Almightygir

just letting you guys know i haven't stopped working on this, and i'm not dead or anything. but my tablet broke, and i've just bought a new one today, so i can get cracking again. i do have an art course i'm starting in a couple of weeks too, so now i'm very much on a deadline to get this finished! thanks for your interest and support everyone :)

think of it like this: your diffuse map/texture is how you want your model to look when there is no light present. your specular map/texture is how you want your model to look when there is light directly on it. the engine then interpolates between the two values, in some engines (like unreal for example) you can make the specular map it's own colour, and therefor have say... a green diffuse, which will then turn purple when it reflects light. skyrim however only handles grayscale specular, so it can only really be used to tell you how shiny a surface is, not how it changes/reacts to light. so for a glossy black armour, i would go with black diffuse, and then gray specular, with white highlights for edges and scratches.

the _n.dds files, are normalmaps, and the alpha channel is the specular map. so open the _n.dds file, and edit the alpha channel only (it's grayscale), anything you want to look bright/shiny should be white, anything you don't want shiny should be black. then save it out as a 32bit .dds file.

if you darkened the gray to an almost glossy black, this would look badass.

this is looking really good man, it seems like the colours come out a little too saturated in skyrim though. personally i like it, i think the game needs a bit more vibrancy, but at the moment because the rest of the world is less saturated, they tend to stand out.

sorry i should have clarified, i meant that in repositioning the arms that they would be in a more neutral/balanced pose than straightened which will make animating easier when it comes to that point. but also the shoulder joint is going to be brought forward to interfere less with the wing.

try not to use so much shading in your diffuse texture, the whole point of normals and specular is that they deal with directional lighting/shadows (normalmap) and highlights/reflectivity (specular). your diffuse map should ideally contain flat colours with as little shading as possible. the reason for this, is that on creatures/characters particularly, that are always in motion, static shadows can look very wierd if the light is coming from the wrong angle.

hey guys... so over the last few days i've been re-reading a lot of my old dragon reference books. the dungeons and dragons draconomicon, flight of the dragons, and good old google came up with some good stuff with regards to the theory of flight and the mechanics behind it. i've also recieved criticism about the forearm position, and how it would affect both flight and movement on the ground... it led me to believe that my dragon wouldn't even be able to take off the ground, let alone dominate the sky... so i've come to the conclusion that before i get way too committed to the texturing (as i was still playing with colours), i'd rather do a redesign now, and get it right... than have a finished piece i'm unhappy with and would probably redo anyway. sorry if that disappoints anyone! but anyway, here are the general redesign points i've come up with, please feel free to do any of your own paint overs, or give criticism. i want to do this right! http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon_redesign.png

@Zenl - thanks for the advice man. i'm actually texturing in photoshop, but i do use polypaint for some things, like laying down base tones to work from. @Alphawolf - where there's a will there's a way, i've been modding since Q2 (like... 15 years ago... god i feel old!) and i have semi-pro and professional friends who i can lean on for support where needed. i'm sure we'll figure it out! i'll try to document the progress where possible. @Scripts18 - red makes it go faster.

depends on scale reference really, they're about as long as a human forearm + hand. so they'll go through a horse with little or no problem.

you could always try modeling hair into the helmet itself? so when you equip the helmet it disables the characters base hair, and you have new hair as part of the helmet mesh? i imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to tie the colour into whatever was chosen at the character creation screen either, as that's largely just multiplying a grayscale texture with an rgb value.

working on it....

ah okay so you're basically just doing a skin-wrap? once you've done that there is an option in the skin-wrap menu to convert to skin. from there you can edit the weights of individual verticies and the bones that affect them.

just don't weight any verts to that bone?

http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/screengrabs/dragon20.png