[WIP] Tamriellic Craftworks

[Ph0rce]

Thanks, Cocas

 

I wasn't satisfied with how the textures were turning out. Anyone that's looked closely at the assets that Bethesda/Zenimax has made over the years would notice a distinct colour shift from year to year for Dwemer items. Back in Morrowind the metal was a bright, acidic yellow (supposedly brass) with flecks of green which were likely meant to be tarnish. In Oblivion, they went to a lightened brass texture with a layer of rust to visually weather the material. Skyrim moved away from brass completely, with the material even being called (incorrectly) bronze,, though it still maintained a green/gold patina. Online went a step further by darkening the material even more and killing the patina entirely (at least for the Dwemer tileset and the Stros M'kai enemies. I've seen content that suggests that some Dwemer items till have a colour that resembles the patina from Skyrim). I've railed against Bethesda's art direction in Oblivion on more than one occasion, but of everything that they did, one of the few things that I feel they got right was dwarven metal. I've only done the ancient materials for now; I'll have to tackle the new versions of them at a later time.

 

I needed to rebuild my graphs in Substance anyway since my specular and environment maps weren't working properly in game. I've spent most of the last 2 weeks redoing the graphs to be a closer match to the material from Oblivion; with some influence from the materials found in the other three games. I've also made the Dumac dagger. The design was informed by the design of Keening, fused with elements from the other blades that I've done. Since I have done most of the work already, a remake of Keening itself is probably next in the pipeline.

 

 

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[Ph0rce]

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Continued below...

[Ph0rce]

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Now to the ugly business of the last few days. Quite a few modders have come out on one side or another of the UGC issue since Valve's announcement back on Thursday. Personally, I was surprised by the timing, but not by the event. As I already stated on a previous thread, the option of being paid for my work is more than a little attractive to me. I'm a professional, and I normally expect to be paid for my work. Modding, however is not a normal circumstance. It has traditionally been a hobby, which usually has certain costs associated with it, usually both incurred and taken care of by the modder rather than the player, and that paradigm is shifting, for good or ill. I've never set up donations here at Nexus because I don't like Paypal, and unless Nexus changes its policy on that I'm unlikely to use them any time soon. I've never expected money for what I do in my off hours, as I do it for my own entertainment and skill development. If somebody wants to pay me for my time and trouble, I'm hardly going to say no. Money that I get from modding can be put towards better equipment, software and training. At the very least it can be used to buy some coffee and perhaps the occasional beer for a late-night modding session. But I'm not sure about Steam's implementation of paid modding. The way that they've rolled it out has been highly flawed and the legal issues that it potentially generates are extremely troubling.

 

I won't promise that my work will never be monetized. But I will promise this: I'm not a believer in forcing the end user to pay-to-play content that is not officially licensed, particularly when the system is not implemented at launch, but deployed years after release. I promise that any work of mine that gets monetized will either be a timed exclusive or a concurrent release. I would like to be paid for my work, but I also want the community to enjoy it, and I don't want all of you to have to jump through hoops to get it. I also promise to emulate the model that CDProjectRED has followed for the last several years: The monetized mod would be an initial platform, with supplemental extensions of the content released for free. Third, I promise that the only work that I will ever monetize will be content that I have developed myself, from scratch, using tools that have a professional license. That brings me to my fourth, final, and not least point: All of the work that I have released previously was free at release, is free now, and will continue to be free forever. You will never be asked to pay a dime for anything I have on Nexus now, and none of it will ever be removed by my hand, unless it is replaced by something equal which is also entirely free.

[Ph0rce]

Well, that was probably the fastest turnaround I've had on a weapon. Presenting Keening: one of Kagrenac's tools, and one of the unique items associated with Clan Dumac. I felt that I needed to harmonize Keening with my other clan Dumac weapons, and to be perfectly honest Bethesda's original Keening mesh is terrible. Near as I can tell, the version that shipped with the game is literally a modified version of the original Keening mesh from Morrowind with a better texture slapped on top of it. As for the quality of my rendered textures, Substance Designer is great at doing metals and most other materials, but wow is it bad at rendering crystals and glass. I should really look into how to make a custom shader for presentation renders. The crystal actually has an orange hew with purple vertex and specular colours. I got the idea from a type of crystal called ametrine, which is a 2-toned type of quartz. The crystal will also be translucent in-game as well, however Substance doesn't support transparency alongside the PBR shader. I'll have to see about getting this thing in-game and getting some actual screenshots up soon.

 

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[Ph0rce]

Got keening into the game as a replacer for Bethesda's original mesh and texture. Rather than my original plan for the crystal, I desaturated the texture and used vertex colour to add the colour in. The result was better, and pairs beautifully (IMO) with the refraction effect.

 

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[miscdude]

These definitely, to me, look a lot more like dwemer weapons should. Keening is looking great, especially with the refraction :D

[FafnirEtherion]

I just discovered your project... This is just AWESOME !! I'm more hyped in this than in anything else right now :D ! Good luck : You're doing a great job already ^^

[Ph0rce]

Thank you both.

 

For a change of pace I decided to take a crack at remaking one of Bethesda's meshes. A few days and a hell of a lot of tweaking later (less than half of the mesh still matches the original), and we've got the Mzark dagger.

 

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And before you ask, no: I will not add wood back into the texture scheme. having wood in the handle for the Mzark weapons never made any sense to me. I'm sure it lightens the weight of the weapons slightly, but it just looks bizarre along side the rest of the weapon, particularly when the Dwemer (even Clan Mzark) were known for a machine aesthetic. Not sure what I'll tackle next. Might take a day or two off to actually play the game a bit. You'll just have to wait and see.

[Ph0rce]

Well, that took a great deal longer than expected. For the next build I decided to up the ante and remake the Spider Centurion; now for all intents and purposes the "Mzark Spider Worker". I've completed all of the ancient variants; the Mzark Spider Centurion will now use a slightly different model so that you can tell the difference between the two at a glance. The worker's low-poly mesh remains unchanged from Bethesda's original. The only difference from the one that shipped with the game is a complete redo of the UV Layout; Since I no longer work with a traditional workflow, I've elected to let Blender handle the UV layout on its own. This has the notable advantage of minimizing distortion in the texture, but also has the the disadvantage of making the textures extremely difficult to edit manually in Photoshop.

 

For comparison:

 

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Bethesda's texture on the left, mine on the right; both for the same mesh.

 

And on to the glamour shots:

 

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(Continued in next post)

Edited May 27, 2015 by Ph0rce

[Ph0rce]

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I'm issuing an official challenge to the community: The last two of these screenshots are two images of a "Legendary Spider Worker" made of a mystery material. My challenge is twofold: first, identify the metal (the only clue I will give you is that it made its debut in The Elder Scrolls Online), and second, come up with a name for this tier of armour/enemy/weapon.

The winning suggestion will be used in the release of Tamriellic Craftworks, and will be fully credited.

Challenge closes on Saturday, May 30th.

Edited May 27, 2015 by Ph0rce