[WIP] Tamriellic Craftworks

[criswolf09]

Oh the project is very interesting, I'll be checking from time to time.

[Ph0rce]

Bit of a change of pace, I decided to create some banners for the necromancer factions in Skyrim; something one of my projects called "Blasphemous Revenants" may touch on if I ever get around to it, though alternatively I'll probably just release these as resources. Still tweaking the Guild banner, so the image here may change on occasion.

 

http://www.ndavidteixeira.com/images/Oriius/TESV/TCW/Screenshots/0012.png

 

Cult of Worms: Original necromancer faction started by Mannimarco during the second era; driven into hiding after the early conflict with the Guild of Mages, though it is still very much active. Currently worships Mannimarco as a god (the Necromancer's Moon).

 

Cult of The Black Worm: Splinter faction of the Cult of Worms, established by the "Returned Mannimarco" following the Warp in the West. There is to his day, debate as to whether or not the Altmer leading them was actually Mannimarco. This of course lead to the schism that produced the second cult. The Cult of the Black Worm was utterly smashed during the conflict that effectively destroyed both it and the Guild of Mages, and also killed the Altmer known as Mannimarco at the end of the third era; though there are rumours that remnants of the cult may still be found.

 

Guild of Necromancers: Originally another name for the Cult of the Black Worm, some surviving members formed a new guild stripped of the religious elements found in the cults; they are researchers studying a school of magic rather than religious fanatics. Though they still revere Mannimarco as the father of the craft. Their disbelief in their founder's apotheosis has led them into conflict with the Cult of Worms on more than one occasion. This faction is a guild in name only, and is rather a loose assemblage of covens that share a banner and little else. The majority of necromancers found in Skyrim are members of the guild.

Edited August 31, 2014 by Ph0rce

[Ph0rce]

Been doing some concept art lately; I can explore concepts faster this way than I can building them as models, and the honest I need the practice anyway. Those who saw the old Archer's Paradox thread will probably recognize the "Mechanist Arrows" from the second image, but the arrowheads from the first image are the new Dominion arrowhead designs that I'm exploring. Each style of arrowhead I produce has 3 basic types (Broadhead; the standard arrowhead, Serrated; an arrowhead that causes bleed damage and Bodkin; an armour-piercing arrowhead), as well as a fourth unique to the style. For the elves of the Dominion, that fourth arrowhead is the Starburst arrowhead, which is tipped with meteor glass that explodes with a magic charge on impact (does mostly stamina and magica damage).

 

The only exception to the aforementioned rule is the Mechanist style, which instead contains 3 unique arrowhead types, two of which were inspired by the Thief video game series. From the top to the bottom, they are the Noisemaker Arrowhead (similar to the "Throw Voice" shout, though as an arrow that can be used by anyone), the Syringe Arrowhead (injects a potent toxin of the player's choice directly into the target) and the Exploding Arrowhead (contains a glass phial which shatters on impact. On release the phial will be able to contain water, sleeping gas, poison gas, or one of three elemental explosive compounds similar to the exploding bolts from Dawnguard. Think an exploding arrow that moves slower than a bolt, but delivers a much larger amount of explosive. I'm thinking of also doing an oil arrow since Skyrim already has the mechanic for flammable oil).

 

http://www.ndavidteixeira.com/images/Oriius/TESV/TCW/Screenshots/0013.png

 

http://www.ndavidteixeira.com/images/Oriius/TESV/TCW/Screenshots/0014.png

[Mattiewagg]

Looking great!

[Ph0rce]

Thanks Matthiaswagg.

 

And the first release of TCW will be... Tomorrow, as an addon for a pre-existing mod :blink:.

 

I'm still reworking the plugin for the core content due to issues with the latest version of the plugin, a lack of available time, and my utter hatred of the Creation Kit. In the mean time though, swordboy has given me permission to release an addon for his Northern Cardinal mod; two new banners replacing the "Northern Cardinal" and "Pirate" banners.

 

The textures are done, there's just the matter of the resolution packages and the NMM installer. So yeah, depending on how much time I can get to work on this, hopefully tomorrow.

 

http://www.ndavidteixeira.com/images/Oriius/TESV/TCW/Screenshots/0017.png

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[Ph0rce]

Northern Cardinal preview release is up. Get it here.

[Ph0rce]

It's been more than a few months since I last posted, but I haven't been idle. You may have seen a few pictures that I posted on Nexus while I was unable to access my server. Finally dealt with that problem today, so I can show you all what I've been up to in better detail.

 

First all, Dwarven Splendor.

 

http://www.ndavidteixeira.com/images/Oriius/TESV/TCW2/Screenshots/002.png

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Dwarven Splendor is my oldest project for Skyrim. Though the project can be traced back to an early retexture that I did of the Ebony Mail, the simple truth is that I've never been satisfied with how Bethesda handled the Dwemer in Skyrim. They were my favorite element back in Morrowind, and the artifacts in Skyrim just felt so soulless. I keep coming back to it, but I keep loosing interest; primarily because I can't achieve the results that I'm looking for without an utterly massive investment of time in Photoshop. This changed dramatically over the holiday season, when I decided to invest in a copy of Substance Designer (if you get the chance to try it for texture work, I highly recommend it). Armed with a tool that can generate high-detail textures extremely quickly, I started playing around with Bethesda's assets and custom built displacement maps deployed in Blender. Results weren't bad all things considered, but the other shoe dropped when I saw the semi-automatic Dwemer crossbow by XvortexbladeX and Matth; I knew I was going to have to start from scratch in order to get the results that I wanted.

[Ph0rce]

A bit of a primer on Dwarven Splendor, which has now been merged into Tamriellic Craftworks:

 

Dwarven Splendor is an overhaul of all things Dwemer in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, with a focus on material use and regionality. Within Skyrim itself, the the dwemer are divided into three clans: Clan Mzark occupies the centre and north of Skyrim, Clan Rourken occupies the Reach and surrounding areas and clan Aztul occupies the Rift and Eastmarch. Outside of Skyrim we of course have clan Dumac with holdings on Solthstiem. There are also rumors of a fifth clan which seems to have been scoured from all records. Each clan has a different philosophy and general outlook, which is reflected in the artifacts that they left behind, whether they be tools, weapons, animunculi or ruins. In practical terms, this means that the eventual goal of this project is to replace all weapons, enemies and dungeon tilesets with versions used by the appropriate clan in each region (with incremental releases to reduce the risk of the project imploding on itself).

 

For the new content, I've started with Clan Dumac. Both fortunately and unfortunately for me, InsanitySorrow got here first with his fantastic Dwemer Weapons. So with recreation out of the picture (don't want the same mod twice over after all), I've opted for reinterpretation, from the perspective of mass production (fitting for a race so heavily tied into machines and machine aesthetic). I started with the crossbow which uses steam power to propel the bolt faster and harder (think of Zephyr from Dawnguard), and then moved to the longsword, and I'm now working on the shortsword. Each clan has four different tiers of weapons: standard, enhanced, advanced and legendary. I may do legendary armours and enemies down the road, but for now they will be locked to the first three tiers.

 

• Standard is made almost entirely of Dwarven Metal, with a special type of resonance-enhanced silver to help conduct enchantments more effectively. The look for this tier is inspired by the Dwemer devices in Elder Scrolls Online.
• Enhanced is still mostly Dwarven Metal, but now features a second material called "Tempered Metal", and the silver is replaced with gold (which in the rationale of the project conducts magicka just as well as silver but is less prone to damage). The look for this draws on the original Dwemer weapons from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
• Advanced replaces both the Tempered Metal and most of the Dwarven Metal with ebony. Ebony is the highest tier for materials found directly on Nirn, so it makes sense that the Dwemer would use it for some of their most powerful items.
• Legendary is based on one particular special material being added to an advanced item; something unique to this particular clan. For the three clans based in Skyrim, it will likely be Aetherium, though I may only use that for Aztul... not sure yet. For clan Dumac though, the special material is "Oblivium" (terrible name. If you have something better, I'm open to suggestions). Oblivium is the crystalized waters of Oblivion, and can be best described as a "Pre-Mythic quasi-crystaline morpholith". As you might guess, this is the same material that Sigil Stones are made out of. Clan Dumac's legendary weapons are the "Black Weapons of Fate"; fate-engineered weapons that will never decay, never break and never disenchant. As one might expect, these are inspired by the Black Bow of Fate from Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC.

http://www.ndavidteixeira.com/images/Oriius/TESV/TCW2/Screenshots/011.png

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And no, I haven't forgotten about the earlier items from Craftworks. I've done the first mead bottle, though I'm not satisfied with it and consequently won't be showing it yet. That's all for now folks. More soon.

Edited April 14, 2015 by Ph0rce

[Mattiewagg]

I love this. Matth did that semi-auto crossbow for Beyond Skyrim: Morrowind BTW and it's fantastic. The concept is amazing too.

 

I do think the red parts on the weapons are a bit strange (the solid red ones) though that may not be included in the final.

 

From what i hear, Substance designer is fantastic.

[Ph0rce]

Thanks Matthiaswagg. Matth's crossbow relies on a soul gem mounted to the magazine as a power source. For mine, the glowing red crystal is a material I call Quorium; a crystal that can transfer energy through the air as resonant waves. I got the idea from both Skyirm's centurion dynamo and the glowing red crystal found on the dwarven spider which Bethesda clearly elected not to use. In some ways, the texture on his is still a little more refined than mine. Sunstance Designer can make some fantastic textures if you feed it the right information, but there's still something to be said for the hand-painted approach. Photoshop is also less likely to crash a computer running 32GB of RAM on a 4K texture. On the other hand, I was able to bake full texture maps from the high-poly and generate textures for all variants of the longsword in one day, so I suppose I can live the the tradeoff in visual quality. Now if only Creation actually supported SD's native image map types...