Blu02

You dont happen to know any good tutorials on this, using 3d Studio Max and Mudbox? I'm at this stage myself where I really need to learn creating highpolys and baking them on to my lowpoly's. It's the best way especially for more organic surfaces and cloth. For hard surfaces however Photoshop is most often powerful enough, especially if using plugins like nDo2 :) A lot easier to start learning from.

It's definitely a nice idea. I love Riverwood and would really like to spend more time there, especially in a proper player owned house. I would however avoid adding the same things you see in other villages like spider infested mines and barracks. That's just dull. Put some more mind into it and have it more unique and interesting instead ;)

Still havent decided if I'll upload my mods on Steam. I like the idea to reach a wider audience and simplifying installations, but at the same time I despise the idea of getting money involved, whether it's for my own profit, Valve's or Bethesda's. Modding is about sharing your creations and imagination, not making money of it. Donations however is a legit exception, as long as no greedy company demands a cut from it. I dont think Bethesda or Valve knows exactly what they're getting themselves into with this anyway. I'm kind of expecting a shitstorm. And there will be TONS of license-violations if money gets involved. Nah, I'm positive Nexus will stay as the number one hub for our mods. Here is where they belong.

"Gameplay"-mods are more common because it's a lot easier for one person with a certain area of expertise to make. Making quests and adventures will however require quite a lot of effort in many areas, so most people would need help from others and form a team, which isnt always an easy task, definitely not in the long run :P Personally I'm not sure what to choose here. Skyrim is still in the need of a LOT of improvements, and I think this is the most important focus at the moment while people still explore the original gameworld. In a few months however, Skryim will look incredible, and we will need new quests and areas to keep it interesting, which I'm sure will pop up like crazy as soon as Creation Kit arrives in a few weeks. When this time comes, I think I'd rather see adventure-mods past the borders of Skyrim, because I think Skyrim is so detailed and well made in that matter already, compared to previous TES-games :) I'm personally looking forward into making quests with new NPC's, rewarding objects and voice-overs myself, and I'm definitely not alone ;) Teaming up with a friend of mine who's good with the scripting-part, so hopefully we'll make it without recruiting more people.

Picture speaks for itself. A civilization of steampunk ravers shaking their butts all day and night, while machines did all their work in the tunnels and guarding entrances from anyone not invited. Eventually they all died of intoxication and exhaustion, but was probably totally worth it :devil: http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/Da__Tobb/dwemersensation.jpg

I'm kind of experiencing the same in some cases. It's there but it shows very poorly, and I think it is simply because the lightning- and shading-systems in this game is pretty balls. You really need to overdo the effects and specular in order to notice them in the game, but which unfortunately often destroy details in the process. Especially hard on surfaces where you dont want a strong specular, like wood. So instead I try to add more strong highlight-effects on any edges created on the normalmap, which will bring out the shapes or markings a lot better. But I dont know, I'm not an expert on the subject. I'm just used to see way more visible results in modern games of this, and it's not a secret that this "brand new Creation-engine" is in fact older than Oblivion itself :pirate:

I started with Oblivion, which catched my interest because it was an RPG made for first-person view (FINALLY). Tried Morrowind because everyone is praising it, but I really hated the gameplay and dead world (Say what you want about Radiant AI, but it does add a lot to the cities and dungeons), so the little interest I had about that game kinda died instantly and I have never looked back. But on the other hand, Morrowind-lovers often liked the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion, because it had a lot more interesting design to it compared to imperials classic style. That however bored me to death for some reason, and I never finished the expansion because of that. I guess I simply just like the classic styled castles, forests and mountains of both Oblivion and Skyrim. The main stories of the games doesnt interest me much at all. I'm just in it for the sandbox :D

Iron arrows ftw. Looks like a very poor character you got there. Even on low difficulty you barely do any damage or anything. At least show your stats when complaing about this? I smell troll here.

Lol on Ghogiel :P Quite a coincidence about alpha-channels, as yesterday I took some time investigating this matter in Skyrim for my own sake. I'm not very used to saving colormaps this way, but logic says that alpha-channels shouldnt be there if it's not needed (Usually anyway), or at least not saved in high quality. When starting to work with Skyrim a couple of weeks ago, some post that said "Always save your new textures with DXT5 interpolated alpha, or it will not work in Skyrim" got stuck in my head, and I didnt think much more about it until now. Turned out to be bulls***, so now I'm working on re-saving the colormaps where alpha is not needed, and some other alpha-tweaks. Should lower the overall size quite a lot on my stuff :whistling: Mipmaps however should be good on standard-settings, right? Havent messed around with this much at all. It's a mystery why anyone would turn it off completely though, maybe that person had turned it off for some other reason before and forgot to switch it on again. But anyways, I think the problem here is that the information about how to save files, why and when, is so damn widespread on forums or located in the middle of huge threads, it's hard to put those pieces together. Many people are good with photoshop, but not so experienced with setting up and/or optimizing their work for games, or Skyrim in particular as this can be very differently done for different games. It would be nice to have all this information gathered somewhere in a sticky thread or whatever, because you know most people wont bother to google or check wiki's or whatever. Call them lazy, but we're still all affected by this in the end. Would be such a waste of talent.

These things are so stupid. But I dont care about anyone doing it, until they start posting on forums about how bad Skyrim and Bethesda is because you can do this and how easy the game becomes. Retards... :dry:

I read about all the faults last week, decided to play in offline-mode until it was fixed, but forgot about it one evening and even if I had unchecked the "update automatically" on Skyrim, Steam forced me to update by locking my exe or something. So now I'm playing with 1.2 patch anyway, but havent actually had any problems at all these past 4 days, except for the non-working resist-effects of course, and a dragon decided to go fishing for mudcrabs once instead of fighting me, but not sure if that one was the patch's fault :P

The time it took you to start this thread is about the same time it would take you to find the Skyrim-folder, if you just tried for a few seconds. And you also posted this in the wrong section. Impressive first post.

Another swede ey 8) A very skilled one that is! Very nice work you got there :dance: Since concept-art is mainly done in the early stage of planning, I recommend you to ask around in threads of bigger mod-projects. They often have a lot of brainstorming and planning going on, and a big list of things to be done whenever an artist is available. Concept-art for this is the key to present a clear common goal for settings, design, and hype other artists into joining the project to get things done. It's a lot easier to create things from images rather than 400 lines of text, especially if there are several people who have to match eachothers work ;) Sorry I dont have a good eye on these mods yet. But maybe Werewolf vs Vampire Quest sounds interesting? Or this "Major Underwater World Thing Without A Name" ;D I think you'll mostly have to ask and propose it yourself, as many projects are run by people with huge ideas but too little experience to know the great value of good concept-artists in these early stages :ermm:

-A highres texture overhaul for all clothes. The current ones are awfully compressed. -And of course "hardcore-mode" for eat/sleep/drink, so there's a bigger point with all the food and cooking abilities.

That's the normalmap for the texture. If you open that file in Photoshop, click the Channels-tab on your right menu. There you have a set of channels; red, green, blue and Alpha. The RGB-channels holds info for the normalmap which defines shapes on the texture surface. Alpha-channel however holds a black and white specularmap, which defines how shiny the surface should be, and where. You use the grey-scale for this, so the brighter it is the more the surface will shine, and the more dark it is the less it will shine. Check the alpha-channel and uncheck the RGB-channels in order to modify it. If you want to go into details you should copy the alpha into a new file, where you can more easily edit it with adjustment-layers or whatever you want. When you're done, simply merge all layers and copy it back into the original alpha-channel, then and save as usual (With "interpolated alpha"). Or you can simply use a copy of the colormap to make a completely new one. Just add a black and white layer over it, and then I recommend using "Brightness/contrast"-layers in order to affect the different parts of the texture without loosing details. When you're done, merge all and paste into the original alpha, and save.

Wow that is one LONG sentence :ohmy: But no, you can not compare texture-size to your screens resolution. For example, imagine yourself standing close to a shelf checking book-labels. At that point even a 2048-texture on that shelf is scaled way past your monitors HD-resolution, and you lose sharpness. On architecture it's even worse. You should also know that textures consist of lots of different pieces, often also containing pieces of other objects in order to save space. So eventhough an object is using a 2048-texture, it rarely means that the polygons/surface you're looking at is actually using all that space, but more like half of it, or even less, depending on a lot of things. You know in 3d everything has a backside as well, so to speak at least. There are a lot of advantages with high resolution textures for artists, especially when it comes to almost everything BUT the colormap itself. Sure there's a sport in keeping things 110% optimized as well, but I dont see the point when computers are so overpowered for this console-game as it is already. My first thought when noticing these horribly downscaled and compressed textures of Skyrim was "If I was a texture-artist at Bethesda, I would be so damn pissed seeing how my hard work ended up on release". Not saying people should exaggerate, but dont be stingy to the point where you think it's starting to mess up your art/vision. If people cant see the difference, then maybe it's time for them to buy a new monitor or glasses. Or just save some money and keep living in denial :rolleyes:

It's still chaotic on the texture-modding here on Nexus. People want to be first and/or biggest, and some people just upload whatever small changes they make by personal taste. but the real deal texture-packs are slowly starting to form and show, instead of just getting flooded away behind bazillions of other new mods. Within a month or two I'm certain you wont have any problems filtering these mods from eachother. Just give it some time to organize :) There are a lot of people and work involved. As Wither79 mentioned, one of the projects trying to gather all types of real new textures into one single pack is Skyrim Pretty Pack. Keep an eye on it ;) But I agree. Also on the persistent use of "HD" in these matters. It's just.. wrong :wallbash:

I made a small experiment this morning with the alpha-channel on the Dragon Runes texture, to get rid of nasty pixelated edges ingame that has been bugging me. Turned out quite nice, so I uploaded it. Check it out and include it if you want :) I'm probably bundling this with Tobes Highres Textures later on anyway. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2580

If Bethesda says January, then they most probably mean February. So no, I would not count on a release this year, especially considering christmas holidays for a team that has been working their asses off to at least have the main game ready and released on their 11.11.11 date. All I hope for this year is that they fix whatever they broke with the latest patch :mellow:

Nice! Downloading pack now. I just released a new version of Tobes Highres Textures that you can check out whenever you find the time. I decided to cut out noble furniture and chests for this version after all, eventhough I spent almost all yesterday trying to finish them :wacko: Hoping to have them done next week instead. Here's what's new for now; *color-tweaks to lowclass furniture & barset *Remade firewood textures *Various specular-tweaks *Added 10 new textures and 10 new normals/speculars (middleclass furniture, barrels, axe, dead animals, ironpots, ladle) Was that a comment related to this texture-pack or what? It's funny how you say this and worship a mod that is mostly just upscaled and blended with a highres image and some added adjustment-layers, not so much differently as that 90% you're talking about :rolleyes: Personally I'm not very fond of using a base of low resolution, even if it's well done as that tree stump. If you're putting work into recreating a texture in high resolution, you can just as well do it properly from scratch. But there's a lot of work in finding matching images to work with, and the end result is hard to predict. Many details of lowres textures are often practically non existent or too blurry to understand, so this is added by the artist as he/she imagines it and sees it fit. This is where ones work often gets criticized for not being true to the original, even if all the original details have been recreated correctly. Everyone seems to have their own vision of how Skyrim should look like when adding tripled amounts of details to the textures, and it's impossible to please everyone, no matter how skilled you are. I think people should just stop being so obsessed about how identical things should be to the originals. The fact is that most highres-textures contain so much more information it easily illustrates a completely new looking object ingame. The whole point is to get rid of that blurry mess you're comparing with and add something that actually looks like something. "Staying true to the art direction" isnt about these tiny details, but the whole picture. A rock is a rock and wood is wood. As long as you stay fairly true to the material, color and brightness, I see no problem here. This is the art direction of Skyrim. And as you can see the actual surface details is quite moot in this matter, as long as it blends in with the rest. http://elderscrollsfive.com/sites/elderscrollsfive.com/files/images/skyrim-crypt-concept.jpg

Hey Shaikoten, sorry I didnt post any update before as promised. Some personal stuff popped up that I had to take care of just when I was working on the last 2 textures :P I'm back at my computer on thursday or friday, so update on Tobes Highres Textures should be done and released on friday-night, or saturday in worst case scenario. Still working on noble furniture and chests, which I'm hoping to have done for this round. They're so damn detailed compared to low- and middle-class stuff, so they take some extra effort to recreate :wacko: Looking good and true to originals so far though! I'll notify here when it's uploaded. Good to see things are shaping up for a first release this week already. Haven't found time to check out the other contributors stuff yet, but I will as soon as I get home. I'm sure this pack will be much appreciated :) Keep it up guys!

I definitely support this! I currently have a retexturing-project of mine (Tobes Highres Textures) that I'm willing to contribute with, if there is anything you like :) It handles clutter and furniture, with all brand new textures including normalmaps and specularmaps. I'm trying to keep the same style as the original textures, with a few minor exceptions on details that just didnt feel logical by Bethesda. I currently have a first public release, but I'm releasing an update tonight within 12 hours that adds a lot more textures, and some tweaks to the old ones. Currently I have 19 new textures here, plus just as many normalmaps, and I will probably find time to add a few more before the update :) Most furniture have 2048* sized textures, while minor clutter has a maximum of 1024*, depending on how big the objects are. I'll return with a bunch of new up-to-date screenshots in a few hours. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1123 Some more or less WIP-screens from upcoming 1.1;

How is this "mod talk"? Anyways, I dont think it's because they cant or because they dont want to. It's probably just not a priority. The current AI works well enough, and path-finding is quite the b**ch to deal with anyway, especially in a huge open world like this where they have to be more self-aware rather than following invisible trail-tracks and action-points. It's a common problem in all games. Come to think of it, I dont even think I can mention a single game that does it better in these types of environments. Possibly ArmA2 with some AI-mods, where they can even jump over obstacles and use ladders sometimes in a gameworld that surpass the size of Skyrim. And besides, AI is a lot of work for the CPU, which isnt exactly consoles strong side (As if they have any strong side at all). I recall I heard complaints from Ubisoft not too long ago about how consoles CPU is constantly limiting their AI for Assassins Creed.

Yep, I skipped the engravings for now. That tiny 128x128 texture was just waaay too blurry to completely understand the uv-mapping when rescaled to 1024 :P I'm going to export the model later on and get a proper template to work with. That object is so thin and small anyway, so I doubt anyone will really notice it ingame, except for you of course :pirate:

I know, I feel really bad for the artists at Bethesda when I see how their hard work ended up in the release-version of the game :( I cant even imagine how beautiful the game looked before this madness. Such a waste! Some shelves has caught my attention too actually (Slightly more than the rest), now that you mention it, but I'm not sure which textures they use yet. Will have to investigate this later. There's another nice project dealing with furnitures already, so I'm trying to avoid getting too involved with those textures for now :teehee: But I'll put it on my list!