LE White Phial Replacer - Design Question

[Meester]

Im just going about the quest to get the White Phial myself, however I don't mind the original white phial bottle itself, I just would like a decent texture for it [the damaged and repaired version]. Any chance you could also do a retexture for the original too?

 

If someone wants the White Phial for display it could always be made as a droppable item?

[Jokerine]

I'm getting nowhere with the texture. White is a horrible colour to work with, I don't know how to add any detail to it without making it look dirty. And without detail it looks flat and unnatural. Gotta face the fact that I'm no texture artist... for the moment this project is officially on ice.

 

Do you have a finished nif then, or just the unfinished model? You could upload the nif here if you have it and maybe someone good with textures could give it a try :)

[ShimoOkami]

I actually love working with white because it gives you a ton of color options. Blue is always the go-to color for a pure-looking white, and I think ice blue would work well here since one of the components of the phial seems to be snow. I kinda imagined the White Phial to have a slight iridescent shine, so I think a bit of green and purple in the texture and maybe a bluish specular color would look nice. That's just me though, it's totally up to you. I'd offer to help, but I honestly lack the motivation and drive to finish any sort of project right now.

[Saerileth]

I do have the mesh finished (well sort of, the cracks are missing but I'll add those later). Here it is, in case someone would like to try their hand at it: White-Phial-Replacer-v0.1.zip

 

TAKE CARE WHICH DOWNLOAD LINK YOU CLICK ON! Unfortunately there are a lot of adds on that site that try to trick you into downloading something else entirely.

There is an inside to the bottle that is invisible at the moment (once the cracks are added you'll be able to see inside though). At the moment it uses the same texture as the outside, but you can change that in the mesh. I'm assuming anyone willing to try and texture this knows how to get a UV template through Nifskope, if you don't send me a PM. You can also work with transparency on the outside of the bottle, there a NiAlphaProperty node included.

 

@ShimoOkami: You're right, one of the components for repairing the Phial is Unmelting Snow... I could use frost and ice crystals for decoration on the bottle. You have just given me the inspiration I was lacking, thanks! :smile:

 

@Meester: I'm not primarily a texture artist... I'm learning how to do make textures for the custom meshes I create, but frankly I enjoy the modelling part a lot more. Retexturing a vanilla object without changing the geometry at all sounds a bit boring to me.

 

Edit: Here's a screen of how the phial currently looks ingame:

http://static-4.nexusmods.com/15/images/110/4522213-1398781595.jpg

 

Pretty boring, huh?

Edited April 29, 2014 by Saerileth

[Matth85]

@Meester: I'm not primarily a texture artist... I'm learning how to do make textures for the custom meshes I create, but frankly I enjoy the modelling part a lot more. Retexturing a vanilla object without changing the geometry at all sounds a bit boring to me.

 

trust me, texturing become a lot of fun once you get the hang of it! I remember when I learned it. At the start, I would not texture at all, or just give the model to somebody else to texture. Slowly I began to get the hang of texturing, and boy, let me tell you: Besides sculpting, texturing is on the top things I like to do. Hand painting textures, manipulatin photos, playing with values. You can get so many good results in a short amount of time! It's even more fun when you start on the subtle details. The tings the majority never see, but everybody notive it if its not there.

 

as on the model itself: Allthough I can see the overall shape can be a design thing, it just looks very low poly. I am not sure if you utilize a normals map or not, because the light doesn't really flow nicely. It also looks very sharp, to the point you could cut yourself.

Though that is me nit-picking!

 

Side note: I'll try my hand at a bottle. Seems like a fun excercise!

My take on the bottle. This is without the transparancy it would have in-game!

http://postimg.org/image/c7r2t1gcz/

 

Tip for texture:

1) Don't texture it all white. I chose a slight greyish blue to work with.

2) Don't sweat the details. I spent a good hour on small details you will never, ever, see when this goes transparant.

3) Get some values in it. Some darker spots, some lighter. This is especially important on the specularity, so you get something the eye can see as the light bounce on it.

Basically, choose a color slightly greyer than white, and work with values. Then get some good values popping in the specularity. Choose a good cubemap on top of that, and the alpha transparancy will fix the rest!

 

Cheers,

Matth

Edited April 29, 2014 by Matth85

[JobVanDam]

OOOOOOOhhhhhhs!!! I's can'ts waits!!!

Edited April 30, 2014 by JobVanDam

[Saerileth]

The phial has 736 triangles, stopper and inside and all, which is roughly 200 more than the vanilla bottle has. And that's without the cracks. Currently there's no normal map on it at all, I don't really know how to work with those, unfortunately. The most I've ever managed is let CrazyBump bake normals from a diffuse texture.

 

I think what you see as too sharp is that I gave the lower half of the bottle (and the stopper) split edges to bring out the shape better. I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom in this, as you can see the UV map does weird things toward the middle, where the sharp edges blend into the neck of the bottle. I might have to redo that part and try to get the sharpness with a slight bevel. Or use normals, if I can figure out how.

 

Here's how my frosty texture turned out:

http://static-2.nexusmods.com/15/images/110/4522213-1398821049.jpg

 

And the same with a bit of a glow inside:

http://static-3.nexusmods.com/15/images/110/4522213-1398856341.jpg

 

Still not quite the look I'm going for. The frost texture looks nice enough in my Gimp editor, but ingame everything looks... different. I guess I need a lot more experience with this stuff.

[TaeRai]

I really like what you've done here! Great effort everyone :)

[Matth85]

All right, a few things, if that's okay!

 

1) I checked the mesh and noticed that a lot of the polygon are wasted. They are not contributing to the overall silhouette enough to be worth having.

2) You got no normals map or specularity map.

3) The UVW is, well, usable. Some serious stretching going on at certain points.

 

I took the liberty to check out your mesh, and did some 5-minute fixes on it. Just to show how quickly you can get the model up to speed!

http://s1.postimg.org/am7cgcgbj/Untitled_1.jpg

 

The polycount ended at 176 polygons. I redid the UVW, all though it was not done very well on my side either. Some stretching around the model itself.

The texture is, again, a blue-greyish difuse with some color values, a "frosted glass" looking specularity map. The high poly model was done VERY quick, so the normal map is simply a hard-edged-high-poly version of the low poly one.

 

Note: This is, again, without transparancy. I use Marmorset 2.0 to render, and the transparancy options are... limited.

With transparancy, it would look a lot more white/glassy.

 

I hope you can take some of these tips with you!

[Saerileth]

Good news: Gamwich helped me make a pretty texture, it's not quite done but I'll upload screens once it is.

 

@Matth85: You're right, the mesh could still use a bit of work. I'll try to reduce the poly-count a bit, though I kinda like my silhouette better, especially on the lower half of the flask. I think I can find a middle way here. I think ~700 polygons is not that much compared to other vanilla items, and considering it's a unique item I can probably afford to be a bit wasteful.

 

I know the UV map is a bit of a hack, I really don't know how to work with those properly so this is the best I could manage. Either way it doesn't matter anymore, as I've already got a texture that looks nice on it and I won't ask Gamwich to do it all over for a different layout. But I've learned something from this: get the UV map right before you ask people to texture things for you :D

 

I also removed all the split edges and made a high-poly model that uses a slight bevel to get the sharpness back. I also added a lot of detail to it that I would like to bake into the normals. The trouble is, now I don't know how to match them to each other. I know how to bake normals with Blender, but I've made some transformations on the high-poly model that changed the UV so I can't just use that direclty. You wouldn't happen to know how this is done?