Not exactly what I was going for, but interesting enough to keep a copy before moving on. This is the early stage ash zombie.
It has two fully boned skins. One skin represents the normal skin texture of a human, and is normally lit, while the other represents the glowing cinders below the skin. The glowing skin actually does glow in the dark as it is both transparent with a TXI handling the blending as additive, and the color is ramped up via self illumination of full white, making a very interesting looking creature. That combination makes only the non-black portion of the skin glow.
I then added some simple fire emitters, hoping to tweak it down to ashes and a few sparks. The fire looks really cool as is, so I will release this one along with the more ashy ones.
I don't have a closeup of the face and body yet, but what you are looking at is a medium poly skin which is completely custom. It incorporates a higher poly version of the fingered hands you can download from the vault. I still need to work on the actual skin texture a bit, and I want to make the facial features more visible and disturbing. If you could see the mesh, you will see the ears are burnt to nubs, the eye sockets have no eyes, and the mouth is contorted. There are also sections of sagging flesh, as well as raised areas on the scalp and other parts of the body which represent cooked meat.
His shadow is that of the normal human figure. His animation relies on the zombified version of the normal human (c_zomb_rot)
A few drawbacks:
1) The emitters on the body cannot be affected by wind, or the body itself blows the fire out to a few meters while running/spawning/any other action but slow walk.
2) Because it has two medium poly skins, they do take a little bit to load on my machine. Once they are loaded they work flawlessly.
3) IRL if you shine a light on cinders, you can barely see the glow. In NWN, light adds to the glow of cinders. This just looks odd to me.
Reminds me of Brand from LoL. I may have to actually make a Brand now! Maybe an Ignus from PS:T.
Edit:
I've added some animation on the glowing skin. It now flickers and waves like moving lava, but smaller in scale. I also have four glowing skin varieties to choose from, which range from the one you see above, down to much smaller cracks in the body which show heat inside. The smaller the cracks, the more of the skin color you can actually see on the zombie, and he becomes more gray. Maybe I can release 4 of these each with a different amount of flame and ash combination.
I also wanted to add some negative energy into the ash, since the plane of ash is adjacent to the negative energy plane.There is a reason they are undead. I had also read somewhere that one of the features of a section of the plane of ash is that fire can be cold. It may appear like fire, but it freezes as it sucks the energy out of you instead of putting it in. I wonder if most users would like that described visually by having the color of the flame changed to something more evil looking. Maybe either darkfire (add purple to the yellow, and darken the red) or coldfire (change red to blue and change yellow to black, with a magenta tone added).
