The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Monthly Modder: PrivateEye
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
This month we’ve interviewed prolific artist, PrivateEye, best known for the quality and variety of his Elder Scrolls equipment mods.
He discusses his inspiration, process and “kitbashing” his designs.
PrivateEye is well known in the community for his massive Heavy Armory and Royal Armory mods, which add a tremendous variety of both mundane and magical weapons between them. On top of these is a succession of classic artifacts and equipment from earlier Elder Scrolls games, like the Mace of Aevar Stone-Singer, Sixth House Bell Hammers, and Nerevar’s Moon-and-Star ring.
Several of your mods recreate artifacts from previous games. How did you choose these?
I went by a few criteria. First off, the artifacts had to interest me, either by design or lore. Next I felt it was important to choose items that hadn’t been covered by other modders at the time, because that just seemed less interesting to me.
Another thing was that back when I started in 2011, I was still fairly new to 3D modelling, so my skill level limited me a lot too. I tried to choose artifacts that I felt confident I could recreate. There are a couple of mods that never got released because I just didn’t like the quality of the end result.
You have many new items as well, especially in your Heavy and Royal Armory mods. What were some of your sources of inspiration for these?
Inspiration mostly came from earlier TES titles. Morrowind especially has a big variety of weapons like spears, clubs and shortswords and I wanted to add those to Skyrim as well.
When I started working on Heavy Armory, I was collecting a lot of Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings miniatures. I had a pretty big collection, so inevitably I had a lot of identical miniatures in my army. One thing I liked to do was create some more variety by kitbashing my miniatures (cut up the miniatures and swap out the arms/head/legs with another). That’s basically what I ended up doing with the Armory mods; I kitbashed existing weapons together into something new.
With the Royal Armory mod especially I tried to avoid using common weapons and instead looked at artifact weapons and rare items for parts. My idea was that these objects would be less recognizable to most players (less recognizable than a Steel Sword anyway), and so players would not be able to tell (right away) what existing objects I scrapped together.
What software do you use?
In the beginning I used 3DS Max and Photoshop only. A few years later I started to learn Maya, and this has been my go-to jack-of-all-trades software ever since, although recently I have picked up Blender as well. These days I use Quixel Mixer for texturing.
What is your favorite part of modding?
I like that you can tell a story through a single object. Many of my artifact mods are just small scavenger quests that tell a story through notes. It’s just something small to add some flare to an otherwise very simple item hunt.
In Royal Armory I don’t think I added any notes at all, but I tried to make the designs themselves tell the story. I did actually add a storybook detailing the background of each item, but it’s only available through console.
Any new projects or updates you’re working on?
Not actively. 2020 hasn’t been a very inspiring year to say the least. I do have some plans moving into 2021, but it’s all a matter of when I’ll have the time to get this done.
I get requests to port my older mods to Special Edition regularly, so I’d really like to get this done sometime soon. The main reason why I haven’t gotten around to this yet is because I am generally unhappy with a lot of my old art; I feel I can’t port them over without also giving the artwork a big overhaul. I’ll probably bundle all these mods into a single convenient package and release it as a single mod.
I also have some plans outside of modding, with a fun 3D art project that I hope to realize, but that’s in a very early stage so I’m not even sure if it’ll see the light of day this year.
Any mods you'd like to recommend?
Anything by ThirteenOranges (Bethesda.net, Steam). He has an amazing way of creating beautiful and interesting locations. His mods feel very professional, have compelling storylines and amazing voice acting. The work I did on his Pit Fighter mods was a huge push for me to create Royal Armory (I even ended up re-using one of the weapons from Pit Fighter).
He isn’t an active modder anymore that I know, and most of his stuff was released in the early days of Skyrim, but I feel after all these years his mods still hold up. I ported a few of his mods to SE and I hope I can get some more converted this year.
