Athavulf Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 Hello everyone, I've greatly enjoyed sampling various mods and am thankful for this site and its contributors! I have some 100+ mods running and a level 64 Khajiit, sided with the Stormcloaks, etc.. What fun! Anyway, as much as I enjoy playing mods, I would love to see some of my own artwork in a future mod. The problem is, most of my weapon models are high-poly and were created in Bryce 7 using Boolean operations. Bryce supports exporting to .obj among others, but apparently Skyrim does not want to even try to think about Boolean shapes (I may be wrong here). I've seen and downloaded a few different "importing custom swords" tutorials that run you through the Nifskope process and such. No problems there. What I am trying to figure out is this: What's the best (cleanest) way to convert my Bryce files to low-poly / baked texture versions for use in Skyrim? One sort of successful approach I have found was to just trace a Bryce render of one of my weapons in Photoshop CS5 Extended and using the "repousse from selection" feature to create a simple version of the sword shape. I used the same traced render as a texture for both sides of the sword. When imported into Nifskope, it was messy looking (I need to flip normals?) and mega-gigantic in comparison to the scale of the vanilla iron sword .nif I had loaded. I got frustrated at went looking for any tricks I could use for the high-poly to low-poly conversion. It occurred to me that I should ask here, amongst the seasoned modding veterans. Any advice on a sensible workflow for the conversion would be super-helpful and greatly appreciated! If I can just get over this technical barrier, there are a lot of new models I would like to release here as a package mod, perhaps a little quest for each one / hidden locations + hints, etc.. Personally, I just have this persistent craving to swat a few bandits and draugr down with one of my own swords.I have ZBrush (but am noob on it). I suspect this program can do what I need it to do, but the interface is ..complicated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matth85 Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 (edited) Retopology. Google it.Try Topogun or 3d Coat. I believe they offer a free trial. Then make a low poly version of the models you got, UVW it and bake a normal map/AO using Xnormal (free). Otherwise Maya/3ds max/Blender/etc works fine for it as well. You basically just want to create new geometry around the existing mesh. When it comes to scale, just import an existing weapon from Bethesda into any 3d package capable of handling .nif files and scale it to that. Remember that the hand will hold the weapon at 0,0,0, and try to get the handle to be the same width as the one used by bethesda. Edited March 13, 2015 by Matth85 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Athavulf Posted March 14, 2015 Author Share Posted March 14, 2015 (edited) Retopology. Google it.Try Topogun or 3d Coat. I believe they offer a free trial. Then make a low poly version of the models you got, UVW it and bake a normal map/AO using Xnormal (free). Otherwise Maya/3ds max/Blender/etc works fine for it as well. You basically just want to create new geometry around the existing mesh. When it comes to scale, just import an existing weapon from Bethesda into any 3d package capable of handling .nif files and scale it to that. Remember that the hand will hold the weapon at 0,0,0, and try to get the handle to be the same width as the one used by bethesda. Thank you for the info! I actually just checked the forums here after sampling 3D Coat. It looks really nice and intuitive. After only a moment of struggling, 3D Coat mapped a very high poly set of spiky pauldrons that I made in Sculptris. Impressive! I think that's what I was looking for. I'll still check topogun out anyway. The Xnormal tip was fantastic though, thanks for that! [EDIT]: I was browsing your gallery and that is great work, very inspirational! Edited March 14, 2015 by Athavulf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matth85 Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 Glad I could help :) Best of luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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