ResolveThatChord

I've been looking forward to this for a while. I'm suprised that you're porting it to the creation engine; that must be a lot of work! I think the random encounter system could make it worthwhile though. Good luck with it. I really want to play this.

That is strange. I didn't know this kind of thing could cause CTDs; you tend to get a lot of purple exclamation marked boxes in game, or invisible objects when you mess with the meshes and make mistakes, but I've never heard of a CTD as a result of swapping a weapon... Although that could happen if your polycount was ridiculously high. You're not using sub-surf, are you? Post a bit more detail about the problem, and I'll see what help I can offer. If you like you can PM me the .nif and I can have a look at it.

Exquisite. Really, this is fantastic quality. I have no criticisms. That said, I've never seen anything like the different shades of metal on the blade. If you're going for a folded steel effect like Damascus steel, then I think you'll want more variation, sort of like this: http://i00.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/103501720/AE_Damascus_Steel_Knife_Blade_BL24.jpg But you clearly know what you're doing, and it looks fantastic anyway. I say go ahead and release it- I want it!

I'm currently making a Tibetan sword. It's mostly working in-game, I just need to get blood effects to work and improve the textures. It'll be released as a modder's resource on TESA.

Ah, I tried the oval brush thing. My problem was that the ovals only faced one angle; I couldn't find a way to make them conform to the direction of the brush stroke. Is there a way, or do you have to change the brush angle every time you want the stitching to go in a different direction? And definitely check out TESA. They're starting an online Skyrim modding school. They're doing everything from scripting to texturing to cluttering.

Guys, You don't need to justify the inclusion of what YOU want in YOUR game. Do what inspires you! And good luck with it.

I think having a gameplay mechanic for eating/drinking/sleeping is an awesome idea, but the way it was implemented in Fallout NV was very awkward. There was lots of needless menu trawling, it cluttered your inventory and status screens, and was generally inelegant. One of Skyrim's major design principles was doing away with menus, HUD elements, status bars, and anything that came between the player and the game world. I think a hunger/thirst/fatigue mod should be consistent with this. One solution could be that going without resting causes detrimental effects, but resting consumes food and drink, and cannot be performed without them. Beyond status effects, all the "hunger meters" and other information would be under the surface, concealed from the player, much like the NPC friendship system. We don't need a progress bar to tell us we should sleep every night, and eat every day. Hunger/thirst/etc. could be indicated by stomach growl, and other audio/visual cues. Anyway, that's just my two cents on the matter. Ultimately the quality of the mod will depend on the execution, not the ideas; so I'll trust the modding to the modder.

This is looking fantastic, keep it up. I haven't done much sculpting. I'm curious to know: did you sculpt the patterns on the high-poly mesh by painting with displacement maps? Or did you bake normals directly from displacement maps without sculpting?

Well, you can still do most of your modelling, unwrapping, and weighting work in Blender 2.6x. You can then put your mesh into 2.49 for export, using the append feature. I strongly recommend doing your sword idea first. It's far simpler to get it into the game, and the experience will help a lot when you want to get your armour working in game, which can be a tedious and frustrating experience, requiring much testing and tweaking. Model, unwap and texture your sword, then export to .obj and follow this tutorial. There's also a tutorial on Nexus for getting armour in game. As for the Skeleton, you can't get it by exporting to .obj because .obj files don't hold that kind of data; you'll need to import directly from .nif to Blender 2.49 using the .nif scripts. Hope this helps. Good luck with your creations. Remember that the first time you try to get it to work is by far the hardest. Stick with it, come back to it, and each time you succeed it'll get easier and easier.

Basics? Right here. For an arrow, which is to say an unweighted mesh, you'll need to learn: Box modelling UV unwrapping Texturing Import/Export between Skyrim and Blender And finally, all the CK stuff to put it in the game and set its properties. Hope this helps.

With normal maps we generally bake one for low frequency, geometry details like folds in cloth, or buttons, smoother geometry, and make a normal map from the texture for high frequency detail, like scratches, literal texture, that kind of thing. Then combine them. Your armour is looking fantastic, even with the basic texture. I was wondering how you did the stitching; is it done with a vector program, or did you do it in photoshop? As for your lighting problem, I'm afraid I haven't encountered that one personally yet. If I had to guess I'd say it's to do with the shader properties in Nifskope. I think someone on TESA had a similar problem; you might want to start a thread over there.

It's a very simple matter. You could do it yourself without much trouble. Look up how to edit items in the Creation kit; all you have to do is point the feamle headdress to the male headdress mesh.

Some modders feel that making their mod exclusive to a site is a gesture of loyalty to that site and its community. Some modders don't speak english, and are more comfortable with the modding sites in their language; for example Japan and Germany both have thriving TES modding communities. Some modders for whatever reason just don't like Nexus. Whatever the reason, it's their call. I personally like to browse at Planet elder Scrolls, Moddb, and The Elder Scrolls Alliance as well as Nexus. Each has their own community with something different to offer.

Well, there are a few approaches you could take. I'd start by merging bits and pieces of vanilla armour using Nifskope. The methods covered in this tutorial should be enough for you to get going with. If you're looking to learn how to use Max to get you own raw ideas into Skyrim, I'd start by learning how to model, UV map, texture, and export to .obj. I'm a Blenderhead myself so I don't know any Max tutorials, but of course Google knows all. Good luck!

A triangle is far more mathematically simple to describe than a quad, and any quad can be split into two tris. That's about it really. Just model your models as you normally would; all quads will be converted to tris when you export it to .nif.

If you have questions, and you're finding google to be obtuse (it knows everything, but sometimes doesn't tell you), then send me a PM and I'll see if I can help you out.

I recommend keeping it simple. I don't rate mods that dump a whole bunch of abilities, stats and powers on you, accompanied by a huge readme. If you can't help yourself, then I recommend having the player acquire the powers in a way that is intuitive, and gives them time to learn how to use them, like the dragon shouts.

The neat thing about languages I don't understand is that I can't recognise horrible voice acting. It can also be used to great effect: look at Star Wars, or Shadow of the Collossus, where they used made up languages to characterise the world.

Its true that you currently need blender 2.49 for import/export, but you should learn to work in Blender 2.6. It's a superior program with far more support and available free education. You can append and link between the two.

Yeah go Antiscamp. If anyone can do it, you can. I know you prefer to fly solo, but if you need a model that would be useful to many modders as a resource, let me know.

Ambitious. Good luck.

With regards to the quads/tris thing: When box modelling it's true that you should avoid triangles. Triangles play merry hell with your topography once you try adding more edgeloops, so adding one means you can't put any edgeloops through it. In 3D animation, you should avoid them altogether, but in game design, keeping a low polycount is a far higher priority. That said, Bethesda's models still have a topology which is quite easy to follow. When you import a mesh to blender, every single quad is divided into two triangles; the game engine requires this. By selecting all faces and hitting alt+j, Blender will convert them to quads, but be careful because the script is imperfect and will often join the wrong triangles. I personally find it simpler to just look and see where the faceloops are. Since they're good modellers the faces that were quads tend to be (loosely) approximately square, so the triangles tend to be approimately right angled. If you're going to modify someone else's mesh, I'm afraid you're going to have a but of tedious work in converting all those tris to quads properly, but at least it's a good exercise in studying topology. Good for the soul, and all that.

3DS Max is the industry standard, but Blender is free, most modders use it, and it has an overwhelming amount of free education and community support. I believe it is also possible to change the interface to be more in line with Autodesk or Adobe. Get started with Blender here. The tutors at Blendercookie are really excellent. And here you'll find an overview of skills needed and method required to bring your ideas into Skyrim. Good luck, and have fun!

Just thought I'd offer my encouragement. This looks extremely promising; keep up the good work!

Well I recommend Johnathon Willamon, an excellent tutor from Blendercookie.com. The Blender skills you will need for modding will be: Box modelling Baking normal maps Vertex weighting (for clothing/armour) Import/export. Once you've got all that under your belt, you may also want to look at animation. Keep in mind that you'll never need to use most of Blender's functions- but it can be fun to do so! I personally enjoyed playing around with phisics simulations, and found them very helpful when creating clothes. There's also this tutorial which gives an overview of every stage required for getting a thing out of your head and into Skyrim. I hope this helps. Remember that it can get frustrating at times. It helps a lot to follow tutorials as you watch them; you learn more, and it gets easier every time. Good luck!