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Modelling and mesh wrangling


vometia
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It's a pity I can't release them but I accept that's the way it is.  Hasn't stopped me working on them which has kept me entertained for a while, at least until in an insomnia-addled careless-pressing-of-buttons I managed to accidentally delete my meshes/clothes directory, which kinda sucked.  Would've sucked more if I didn't back it up regularly, though of course I had to learn the hard way to do that.

Anyway, I've finished her original and noir outfits.  Obviously for values of "finished", and I feel a bit meh that my skills aren't really at a professional level, but I'm not an artist, I'm a programmer, so I guess I'm reasonably satisfied as long as I don't look too closely at actually competent people's work. :lol:

 

fo4-elizabeths1m.jpg

 

There's also some dalish elves loitering in the background: I'm definitely not allowed to release them either!

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And there was me thinking "I wonder how the noir outfit would look with trousers...?" :lol:

I think even this little exercise has seen my modding come on a way: although I've been using it for a while, normalmapping has really shown its worth with these outfits, particularly with details like pleats and creases.  I'm probably still a bit too timid with it but I'm liking the results on what would otherwise be less interesting outfits.  Here's an example; close-up it maybe looks a bit unsubtle around her blouse's stitching (and maybe it is) but when standing any distance away, any less than that is almost invisible.  I probably really need to be much more flamboyant with the details!

 

fo4-elizabethnoir5m.jpg

 

I actually tried to play some FO4 today, for the first time in a couple of months, but the last patch broke so much stuff. :(  Follower hiring/firing scripts are broken, texture loading has regressed to the Bad Old Days, and worst of all the cell loading is awful: though never good since at least Oblivion it's suddenly got an order of magnitude worse.  I hope they fix it soon; or rather since "they" won't, I hope somebody else does...

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Yeah, it would be nice if beth would stop screwing up their games, all in order to pursue CC dollars......

Played with a NICE gaming rig at work Friday...... the customer had FO4 installed, but, the ONLY mods he had were CC content? I was floored. Meant to discuss that with him when he came in, but, he didn't come in. :) If the machine is still there Monday, I may have to corner him when he shows up. :D

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Fortunately I found a way of reverting to an earlier version of the game: by which I mean no funny business, it's a proper Steam download.  Contrary to what I'd assumed it does actually keep all previous versions and will let you download them, you just need to know how to ask and they don't make it especially obvious.  Anyway, rolled back to 1.10.20 which I recall largely behaved itself and the inordinately long and frequent cell loads have gone.  Okay, it's still its usual self where it does hiccup when loading new cells and it will pause noticeably in very detailed areas like the city centre but it's actually playable again.  Jury's still out about the companion recruiting thing and I'm not really in a rush to play the past few hours a third time over the course of little more than a day, but I suspect it might be the sensible thing to do just to be sure as I could in theory continue this play through for another 100 hours or more, so I don't really want that hanging over me.

A bit sad that the guy with the nice PC only had CC stuff, but I guess we all needed to learn somewhere!  Hopefully you'll get a chance to point him in the right direction.

Edited by vometia
typo
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I'd also asked someone at Zenimax my question who seemed to not see it as a problem, though that is admittedly not one of their army of lawyers who may have a different viewpoint.  I must admit it's hard for me to ascertain where the line is drawn, whether it's "not a single pixel or vertex" or closer to simply transferring entire assets wholesale.  My stuff is derived from a small part of one outfit so falls in the middle, and it's probably hard for most people to guess where the line is drawn, but being autistic I seem to find it doubly hard (either that, or I have a need to know where other people might just accept it's a subject best avoided).

But ultimately it comes down to respecting a site's policies, and here it seems to be to not risk anything, so I won't.  On Nexus I've PMed Dark0ne to clarify though he may or may not reply since he's a busy chap.

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Sooo... finally resumed my game and have recruited Liz as my team "medic" (in other words she doles out the odd Stimpak in exchange for me listening to her moral dilemmas after we shoot pretty much anything at all) and there's one immediate stand-out problem:

fo4-piperadaelizabeth1s.jpg

Compared to the other two scruffy reprobates (the other one is Ada in synth guise) she looks way too clean: I should do something about that.  Although there's plenty of examples of her outfit in Bioshock looking increasingly dirty and torn I'm not entirely sure how I would go about achieving it.  I guess a "tasteful" smattering of very light grey/brown mud-spots would be a start but I'm not sure how to dirty something up without it looking either contrived, not enough or too much.  Anybody have a handy guide?

I can probably manage the odd tear and stuff but beyond that I'm really out of my comfort zone.  I'd rather just stick with a texture/normalmap alternative I can set up as a material swap rather than any re-meshing.

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Wonder if you could script it to get dirtier over time, and have the ability to wash it, and reset the script. :D

 

Or, maybe, she is just VERY fastidious about her appearance, and would be caught dead in 'dirty' clothes..... even in the wasteland. She WAS a lawyer, after all.... (assuming she starts the game as "Nora"......)

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I suppose that would be an interesting mod for all the characters!  Actually I think I did see something like that on Nexus, where you get gradually dirtier over time and can have a bath periodically.  Maybe I should take a look at that.

And I'm not playing her as my character, she's just out of shot and currently wearing a BoS uniform she "acquired" from somewhere.  In black, so you can't see how grubby it is...  I'd forgotten about the choice of profession, I feel even dirtier now. :lol:

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I had a go at just randomly adding some dirt anyway: good old galaxy brush!

elizabethdress_dirty.jpg

The result is... meh.  It doesn't really look all that great in game, but I guess at least I have a non-pristine alternative.

Edit: found some splattery brushes, now it looks a bit better.

Further edit: and in game, where I still think they look a bit too subtle.  I used the same overlay for both, because why not etc.

fo4-lizscruffy.jpg

 

Yet another edit: eventually realised I just needed to desaturate and lighten the base texture in order for it to work.  My PC eventually makes an appearance modelling the original outfit:

fo4-lizscruffy2.jpg

Edited by vometia
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  • 2 weeks later...

After much complaining and general griping, I finally relented and used shoes from FO4: so the Edwardian and Noir outfits get Irma's and Magnolia's shoes respectively, albeit somewhat altered to hopefully look passably convincing.  I've also re-done the bird brooch and have permission for the other three assets I've used, so they're finally unencumbered and I can upload them somewhere if I'm ready for someone to immediately steal them and put their name to them instead. :lol:

 

fo4-elizabethoutfits1m-v2.jpg

Clean versions

 

fo4-elizabethoutfits2m-v2.jpg

Wasteland-improved versions

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I spent ages wondering what to arm her with (it's not the rifle, for the record: that's actually my character temporarily being a lookalike for the fashion shoot).  She eventually chose her own and wrestled an "assault rifle" from a supermutant: the rather Steampunk, WWI styling goes quite well with her Edwardian outfit!

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I've been re-doing the normalmaps, because as careful as I think I've been to make normalmap-friendly versions of the various layers comprising the texture in Gimp they looked a bit blah somehow.  In the end I combined my normalmap with the original: mine had some nice texture effects (I like quite heavy textures, but not everybody does, and I do wonder if having the depth turned up to 8 is a bit heavy for the blouses: they look a bit like hessian close-up...) but still looked slightly blah.

Looking at the originals I saw that they gave the clothes some nice sculpted, billowy effects and a much more 3D image, so editing out the bits I didn't want and doing a grain merge with mine seems to have given the best of both worlds.

But proving that I've barely scratched the surface of what Blender can do, I happened upon this guide which explains how to create that 3D sculpted effect from the model: in itself it would just accentuate the model's shape, but in the absence of anything else it creates a nice map to combine with Gimp's normalmap filter, and if desaturated could also work quite well as a shading filter for the specular and diffuse maps too.

The explanation is quite long but it's not too hard to do in principle.  The most gnarly bit is creating a "low-poly" version of the mesh you want to map, though there are cheaty ways of doing that such as adding a multires modifier and subdividing it (edit: actually just doing a regular subdivision on the original mesh seems to be a better option, converting the faces to squares beforehand).  I'm not entirely sure why this is necessary or how it works but I have a vague idea; my head was starting to hurt before I committed myself to reading further!

Of course the original normalmaps are still going to be the best option as they were purpose made for the job, but if they're unsalvegable (or not available, in the case of custom meshes) it seems this isn't a bad approach.

Edited by vometia
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Just to illustrate, some comparisons:

 

fo4-normalmap-original.jpg

The original normal map for the Pre-War Dress, with slight edits to remove the bits I didn't want.

 

fo4-normalmap-gimp.jpg

Gimp's normal map, generated from layers I'd prepared for normal mapping: lots of details, but no real volume.

 

fo4-normalmap-blender.jpg

Blender's normal map generated from the model.  Not quite as good as the original one that was created by an actual artist, but really not at all bad and which certainly works well when combined with Gimp's version by doing a grain merge.

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  • 1 month later...

Still mulling over whether to release this mod now that it's finally unencumbered by non-distributable IP: it does include some other third-party assets, but I have permission to use all of it.  Everything else has either come from FO4 or I've re-done it myself.

In favour: I so rarely ever release anything so maybe it would be nice to do so!

Not in favour: not really sure how useful the outfits are without the character, who's absolutely non-distributable given the amount of stuff owned by Irrational (I haven't checked their policy but I doubt it covers porting it elsewhere); they're not absolutely perfect, even though in most cases people won't notice, except for stuff that's a general problem in FO4 (e.g. occasionally erratic skirt physics); and someone will nick it, as happens with practically everything anyone uploads!

Decisions, decisions...

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Hey vom -  I don't know why I haven't chimed in here :blush:

This is really great work you're doing :trophy: As far as releasing it, it's obviously your choice, but if you really care that no one steals it, the obvious choice is to not upload it publicly.  

Meanwhile, here are some links to things and stuff :

To get a low poly model from a high poly you can get the blender add-on called retopoflow - it's US $71, but here is the Github link to an free early version that does the trick. Check out the video demo on the blender market page and then try to resist getting it. . .

Also - and this one is dangerously addictive - there is an add-on included in the newer versions of blender called B-Surfaces, which is one of the few things that makes me write the anagram OMG - it's that awesome ( and exquisitely complex ) DON'T WATCH THIS INCREDIBLE VIDEO :woot:

Here's a video about using B-Surfaces for retopology.

Finally, if you become unhappy with Blender's baker system, you can try out Xnormal it's a powerful baker that does a great job - and it's free!

Best of luck, and I'm sorry for overloading your brain :D 

 

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Thank you! :) Perhaps as I haven't been active with my mod for a couple of months; in fact I haven't done any gaming at all over that time and was just thinking that as it seems to be in a reasonable state of readiness (well, ish: I didn't do her mother's outfit, but that would be another major release) maybe I should tie up any loose ends and decide it's finished before I risk moving on and forgetting about it.

I'll look into the add-on but as a fairly casual modder I'm always loath to part with money. :lol:  I'm interested to see what it can do though: I found a couple of ways of creating a sort of pseudo low-poly (or high-poly) version of the mesh but they were definitely rather crude and basic and I would imaging a proper tool would yield significantly better results.  And some of the terminology there is slightly flummoxing be but obviously worth getting to grips with: and I figure if I had the determination to figure out Blender in the first place (however ineptly!) I really should make the effort to learn this stuff.  I mean I've been using it for years and have become perhaps a bit too "comfortable" in that I can do the basics but in trying to get this outfit looking reasonable given that FO4 has raised the bar a bit I feel it's really time to make the effort.  So thank you so much for the links. :)

Talking of raising the bar, one curious thing: as part of my "random visitors from other universes" I also decided that Fallout Needs Elves so I transferred some stuff from Inquisition: obviously not distributable since unlike Elizabeth's dresses, these use the original Bioware assets.  But given that they are the originals, other than me wrenching the mesh this way and that so it fits the FO4 body, they don't look nearly as good as they do in Inquisition in spite of me even increasing the texture resolution in a couple of cases.  I'm guessing that's just a result of the respective engines and how they render stuff (and as much as I may gripe about some elements of Frostbite 3, it does make things look very pretty) but I was wondering if I missed something, or if perhaps something got lost in translation.  But as far as I'm aware, I have the usual bits like the diffuse, normal and specular maps and obviously the mesh itself...

 

elves.jpg

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And now I'm under doctor's orders to spend more time playing video games and modding. :lol:  True story.  She said I'm overdoing it, as I'm taking new drugs which are allowing me to concentrate, and she said the stuff I'm concentrating on (writing to people a lot, stuff like that) is essentially work and is stressing me out, and that I need to relax.  So video games it is, then...

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