Inked weaponry

[Inked]

I'm going to make a weapon mod and at the moment I am modelling and texturing, all by hand, and I'm looking for suggestions.

 

I plan to experiment with:

Complicated textures and reflections

I will probably throw in trueflame

swords made out of shock, fire, water, see through ice.

Phys based stat affected weapons (like Havoked flails using chain links as phys objects)

Swords, blunts, staves, made out of enemy parts, skeletons (I was inspired by the slaughterfish 2000 (the bloke)

 

I'm hoping for advice on how to texture things, requests and other suggestions.

To kick things off here is the model for my first flail, does anyone have any ideas on how to texture it?

 

http://i29.tinypic.com/xngsvp.jpg

 

:thanks:

[Deleted771212User]

Havok weapons don't work in oblivion. I think.

[Inked]

They probably don't, so this will be like a holdable hilt with a chain ball stuck on it and I will script it all to blunt stats or whatever, and if that fail I'll program it myself, determination ftw.

[UK47]

nice ;)

[Eshenaleros]

I remember someone trying to make flails once. he animated the chains and it just looked sad. your idea, on the other hand, could open up possibilities for havoked clothing items and weapons. THAT'S AWESOME!

 

I look forward to seeing this at completion

[Inked]

does anyone having any good ideas for weapons, I will make them, and also, what would eb a good flail texture?

[Deleted771212User]

I think you should create real medieval realistic weapons.

[Germandeathkittiez]

I saw a flail mod once, it didn't get bad ratings but I never got to use it

[exanimis]

I have a few questions, mainly because that chain scares me.

 

What is the count on the vertices and faces?

 

What program did you render it in?

 

Has the model been UV mapped?

 

The model is well done but UV mapping all those chain links would be a pain. As far as textures goes. I think a black iron mace with a wooden handle would look best.

 

Nice work.

[Vagrant0]

They probably don't, so this will be like a holdable hilt with a chain ball stuck on it and I will script it all to blunt stats or whatever, and if that fail I'll program it myself, determination ftw.

I know you're going to still and go ahead and do it, but I figure I might save you some time and frustration. You can't program it in yourself, the game does not allow this. As such, you are pretty much stuck with whatever the engine allows for. You can bend the rules with creative scripting, but you cannot break them. Weapons require having their own specific havok types. These havok types do not react to hitting other stuff or gravity. This was likely done on purpose so that the game wouldn't be handling collision data constantly from a weapon that is dangling. Additionally, this also allowed them to be a bit more lazy with living NPC havok and hit detection (just being a large capsule around the actor).

 

Now I know what you're saying... There are traps that work like morning stars, I'll just script a smaller one of those to be constantly placed in the player's hand. Except, here's the problem with that. First, there is no native or OBSE function which determines the location of the player's hand. Even if you went through every attack and movement animation recording thousands of points, and creating an offset based on known races/genders, and used that and an excessive amount of math and scripting to move things around, and could determine with absolute certainty as to what animation was used when. The effect would still not work. Due to all that moving around of the activator. The problem is that you wouldn't be moving the activator in a way so that it might create some change in direction or inertia, but are just relocating a pivot point. Since no actual movement is being transmitted down the chain, even if the game had a chance to process it before the chain was moved again, the chain would just be hanging straight down, through the player's hand/arm. And since it is an activator, and not part of the player, and is in such close proximity to the player, the necessary trigger blocks would constantly be firing on the player, or if nothing else, inhibiting player movement, or bouncing off the player. You can't use scripting to position individual pieces of a havoked object, and making the weapon out of several activators, scripted and moved, while it might solve the droopy problem, would likely be more processing and scripting than most computers could handle. Now if all this wasn't enough, there's is still another problem with this idea. As the weapon is an activator, or group of activators, which are entirely separate from the player, any damage they cause will not be factored as the player doing it. Although more scripting can go and calculate damage based on player skill, the damage itself isn't linked back to the player for the purposes of crime, assault, disposition loss, or those few cases where the player has to kill a certain NPC themselves. This aspect cannot be forced or scripted in any way which does not create other issues.

 

The animated weapon method is about the only way that you could do something like this, and as mentioned before, kinda sucks, and really cannot ever be made to look right given the limitations of the game.

 

 

In closing, I would concur with Exanimis, that mace looks to have a rather high poly count, even accounting for smoothed faces and help from the rendering (can't fake round geometry). Texture mapping shouldn't be a problem if you don't care too much what the smaller parts look like, but the weapon itself may need to be optimized a tad.