How hard is it to create custom weapons?

[Gamerbird]

I have looked up a few tutorials and they are extremley long and quite tiredsome. Is there an easy way to create custom weapons or is it always so long winded?

 

Also which one is easier:

- Custom Armor

- Custom Weapons

 

This is so I can start of easiest then get to the harder ones. Another thing I would like to know is how hard is it to make:

- Custom Spells with custom effects

- How to make a summon (for either an NPC for battle or for creatures. Multiple summons in one spell is just a bonus)

 

Thanks in advance!

[LoginToDownload]

Modeling new weapons is vastly easier than modeling new armor, I find. New spells using Vanilla effects are a piece of cake, while some people find scripting easy, and some people find it hard.

[Gamerbird]

Could you tell me a way to make custom weapons? Like a short tutorial containing what tools I would need (easiest would be better) and how to make the custom spell effect? Thanks

[LoginToDownload]

The CS Wiki has all the tutorials a person could ever need. (Except maybe for actor-animating tutorials... :glare:) Blender/Custom Sword is a really good one for new weapons, (WARNING: EASIER THAN MODELING ARMOR DOES NOT MEAN EASY) if you don't have a different modeling program of preference. A good place to start on scripted spells would be My First Spell (undresses the target) and Casting Spells From an Activator. (Lightning from the sky rains on opponents) Also. here's a tutorial for new summons.

[Gamerbird]

Thank you so much! I will try these when I get back on my computer because I'm not there at the moment. When I get the mod done I will put your name in the credits!

[Gamerbird]

If anyone else has some help they can give then that would also be appreciated as more than one tutorial is always good!

 

Soon I may be releasing a mod that summons an NPC to your side, with (maybe) some custom weapons/armor or some retextures of current weapons (will not replace current weapons).

[LHammonds]

I would have to agree. Weapons are the easiest. Shields are next in line for increased difficulty (only due to collision).

 

When you start getting your feet wet with armor, start with full helms that do not show the face. This will introduce you how to rig a piece of armor but you only have to rig it to a single bone.

 

Other pieces of armor / clothing will start to introduce you to weight-painting multiple bones with overlaps. You will also find that places that bend will need more geometry in such a pattern that allows for flexibility when the animation is in full-swing. The shoulders are a good example of an area the moves quite a bit.

 

I have Blender and related tools along with install instructions uploaded here at TESNexus.

 

You might also find these tutorials helpful:

 

Blender - Weapons with Multiple Collision Objects

Importing / Exporting Armor in Blender

Blender Tutorial - Custom Helmets

Resources for 3D Modeling

 

LHammonds

[Gamerbird]

Thanks both to LHammonds and LoginToDownload for supplying these tutorials. I hope to get a new weapon done soon but I have a current FPS and RPG projects underway but when I get some time then I will be working on this. I may also work on a few new spells but I am not sure about that yet.

 

More tutorials on new spells, scripting would also be appreciated :D

 

Thanks

[LoginToDownload]

A full list of scripting functions, organized both alphabetically and by category, can be found here, a list of begin-end block types here, and a primer for scripting here. Here's a full list of the CS Wiki's tutorials by category.

 

Unfortunately, I can't think of a worthwhile way to be more specific for now...

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

You didn't yet tell the poor man about UVWrapping/UVUnwrapping and texturing, which is probably the hardest-to-learn part of creating simple weapons.

 

Learning how to create a mesh is.. peanutes compared to that.

 

 

Anyway, I'll break down the creation of a simple weapon to you.

 

The very first thing you'll have to do is to create a mesh. This is fairly simple, there are several methods like creating a shape extruding and beveling it, or box shaping, it's realy just up to you, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.

 

The next step is giving the weapon an UV map. This is necesary for propper texture placement. You can either wrap the weapon using simple mapping shapes like a plane, cilinder, sphere etc. Or unwrap it, which basicaly means that you'll be flattening out the meshes polygons and tri's onto a simple plane.

 

After that's done you need to create the maps (textures). Image editing programs like photoshop or gimp are used at this stage. You can use the prerendered UV template as a base. You'll be creating a difuse map (the texture), possibly a normal map (this decides how light reflects fro a weapon, it's also used to create the feeling of an uneven surface - to add more detail to an otherwise flat surface), then an alpha map which's usualy full white to make the model completely visible (but is otherwise used to make the mesh or parts of the mesh see-trough in game) and a glow map.

 

And if you've gone this far the rest is fairly simple even though it has the most intimidating name of all - nifscope alchemy. What that means is basicaly just loading up a similar item into niffscope, loading up your mesh and maps, deleting the original item, exporting it and you're done.

 

Each step differs in terms of how long're you going to do it, how hard it is to learn it and how complicated it is once you understand how it's done.

 

Meshing can take anywhere from 10 minutes up to 9 or (many, many) more hours, depends on the complexity(I'm working on a sword I'd like to call "Suffering" it's allready 6 hours in the making). It's fairly simple to learn if you've got some technical thinging, and quite streamlined if you know how to do it and have a clear image of what you want to create. You just have to stay focused. That's all there's to it, realy.

 

UV wrapping is widely considred hard to learn. But once you understand what you're doing it's a matter of minutes to fully map your whole mesh. (A plane on the blade, unwrap the handguard, a cilinder on the handle and a sphere on the counterweight and you're done)

 

Texturing is a problem because it requires understanding of another program outside of modeling. Then again most of the time you can load up premade/stock textures and use filters to create the other maps for you. (The normal map filter in photoshop + the blurring/owerlay method = lol)

 

Nifscope is a madhouse but it's in fact just a few click of work worth.

 

But don't realy take my word for this, those are my subjective feelings about theese things, other people might think otherwise.