New Texture mod WIP

[xander2077]

i always thought these should be elevator shafts for some reason, but the fact they are not was always a letdown. at the very least they could have been like one of those skydiving tunnels or a bank tube that can suck you up or down to another level. weird i know, but something needs to be done with these besides just a new model. i know rubberman doesnt like round stuff, but i would be ok with a round lift if it was done right. if not then i will have to redo the shaft and make the collision box square to allow for the change.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/5aabada1_o.png

[xander2077]

finally got the imports all done (i think) and i had to go back and double check because some of the stuff i ripped from the BSAs was missing, so i did those too, and i even started on one of the centurions, so here is a sneak peek at the parts i am working on. what i am encountering while i mesh the new parts is once i click on a part (because all of them are individual parts on armitures) is that they skew in a funny direction if the extremity is past the second joint and that puts the part out of the bind position. so what i am going to try is modeling them and then lining them up with the part i want to replace, as it sits when it skews out of its bind position, and see if i can import each part into nifskope as a separate obj file once i get ready to update the nif. and if it doesnt look right then i have to line the parts up with the bind position and then try to import and replace each part one by one in nifskope. but that is a ways off, since i have to model the parts first, and then texture them properly long before that. and that wont be done until everything that is dwemer bronze is modeled. for consistency sake i have to do that or i will end up with too many variations of color and things will look terrible. so any machinery, artifacts, pipes, furniture, etc etc, that is going to share the same color scheme (pretty much everything besides the walls and tribunal floors and some other stone things) will have to be done all at once. so that is my planned workflow from now on. models, unwrap, textures, and then finalizing each nif.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/350b6f71_o.png

[xander2077]

well, scratch trying to mimic the skewed position, i think i would be better off just replacing the parts as i go. just one problem i can see. the bounding boxes for each individual part are all screwed up, so i may have to just build this guy and try to export only the geometry to an obj, and then try to import it in old blender to see if things are better, and then replace each and every part one by one, linking them all to each other, and the skeleton. i can model in new blender, but i think it did something to the animations and everything. here is a shot of what i have done, but as you can see the hand on the arm i duplicated as a guide is all stretched because it wants to follow its link and point of origin. so i will do away with the hands and the jaw. i may also do away with some of the other stuff as it was in the animation. like the pauldrons, i will still put them on, but they wont be animated. only thing i care to animate is the creature itself. the hands have to go, and instead they will both be replaced with weapons. one is a 4 bladed mace, and the other will be a hammer. hopefully i can still get the mace to act like vanilla.

 

for now he looks like a mix between c3p0 and batman, but that will change.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/f8fbb694_o.png

[xander2077]

arms, pauldrons, and warhammer left to do. then figure out if this is even rigged correctly. if not then i have to play around with it to figure out how to get it working right.

 

face was trying to morph because i moved the head up, so i had to weight paint it all blue so it wont morph. that is how i am probably going to have to do the spider so i get rid of the gas bag on top.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/8b1a8539_o.png

[xander2077]

just for kicks i decided to play the animation, and the only thing that is even close to how it should be is the mace. but it too is stretching because somehow i messed up the child parent relationships of all objects besides that one to the upper arm (since that is the only thing left of the original) so it animates, but the funny thing is the rest of it looks like a stiff action figure a 6 year old is hopping across the floor LOLOL, so it looks like i will have to export the meshes once i am done and strip them all of any links etc, so i can import the skeleton of the morrowind creature in old blender and rig it from scratch. the model as it is, just way to messy to try and fix at this point, with the individual bounding boxes all messed up and armitures not linked properly, i dont even want to toy with it. better to take all of it back into old blender and find out why the import was so borked. but that is later. i was just having fun trying to see what survived my destructive modeling.

[RubberMan01]

Seems you have played around a lot since I last came on here. Sorry been working away. Surprise job so just had to run off lol

 

I shall check through the posts later when I have the time but as I said...looks like you've been busy :D

[xander2077]

ok, im back, (for now at least) and i am nearing completeion of the armor mod, with one exception, the gloves i want to add as gauntlets. they will simply be dwemer gloves to round out the armor instead of replacing the bracers. so i will need to texture those, rename them and somehow figure out how to add them to the CS and make an esp for them. the rest of the textures are done for now til i add a few minor details here and there, but the nifs are updated to show the new textures. some minor color tweaks need done on a few items, and i want to add bits of dwemer script to the armor here and there. but now that i have the gist of them, i may even go one step further and make them less blocky on the textures, and give them more interesting features tham they already have in a few spots. who knows, something to mess around with i guess.

 

i put the centurions aside for a while til i figure out the animations and why the parts want to warp all over the place or will not stay where they are supposed to, but i am consulting someone a bit more knowledgeable on animations and need the web to research it more.

 

all three models were animated by different people, so they all have their own quirks, and the only one not heavy on jury rigging was the sphere. most of the replacement parts on it worked suprisingly well, but the shield and the head would not behave. so i may indeed need to import each part one by one into the original vanilla nif file just to get the working right. same with the others.

 

no new pictures yet besides what i wanted to post before i left last time, but i will have to get back to that tonight.

Edited March 22, 2016 by xander2077

[xander2077]

http://i.share.pho.to/3f2bbe4d_o.png

 

this is not the final version of the steam centurion, but it was the pic i wanted to upload before and could not. i changed a few things on it and i also redid the mace hand. so i will upload another pic of that later. also of the other models i worked on here and there.

[xander2077]

this is the updated version of the steam centurion, and i was also experimenting with material to se if i could give it a metallic reflection... unfortunately old blender (the one with nif import export) wont recognize the material sets made in new blender, so it will probably be removed in the export to obj.

 

anyway, i also noticed that for some reason the set face smooth feature doea not work as well in old blender, and the results in new blender are a bot overboard, but i like them compared to trying to set smooth in old blender. for some reason now it wont work as well in reimported nifs. and i am not sure if it is because i need to clean each nif first of bogus data blocks before it will take or what. but the nifskope spells are even acting weird and wont work.

 

anyway, the steam centurion: still waiting on textures. and for conparison i have the old mace (4 bladed axe style) and the new morning star style mace which i think is the better choice. both for comparison. either one beats the heck out of the old huge spiked ball.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/eb3a770b_o.png

 

the sphere centurion model is ok, until i try to animate it, and then the head whips around 20 feet from where it started and drags behind the rest. and the sheild stretched to an oval, so i dont know how i will remedy that yet. but i may just end up importing it as an obj file minus the stupid nif info to texture it since it wont stay put and every time i open the current blend file with the bones and animation the head ends up 20 feet under the neck which is 20 feet under the body. not how it should be since i modeled it right on top of the body... frustrating... it also wants to cock at a 10 degree andgle or so for some reason, and i dont get why... probably because of some weird offset the modeler had to put in there to get the animation working right for vanilla... but eny time things are jury rigged it makes my life difficult, and all these centurions are jury rigged in one way or another, not one of them is straight forward.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/b79a0685_o.png

 

i wont even show the spider yet, because all the work i did on it is lost due to a power outage. i opened the file again to find i was right back at the point right beofre i had all the new preplacement legs together and started on the body, so i have to do it all over again, and this time i will not even try to animate it, just export the parts and be done with it. the crazy thing is, even though each part acts as a separate part, this one has them all grouped as one object and i dont even know how they did that since the other models make each limb and joint separate objects, so that one is going to be a headache to do, and i hope to god i wont have to re-rig it from scratch. thats worst case. hopefully i can separate each piece to its own group and import them as separate object to the nif in nifskope to fix the spider and keep the legs from distorting all over the screen when i try to jump out of mesh edit mode to work on the body. they stretch all over and make an awful mess and wont behave simply because i replaced parts and grafted in new ones for better detail, which makes no sense because i did the same on the other two models so far and that did not happen with the other two. so it makes it obvious that three different people animated each one. all of them have different behaviors or mesh problems, and if one person did them all they would all have the same issues instead of defferent issues.

[xander2077]

last 2 pics for tonight. i really need to relax a bit. this is the dwemer armor so far, and it is about as close to ready as possible for now. in the future i may change some details to make it look less blocky by trying to alter the texture to hide a few sharp angles and things rather than highlight them all, but that is mainly going to be on the cuirass. the rest looks good enough. if i cant seem to find the right look i may have to stick with the way it is and just leave it alone. i still have to do the other two helmet options since this is only the skyrim-esque option. i may ask one of my fellow modders to play test it some and see if there are any bugs or problems to fix on them. but that will have to wait til all helmets are textured and the gloves are aded to the mod as an optional esp.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/91c6eb57_o.png

 

http://i.share.pho.to/ebbb8892_o.png

 

i also still have to use these models (since they are textured now) to replace the ground meshes and to try and make some icons that look like these instead of the vanilla armor. that will be another thing entirely. i think i can get the pics for the icons out of nifskope screen capture, but the models have to be imported into the ground meshes scenes one by one and then have to replace the vanilla ones by me arranging them to mimic the same display layout. i may even have to modify them a bit so they dont protrude through selves or counter tops while on display. that should be fun once i start to delete polys or merge a few vertices together. i hope i can get away with deleting faces instead of vertices merging, because then there wont be much stretching anywhere. we shall see.