monsters to fight in the game.
He shot lightning at you and burnt into cinders upon being slain.
Here is his concept and completed art,
plus you can see a rotation of him here. (1.3mb)
Thorned Hulk
This is one of the first monsters that I did for the game.
Keep in mind that he's really very small on a 640x480 screen with no-first person mode,
So the bark texture looks exaggerated here, but it's what was needed
to make him look really good at our game's scale.
Duriel
Duriel, the Lord of Pain, was the Act II boss for Diablo II.
He was modelled in 3DS Max using patches.
He had a really "fun" walk cycle, a scuttling with the lower legs
whilst dragging the bulk of his weight with the upper claws.
Here's Duriel's "walk" cycle, which looks best if you can loop it. (650k)
Diablo
And of course we have our title villian himself.
He was designed by others, but I was the one who modeled, textured, and animated him.
As was fitting, he had more animations than any other monster in the game,
and an incredibly elaborate death sequence, too.
He was modelled in 3DS Max using all sorts of different techniques.
You can also see his walk cycle here. (472k)
And the image of Diablo from the cover of Game Developer magazene featureing Diablo II's post-mortem:
Animation
Here are some miscellaneous animations from Diablo II.
It's by no means an extensive collection, as I did hundreds of animations for this title.
All characters were designed, modeled, textures, rigged, and animated by me (Except Diablo, whom I did not design.)
I also did all of the effects, too.
 The Barbarian player character  The Sorceress player character  Duriel, Lord of Pain, the Act II boss  Diablo, lord of Terror, the Act IV boss  A Fallen Shaman  The Thorned Hulk  A Claw Viper  The Horadric Summoner, a mini-boss  Warriv,a Non-Player Character  Drognan, an NPC mage  Fara, an NPC armorer  Halbu, an NPC knight  Korlic, one of three Barbarian Ancient Warriors From the Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction Expansion  Madawc, the second Ancient  Talic, the final Ancient |
Other things I did in Diablo II: The voices for all of the Fallen, the Zakarum Zealots, the Cows, a whole bunch of Non-Player Characters, some of the interface artwork, and many other characters who appear in the chat rooms.
