cain9580 Posted March 14, 2019 Share Posted March 14, 2019 It can be difficult at times to find good reference images for whatever you may be texturing or modeling. I am sure there are plenty of websites you can pay to get this stuff but I came across an absolutely massive repository a while back and figured I would share it. When I was working on some samurai armor textures I was having a terrible time trying to find good reference material. I remembered that the museums I went to when I lived in NYC had some exhibits so I started browsing their websites. Turns out the Metropolitan Museum of Art (or The Met If you like) has a searchable database of hundreds of thousands of images. The search tool is fairly intuitive and most of the items have high resolution lighting free images you can download. For instance there are over 250 items in the category of Arms found in Europe between 1400 thru 1600. They also had over 1000 items for Japanese swords and over 800 for the various types of armor. A good alternative to using google and the quality of the images is hard to beat anywhere. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/aa/original/04.3.91_002feb2015.jpg A item from Europe for anyone who wants to see the quality level. I just picked it at random but it appears to be the blade of a halberd or glaive. For anyone concerned about copyright issues the museum has an open access policy for the entire database. There are some items still under copyright by third parties (I have never run into one) but all the database images are considered copyright free. Here is the use policy that have posted. https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/policies-and-documents/image-resources Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thumbincubation Posted March 14, 2019 Share Posted March 14, 2019 My God, this is phenomenal. Thank you so much for this. I've bookmarked both. Not that I'm much of a high-res texturer, I can browse things like this all day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cain9580 Posted March 14, 2019 Author Share Posted March 14, 2019 There is likely more out there but the database is so extensive and the images can be up to 4-6k resolution with perfect lighting. I imagine the Museum has a top notch photography team with the best equipment the tax payers of NYC can afford. Plus it is all cataloged and documented. I spent hours searching for stupid high resolution photos of Japanese armor to get just a few decent shots I could work with. As soon as I got to the METâs site I had more than I would ever need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thumbincubation Posted March 15, 2019 Share Posted March 15, 2019 I've just spent most of the afternoon browsing it. Some of the armor is insane. Henry IIs armor and shield...OMG. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cain9580 Posted March 15, 2019 Author Share Posted March 15, 2019 I have a large amount of katana part images stored on my computer. There are around 2000 of them in the database but I only grabbed the unique ones. European full plate armor made for the wealthy is definitely heavily decorated. I have spent more than one night just browsing the different things they have in there. Over 800,000 images of every aspect of human life from as early as we started making art and weapons. I spent have the night browsing polearm and spear weapons from around the world. They were much more decorated and engraved then I thought they would be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thumbincubation Posted March 15, 2019 Share Posted March 15, 2019 I saw some of those pole arms, halberds, etc. Looked like a lot of them were 'from the personal guard of...(insert VIP here)" or of the VIP themselves. I went looking for free-to-use meshes last night, found a couple to play with, and have been trying to set a 17c Japanese(?) shield onto one. It lines up fairly well, though that pic had a bit of extra light on the edges, and I think I made it wayyy too shiny in the specular map. I haven't put it into CK yet, but I suspect it's going to look like it fell off a building in Vegas, in game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cain9580 Posted March 15, 2019 Author Share Posted March 15, 2019 You can usually pull any extra light out of an image by duplicating it, invert, then set the blending for the layer to overlay or one that works best with the image. I usually desaturate it before or after inverting. You have to play around with that and the opacity of the blending layer but you can usually get most of the unwanted highlights out. If there is still more just make a copy of both layers and merge them, after that you can adjust the curves or levels until you have a flat image with equal lighting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cain9580 Posted March 15, 2019 Author Share Posted March 15, 2019 If you really want to get the most amount of control then you can make selections of the different sections that make up the image. Base shield material, the shield boss and any studs or rivets, and group them on a single layer by object materials. Then you can easily make any adjustments you want. Takes a bit of time but ultimately you get a better finished product. Especially if you are wanting to recreate the object as close as you can. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thumbincubation Posted March 15, 2019 Share Posted March 15, 2019 Some of that sounds a bit over my head, but I think I understand the overlay opacity. Going to try that. Unfortunately, the shield meshes I've found are a bit thick, but they're serving well as an opportunity to see what I can make happen. I think they were converted oldrim meshes, so I may try scaling the vertices later, see if I can thin them out some, without scaling the whole mesh. This isn't for release, mind you. Just kind of tinkering for personal use. Time has been uber limited lately, so this provides relatively short, not-too-involved projects to play with. Here are the ones I've been messing with so far. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/images/41765https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/images/41766 https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/images/41767https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/images/41768 This Highlands Targe is interesting. The shield mesh I was able to find has a perfect boss for the texture, and I was lucky enough to get it to fit the first time, but it puts the arrow points around the edges of the shield. I'm not sure how to shrink it to get them to fit, without making the boss too small for the mesh. That being said, I'm having fun and they don't look bad on the walls. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/images/41769 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cain9580 Posted March 16, 2019 Author Share Posted March 16, 2019 Not sure exactly what is going on and I would also need to know what texture program you are using. That being said the textures are told how to wrap around the mesh by a UV map. You can export this in Nifskope by right clicking on the mesh or TriShape, go to Texture, and then Export UV. Keep it the same resolution as what your finished product will be and then open it in your program duplicate the layer to the one you are working on. Obviously there are other ways to bring it in but that is a simple method. From there you have a wireframe image that shows you the boundaries of each UV island. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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