Lovis Posted February 21, 2012 Author Share Posted February 21, 2012 I'm watching u! http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7045/6915206901_1ea75fa6dc_b.jpg Texturing well under way but still far from being finished. Tedious work, actually (if you want it to look halfways decent). Still, the blender texture painting tools are truly great. As for the animation problems. I am pretty sure that there will be some workaround for this sooner or later. For now, I don't worry too much that I won't be able to import this fellow to Skyrim as it will take me quite some time to get to that point anyway. Multiple variants of the mosnter might be an idea as well. I plan to release the critter as an endorsable mod that only contains the monster. For that, I might include different variations of the same monster. For my story mod, there will be only one beholder, though. Still a good idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mgbeach Posted February 21, 2012 Share Posted February 21, 2012 (edited) I've created mods solo and with collaborators and the latter is infinitely more fulfilling. You might want to consider soliciting the community's involvement in actually creating some of these variant models and textures. Maybe make the blender files available and see what people out there come up with. You could then set a deadline for submissions and present the quality entries as a poll. Particularly with very ambitious and desirable mods, I think the dev team approach prevents burn out and generates a better final product. My 2 cents, your mileage may vary, etc. :P No matter what, I'll be eagerly keeping an eye on this! Edited February 21, 2012 by mgbeach Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lovis Posted February 22, 2012 Author Share Posted February 22, 2012 I've created mods solo and with collaborators and the latter is infinitely more fulfilling. You might want to consider soliciting the community's involvement in actually creating some of these variant models and textures. Maybe make the blender files available and see what people out there come up with. You could then set a deadline for submissions and present the quality entries as a poll. Particularly with very ambitious and desirable mods, I think the dev team approach prevents burn out and generates a better final product. My 2 cents, your mileage may vary, etc. :P No matter what, I'll be eagerly keeping an eye on this! You are certainly right about this. I would like to at least finish the base version of the critter, before I involve the community in this, though. For now, I am busy with texturing and I think that I will not finish this step before next week. Alternate skins or model variants could be something to create in a community effort as could be the quest line (reminds me that I wanted to to contact the people making the Vigilance of Stendarr mod). BTW, I just realized that the last screenshots are a bit dark. I will provide new screens tonight with better lighting. Considering the behaviour topic: As I see it, I could create a new race in CK, copy one of the existing behaviour files and have the animation events defined therein trigger the custom animations that I will create. So as I understand it, it should be possible to add the Daedric Perceiver to the game, but I might be mistaken. What's not possible is to add new behaviours. Thus I need to use the behaviour of a existing creature that provides halfways suitable states for my beastie. Again, I might be wrong as I have not yet dived into the details of this issue. One last thing: Been collecting ideas about which other creatures from D&D would be worth creating, and I think I will definitely create a gelatinous cube at some point as it is easy to do, iconic to D&D and cheesy as heck ;) Most interesting part might be the creation of some kind of refraction shader, actually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lovis Posted February 22, 2012 Author Share Posted February 22, 2012 Here we go, the promised render with better lighting: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7063/6920853961_81effb4fd3_b.jpg Won't have much time to proceed until next week, though. Expect an update Monday night. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lovis Posted February 27, 2012 Author Share Posted February 27, 2012 Here's the promised update: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7061/6936089301_95851d481f_b.jpg The texture map is now almost finished, just need to add some detail to the teeth and tongue. The render above comes pretty close to what you can expect the creature to look ingame as it is rendered with pretty basic settings (aside from SSAO which can be activated in Skyrim using a mod, however). Next step would be the rigging/animation then... I hope you like it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Faitmaker Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 Here's the promised update: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7061/6936089301_95851d481f_b.jpg The texture map is now almost finished, just need to add some detail to the teeth and tongue. The render above comes pretty close to what you can expect the creature to look ingame as it is rendered with pretty basic settings (aside from SSAO which can be activated in Skyrim using a mod, however). Next step would be the rigging/animation then... I hope you like it! That is the cat's ass.... The bomb diggity... I am flat out speechless... Cannot wait to see it in game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lovis Posted February 28, 2012 Author Share Posted February 28, 2012 Thank you for the encouragement. I actually started with the rig as well last night. This will indeed take some time, but I am confident that I can get it right. I will be working on the creature tomorrow night but after that there will be some downtime, probably until 7th March. Then however, I plan to do an animation marathon and hopefull finish the work on the beholder that can be done in Blender within a week. Meanwhile, I will do some research on how the beholder can be brought to Skyrim - if at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lovis Posted March 6, 2012 Author Share Posted March 6, 2012 Having not much time to spare at the moment, so it took me quite some time to get the rig done. Now it is - almost - finished. I will post new screenshots tomorrow, showing the beholder in new poses. After that, the work in blender is finished and I will have to figure out a way to get the model first into NifSkope and then into Skyrim. Interesting times ahead ;) I'll keep you posted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Almightygir Posted March 6, 2012 Share Posted March 6, 2012 (edited) try not to use so much shading in your diffuse texture, the whole point of normals and specular is that they deal with directional lighting/shadows (normalmap) and highlights/reflectivity (specular). your diffuse map should ideally contain flat colours with as little shading as possible. the reason for this, is that on creatures/characters particularly, that are always in motion, static shadows can look very wierd if the light is coming from the wrong angle. Edited March 6, 2012 by Almightygir Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lovis Posted March 8, 2012 Author Share Posted March 8, 2012 http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7044/6816109196_cc16e76da8_b.jpg Here we go, the model is rigged now! Unfortunately I'm struggling with a nasty cold ATM, so I kinda lack the drive to sit down on my home PC after work to proceed with this bugger. Anyway, I'll have a look into NifSkope on the weekend. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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