New Texture mod WIP

[xander2077]

well if i can figure out animations then i may try it. who knows.

[xander2077]

actually it has already been done before. here is the animation. link

 

http://abitoftaste.altervista.org/morrowind/index.php?option=downloads&task=info&id=8&Itemid=50&-Thunders-Lightnings

 

 

 

i looked at it in nifskope and it looks ok. not sure if it can be sped up or not, but i imagine so. the texturing is not bad. it is actually an updated version, so the texture is a better one, but i really dont care for the spell effect. of course i think that can be replaced by one of the better effects textures on the nexus, since it is based on a spell, the spell effects have been redone a lot better than when abot designed this mod.

Edited March 10, 2016 by xander2077

[xander2077]

new dwemer ballista walker

 

http://i.share.pho.to/b0ad4b72_o.png

 

not done yet. body still needs work.

[Drakevarg]

I've always wanted to see a version of the Dwemer Ballista from Dragonborn altered to look closer to the inert ones in Morrowind ruins, but I imagine that would require a wholly new animation skeleton.

[RubberMan01]

Looking good mate. I'll check that anim out later when I've finished wiring up this ceiling lol

[xander2077]

speaking of skeletons, i imagine it would be a whole lot easier to port a skyrim style ballista to morrowind using the spider skeleton, than it would to try putting this model on any skeleton of a morrowind creature or any other bethesda creature. as far as putting it on a new one, im not sure how that would go either. the animations would have to be completely new. the only animations that would come close would be the steam centurion but the only skeleton that would work is the guar. tricking the engine into thinking you are dismounted to fire the ballista would be another thing as well. that would mean that at least part of it would have to be treated like clothing on the guar skeleton and on that part only the crossbow animation would work. how to get it to transfer (at least in the eyes of the game) from guar clothing to an active weapon is another thing altogether. i bet it would have to be something in inventory that you have to activate, like a dwemer control sphere, which could stop the ballista from moving, equip and arm the "crossbow", and enable one to fire it. not only that but tricking the game into thinking the player is dismounted would be something to consider im sure it is a lot more complicated than that. probably heavy scripting as well. of course if someone already ironed out mounts so you can fire from them then that makes things a bit easier from one standpoint, but could complicate things depending on how they did it. the crossbow animation can be from another one, but the model has to be a new first person and 3rd person that doesnt put the crossbow through the torso when it is equipped, but keeps it where it whoudl be on the ballista. no reloading animation with hands or moving the crossbow around or anything, just a simple twang and thump. thats the hard part, cause im not sure anyone has successfully culled parts of animations and removed parts that would ruin things when you want to do something like this.

 

like rubberman, i really am lost and avoid animations as much as possible. there were some great people that ripped into that stuff with ease years ago, that have since kind of distanced themselves from morrowind ever since PES went down and lots of mods sunk with the ship, and only those that had copies offline were able to save some of the gems that are now resurfacing here. i lost some mods there too, that were only uploaded there, because at the time that was the happening spot for morrowind, and the nexus was kind of like the afterthought. now, like a lot of people that came here eventually, i wish i had uploaded the same stuff here, as at PES, but i got most of it here. some i just have to redo, and surprisingly i still have some work folders with old dds files in it for armor texture mods that i dont know why i kept cause they were crap. heck, all my mods back then were terrible when i look at them now and know i can do a lot better. at the time i liked them, and i thought i was really doing something, and people liked them well enough. but since then i learned a lot and increased my skill set, so those old mods fall so short, and remind me of the frustration and limitations of working with the terrible unwrap of most morrowind nifs when i had no idea how to unwrap an old model let alone a new one.

 

anyway. im not sure what i will do today. i still have all the outside stuff marked "walls" to mess with, but first they have to be converted to blend files (tedious)

 

i cant remember which ones are dwemer stones, but they were kind of like quarried rocks, squared off in a rough sense, but not finished. and i have no idea why there would even be quarried rocks laying around a bunch of dwemer ruins outside, when they probably had that stuff inside instead. so i may end up making those into other things. seems to me that was one more thing they rushed in the attempt to get the game on the shelf at the store, and just took a much of models that didnt make the cut (scraps really) and used them for the ruins and clutter objects. i think honestly that they could not decide which interiors to use, and instead of mixing it between the morrowind and tribunal styles and refining both to a higher standard, they chose to again use the unfinished interior ruins that were competing with the stock interiors in the first release because they had them on hand and didnt want to waste them. and they stuck those in tribunal in a barely finished state. i would not be surprised if one of the devs that modeled for them back then still has a copy of the finished or mostly finished models somewhere they forgot about, and instead of being able to update them, some manager sloppily chose to put the wrong ones in the game because they had sent everyone home already, and back then modelers were in higher demand, so they would have went from one game to the other with little time to spare. probably were not even working for bethesda at that point and told they had to relinquish all copies of files before they left. but things squeak through. they always do. just like the unused things in the BSA files that creep up all the time.

 

one thing for sure, is games are never complete, even if they get released. same issue was present in just about every game i have ever modded for. restored content is always there in mods. freelancer, morrowind, KOTOR, SWG, all have restored content mods. you always find unfinished tidbits, or rushed things in the models. a lot of the technique i am using here was learned from looking at models from SWG or KOTOR and trying to mimic that for freelancer by making new landing areas. which never got completed. so i know just from examining those, what will work best in a game like morrowind, how important tris are, and how textures play an important role in making something that might not look perfect as a mesh, really come alive with the right texture application.

 

nifs are somewhat familiar to me, but now i have learned a whole lot more about them. statics are easy. and the ones with animations are a lot more complicated. still have yet to successfully import one of those to work on. because the animations are loaded with the model, and skinning, etc, it takes a lot longer to load one of those in blender than a standard armor or static mesh. and there are bound to be errors . that and trying to work with two versions of blender that may or may not play nice with each other is another hurdle. i can save a blend file as a legacy file, but it wont always open right in the old blender version i have to use for morrowind export. so im pretty much left with having to export models as an obj and then import the nif i want to modify in old blender with the obj i exported from new blender on top of it to replace the vanilla mesh in old blender. it is a lot of hopping around, but it can be done as long as most of the actual modeling work is done in new blender.

 

speaking of animations again, i was always curious if nifs from other games would ever work in morrowind. i know there are conversions of armor that was fan made for oblivion, but what i am thinking is there are other games as well that use nifs and may contain the right skeletons that just barely work in morrowind. still have to explore that idea. the problem is they have to have used the same nif version or they wont port very well.

 

here is a prtial list of netimmerse games that use nifs and maybe one of them has the right armitures in it for some of the things that need to be accomplished.

 

Star Trek Bridge Commander
Freedom Force
Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich
Morrowind
Oblivion
Fallout 3
Megami Tensei: Imagine

Florensia

Requiem: Bloodymare

 

and a few more, but they are too new or animations are proprietary and wont work no matter what. oblivion and fallout 3 use a newer version of nifs so those are out unless they are converted to a morrowind nif format, which has its own issues. not sure if skeletons or armitures even translate correctly or if you still have to use the same version as morrowind and just rig the mesh from one of those games to the morrowind friendly skeleton. it is a long shot, but would be interesting to dig into and find out which games using the same nif version with animations are cross compatible witn morrowind.

[xander2077]

I've always wanted to see a version of the Dwemer Ballista from Dragonborn altered to look closer to the inert ones in Morrowind ruins, but I imagine that would require a wholly new animation skeleton.

well once this model is done, i can upload it as a skyrim file asset that anyone who wanted to can use to rig to a skeleton, if they can figure it out.

 

as long as they give me credit for the new mesh im ok with it. textures, i can upload too, but it will all be an obj file. of course if someone wanted to make them look more in line with skyrim textures that is up to them. im going to get close, but mine will be dirtier so wont quite fit in with skyrim design features. of course if that means altering the model a bit to keep the theme more in line as well that is up to whoever.

 

im probably going to chage the bow part as well and replace it with something that has pulleys. im not sure when i will be done since i have to break away from this today to do some things outside. weather cleared up a bit. time to get some things accomplished.

[xander2077]

small update. this is so far on the ballista. i may add some other details, just depends on a more thorough inspection of the model. the only thiings original that are not completely replaced are the spear this thing chucks and the rope. not much i can do to make those better than they are.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/d4cc6213_o.png

 

kind of reminds me of some of the crazy things i did as a kid, like making a huge crossbow ballista out of leaf springs from a 1 ton axle off an old junker truck. we used to fire sharpened steel rods from it lol. it took a hand crank to pull the cable back.

[xander2077]

doing the tedious task of importing multiple files to blender and then saving them as blend files so i can work on them. a lot more models than i thought at first (so far just 109 alone in the interiors folder). luckily the naming convention is pretty easy to figure out, in that most of the tribunal stuff follows one way of naming and the main game follows another. so it will be easier to tell which is which. the trouble comes when trying to save, because the blender i use for import is not the same as the one for modeling, just how it is. so the UI leaves a lot to be desired. instead of being able to highlight the whole name minus the extension, i have to tediously click on each untitled blend file between the d and the dot and then backspace or delete and then type the name out. it wont save the file as the same name as the imported file automatically. then occaisionally there is some anomalous nif that has a totally different naming convention than its partners, so while the rest of the corridors are named in sequence, it jumps to a totally different sequence in the model itself for the parts of it. which can be confusing when everything else is somewhat uniform. and the only way to tell what the model should be named is then to jump out to the folder and look. cant copy or paste the name because the UI wont allow it either. anyway, it is sure to be a frustatingly boring day of import and save. old blender UI also wont let you scroll through the whole list on one side either, it gives two columns and it seems like it is never ending and i dont think it automatically jumps back to the top of the other column. ugh... and the only reason i need to do this is because they saw fit to make so many duplicates of the same models for the CS that i cant skip any. it will make it easier to replace them, but not easy to import. the only things left after im done will be the original collision boxes, which i finally paid attention to and yes the bounding box is also the collision box. weirdly the collision is so simple inside that technically one could just use a box to replace the walls, but im not going to go that route. i think they deserve a much better treatment. but it also gives a lot of room for interpretation and detailing, since it wont matter that the models are far outside the box, i could end up making a sort of shelf platform at shoulder level for pipes and such to snake through instead of the pipes being integrated into the wall. never really liked how they did that in the corridors. of course i have to be careful because the lights have to go somewhere, so i have to at least have a horizontal pipe in the same location. and those will be redone as well.

 

the goal is to get as much of the metal structure and set dressing done as possible first, because everything with the same metal will need to have the same color scheme. then the corridors and walls, and hopefully nothing will get lost along the way. i guess once i am done importing stuff i can save all the blend files for each category to a separate folder so i can make sure they are all completed. i suppose i could give the folders the same names as they are in the data files (a,b,c,d,f,i,l,m etc)

 

anyway, that will be keeping me busy for a while, with short breaks in between so i dont get point and click carple tunnel, and once i am finihsed i will be sure to do some more meshing and updates.

 

the next group of things to do will be anything labelled as furniture or containers. followed by set dressing from the main game and expansions. things like pipes will simply be given a new unwrap for a better texture placement becasue RR mods already did a fantastic job on those, and i have already incorporated those pipes into the replacement dwemer header . gears will be upgraded. and i think the only thing relatively untouched in all of it will be the lever, because that is actually one of the better models in morrowind, and perhaps only the base housing needs a facelift and the rest just needs a better texture. besides i am not sure if i want to monkey around with it and ruin the animations.

 

speaking of which i may have to get creative with the dwemer robots. if i cannot import them completely as an animated and rigged model, then i have to strip them of everything but the mesh and just work on that, and then export them as parts so i can replace those parts one at a time, but that also has its own issues because of the morphing that goes on with the sphere animation and the spider. my luck and i wont be able to get rid of the gas bag on the spider and the sphere will turn stiff lol. but who knows. i know it has been done before so it is possible, but the modders that did that were dead set on trying to get included in skywind, and when they were turned down because the rigging was morrowind rigging and not skyrim, they kind of gave up even though they had working models. which is unfortunate because i really think they could have gotten a lot of interest here in the nexus.

Edited March 13, 2016 by xander2077

[xander2077]

@rubberman:

 

this is the dwemer lift i want so badly to replace with a version of your lift, complete with pillars and gear tracks that actually work. of course it has to be smaller, but this just looks completely out of place and so low poly it is ridiculous, low poly is a good thing in games, but sometimes there has to be a little effort put in, and this almost fits into the lazy afterthought category.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/e9727f15_o.png