Skyrim Armour/Armor

[KingGsterUK]

All right, so after quite some time thinking about it and my anticipation for Skyrim at it's peak, I've started modelling one of the armour pieces in 3ds max around Robert's Male Body. I'm a rookie still so progress is slow but it's on it's way!

 

I just thought I'd have a breather from all the clicking and dragging and being glued to the screen. Here's 2 pic's.

 

What I'm aiming for:

http://tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/2383757-1307229340.jpg

 

Progress so far:

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/4813/progress5.jpg

 

 

The only pieces I have so far is the vest and plate. There's a lot of other bits need adding too like the spaulders, belts, back plate and a bit of fur maybe but I don't think they'll be that hard to make. With the way I'm working now I plan on having a few variations of the armour. For example, I'm keeping elements separate in Max so I can have everything interchangeable, mixing and matching different pieces to form new armour. If i keep breaking things down and concentrating on the little things, it'll all come together, hopefully. It may take a while though, I have yet to learn rigging and skinning.

Edited July 22, 2011 by KingGsterUK

[razorpony]

Great work so far. Your talent looks promising, can't wait to see the finished piece.

 

RP

[KingGsterUK]

I've just been trying my hand at weight-painting. I've got the gist of setting the weights soft and hard and even setting it to negative to remove weights I've painted but some vertices are always red meaning I can't remove the weight that way. I've tried selecting the affected vertices and setting abs. Effect to 0. Still it doesn't remove the weight. I must be getting this all wrong.

 

What I had in mind was taking a screenshot of the weight colouring of the spine1 of Robert's male body, which is here:

 

 

http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/5167/troubleshoot1.jpg

 

 

And then try and replicate the the colours on my vest by weight-painting. It seems when I apply a skin modifier to my vest and add the spine bones, then click on edit envelopes, most of the vest is already coloured in red and I can't remove the weights.

 

Here's a pic:

 

 

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/7774/troubleshoot2.jpg

 

 

While writing this post, I remembered from a tutorial I watched about the checkbox "weight all vertices". It was checked, so I unchecked it and removed/added the bones once again, then started to paint my weights. Using the "painter option" dialogue box (the one with the ... in), I set the max strength to 0.1 and just clicked once on the vest and it completely coloured it in red like it was 100%. When i used this method to set the strength of the brush with the "weight all vertices" checkbox ticked, I noticed I could control it. With it unticked I can't. So for either way I try I'm not actually getting anywhere.

 

 

Is there anyone who knows a little about skinning/rigging who wouldn't mind helping me out, just a bit. I can model, uvw wrap and texture. But I'm new to animating of any kind. You know to be honest, I would welcome someone who knows a bit about this to skin it and release it themselves, if they wish. Because at the moment, if I can't learn how to paint the weights properly, it'll never get released. At the end of the day I just want to give people something to enjoy, something Skyrim related until it's release date.

 

Cheers.

Edited July 23, 2011 by KingGsterUK

[Genzel]

I don't know about rigging in 3ds max, but it should work about the same as in blender.

 

When you first parent the armor mesh to the skeleton, make sure you don't create weight groups. You want it parented to the skeleton un-weighted. 3ds max should have some sort of bone weight copy script which will allow you to copy the base body's weight fairly accurately to the armor. When you have it copied to the armor, every vert should have a weight between zero and one, with one being no bone influence. Once copied, you will just have to fine tune the weighting to ensure there is no clipping.

 

If you can't find the bone weight copy function, you can probably create weight groups from bone heat or another method to automatically assign weight based on proximity to each bone. It will be a lot less accurate, but it will weight all vertices to the appropriate bones.

 

Not a lot of people use 3ds max here, so it might be best to find a rigging tutorial. The armor looks really amazing though :thumbsup:

[KingGsterUK]

I figured out what it was I was doing wrong. I hadn't made the envelopes big enough on the other bones, so when I came to paint weight, it automatically assigned it to 100% for that bone because no other bone was affecting it. Duh! :wallbash:

 

I also didn't reset xform, which apparently can be a big deal if you've moved, rotated or scaled your object.

 

Another thing that I've been scratching my head over, is how to set keyframes. I tried a few times and just moved on to something else but I solved that as well. What I needed to do, after I made a pose, was to put the bone roughly back into it's original position and it worked. Without doing that it seems to fail to animate. - I still can't get this to work. When I did, it must have just been coincidence.

 

After I sussed all that out and spent another few hours playing around with things, I've started to achieve some good smooth results in the animation. Which is absolutely wicked! I'm going to see if I can get a full suit of armour weight painted correctly now and in game before I create any more and start texturing.

 

If I can grasp this process, then I'll be off making everything!

Edited July 26, 2011 by KingGsterUK

[KingGsterUK]

I've managed to get a working armour piece in game. The nif file ended up being pretty big due to everything being separate. I made 2 very basic textures so it would actually show up in game and this is how it turned out.

 

http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/4253/progress6.jpg

 

Now that it's in there, you can see there's a lot more work needs doing on the vertex weights and I think the shoulders shouldn't be 100% to the shoulder helper bone from the Maximum Compatibility Skeleton because they don't move with the arms whatsoever. I'll have to play around with it, there's a hell of a lot of work still needs doing, I can't even see the end of the tunnel yet! :unsure:

[KingGsterUK]

I'm hoping someone sees this who knows a little about animation with oblivion skeltons in 3ds max.

 

Earlier in the thread, I posted that I was able to successfully set keyframes in max, I thought I had it sussed. But when I moved on and decided I wanted to give the arms set keyframes as well as the body, I was unable to.

 

This was my method to make an animation.

 

1) Select a bone

2) Click on "Toggle set key mode"

3) Make sure slider is at "0"

4) Click "Set key"

5) Move slider along 1

6) Move the bone

7) Click "Set key"

8 ) Move the slider along 1

9) Move the bone back to roughly original place

10) Click "Set key"

11) Click "Toggle set key mode" off again.

 

That should be animated but when I move the slider, the bone kind of like "jumps" or "snaps" back to the original place and there's no animation.

 

Damn this is really making it tough to paint weights efficiently :facepalm:

 

-EDIT: Figured it out, needed to be in "auto key".

Edited July 28, 2011 by KingGsterUK

[d181sp1]

Very cool work, dig the shield and I'll be back to endorse that one tonight but if you can pull off the armor like that... legendary.

 

Thanks for the donation to the community.

[NCRsoldier]

wow you did a good job. I wish I could help you but I dont know a thing about modding. seriosly you guys need to work at bethesda!

I think there are a lot of people that waiting to that mod

Edited August 14, 2011 by NCRsoldier

[Faceshifter]

Looks very promising! I love your other models as well! I hope you keep the courage for working on this.