Question on dds files - Materials - 3ds Max - and other advice

[Dante2904]

First off, I am an animator - while I do have quite a bit of experience in modeling and texturing, the blunt of my skillset is in skinning, rigging, and animation (film, not games, so this might be a little different). I have to have a foundation to start on and that means I want to rebuild the models and textures @ step 1.

 

The following was spoilered out because it is entirely too much work for the moment. Will pursue eventually but need something a little more ice-breaking first.

 

 

So, I am attempting to rebuild the character textures from the ground up and ran into a small obstacle.

While most of the naming conventions are self-explanatory, there is a "_sk" type, which really looks like a sub-dermal skin layer that I would use in a SSS material in max...

My question is: How is anyone/everyone else loading this map in 3ds Max/Blender/Maya/etc to get the best results outside of the game? Or closest match to in-game while editing.

I planned to shoot this into Zbrush for a full overhaul but ran into a very disappointing problem with the incomplete geometry under the undergarments as well, and the aforementioned problems with the "_sk" files.

I want to fix the geometry myself but I don't know how to use nifscope for anything other than converting nifs to objs. In short, I have no idea how editing meshes would work because additional/changes in geo means those new/changed verts have to be skinned, no? That's why I stuck to textures originally.

Additionally, I was going to just do some texture work, but the vanilla geometry and the proportions are incredibly horrible. How hard is it to replace the entire mesh from scratch in regards to skinning or whatever is done in nifscope (ie: UNP and/or CBBE)? - female AND MALE (Khajiit and Argonian included).

Why don't I just use UNP or CBBE? Well, I want to create something a little more lore-friendly, lots of dirt, no makeup - I have yet to run across any mascara or lip gloss in skyrim, or even a mirror or hairbrush for that matter :smile:

I run almost 210 mods and about 30 of those are aesthetics that really don't complete one another, so hopefully I can build something a little more realistic in regards to skyrim's theme. This also includes hair, but hair is going to take some time since I can't figure out how to do a batch nif-to-obj conversion. 

The real reason I got into this is 1. I dont like glamour in Skyrim and 2. I love playing khajiit and feel they need some heavy animation work and some love :smile:.

Example of current stage:

Poly counts are really high due to zbrush sub-div settings I am using for detailing; will be rebuilding sub-divs on both meshes to drop to about 40-60% current counts :(.

Female breasts were purposely pinched/adjusted as seen because I plan to use undergarments.

 

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd200/Dante2904/Capture.jpg

 

 

 

 

Edited May 7, 2013 by Dante2904

[Dante2904]

ok, wow, thats a lot of work, I think starting with something simple might be ideal.

 

Doing cinematics is simple, but this type of work requires a crapload of compression and elements outside of my field.

 

So, hair it is:

 

If I need to change geometry on the vanilla hairstyles and "replace" those meshes... is there a tutorial that describes any steps I would need to take? The base geo on the vanilla hair is horrid to work with for UVing/detailing purposes. It operates exactly as if I were to import a mesh from blender (unwelded verts and overlapping faces all over the place, which makes for bad experiences for me in zbrush later).

 

You can actually spot the artifacting from the geometry issues in the first image below. Enabling soft shadows = really bad artifacting.

 

Last thing, where can I find which textures map to which mesh? I don't see anything referencing this in nifscope.

 

WIP Images:

 

 

 

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd200/Dante2904/Capturehair.png

Some of these obviously dont use the longhair texture map, but having issues finding out which goes to which - also Nitrous drivers dont seem to allow textures displaying in viewport over 512 and I dont care to revert back to D3D (my working RAW files are 4K, but can't tell outside of rendering and i dont plan to stage rendering out of game).

 

 

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd200/Dante2904/Capture-1.jpg

Started a rough retex of the longhair variant seen in UV map display, havent detailed in ZB yet though - edits sure to come and normal alpha will prob end up being tweaked for hours :(

 

This image is just the haircap for hair02; I had to retopologize it and will likely just rebuild it and all the others as they just either... dont convert well, or are not efficient for me to use for my workflow.

 

The following is just some Zb renders that have no practical purpose what-so-ever yet.

 

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd200/Dante2904/Captureh1.jpg

I just wanted to see how bad the UV warping was going to be from the vanilla meshes/uvs

 

http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd200/Dante2904/Captureh2.jpg

No normal or displacement applied to the face makes her look entirely too plastic with my light rig, but i'll fix it eventually.

 

 

 

Edited May 7, 2013 by Dante2904