Tips for creating original weapons mods for Skyrim

[Kyvord]

I need help, so if anyone could please post here some tips and directions about modeling a weapon for skyrim. For example: is it better to model the sword in one single mesh or is it acceptable to create a sword with different separated meshes (blade, guard, hilt, pommel, extra details)? Is there an optimal polycount for weapons in skyrim? Or anything you think its important to take into account to avoid bugs and glitches in general. Thank you i hope this can be of use to other people trying to come up with weapons of their own and having a heads up on stuff that should be considered before trying to port it to the game.

[Kyvord]

I'm working on blender atm, but im having trouble with the normals of the details in the sword and im still debating if i should just try to work on a single mesh sword or if its ok to work on a module type sword where i got every part by itself. What concerns me the most is the performance issues that could bring and if its good practice or not to do it that way.

[crazylion]

Hi

If I understand you correct you like to know if you split up your mesh into individual elements like hilt, grip pommel or some other detail elements if that affects performance?

It is actually very common to split the mesh in separate pieces, manly based on there material, so different shader's can be applied ( glow maps or refection). When it come to performance, the mesh or model size (or more specific the poly count) is not as relevant for the in game performance as the size of the applied textures. The final mesh in nif format is broken down into triangles and if you don't go crazy overboard with the poly count (usually 500 to 5000 for a weapon is enough) it will have no impact. Texture on the other hand does quickly bring your rig to the knees. If you make a sword and but a high res 4k texture map plus a 4 k normal map and eventually an environment mask (assumeing you compress them with dx3 or dx5 or even bc7 for the SE version your computer will load 63MB of data for every copy of the weapon that is visible on your screen (to compare that to the weapons nif file which has around 500-1KB usually)

 

Not sure what your problem is with the normal map but look at these tutorials (even not blender specific) that might help

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/3DTutorials/Modeling_High-Low_Poly_Models_for_Next_Gen_Games

https://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-bake-a-flawless-normal-map-in-3ds-max--cg-925

 

CL

[RGMage2]

Something you can try for the normals in blender that might work, in edit mode with all vertices selected, in the 3dview menu select mesh and normals and recalculate outside. Depending on the complexity of the mesh it might fix it, if it doesn't work then Crtl-z to undo.

[Kyvord]

Thank you both!