darthsloth74

Theres a lot of nasty stuff floating around the net these days. Too many stupid people who get their kicks from ruining other peoples machines. I really hope its not too serious Porscha and you've got all your texture work backed up just to be on the safe side.

Tigersong: It would be helpful if you could tell me the image dimensions of a standard Oblivion book texture since I don't have Oblivion installed at present and I will have to unpack the bsa.textures again.

Well something that is useful is the Markov name generator. If you input vanilla names into it like Redoran, Hlallu, Telvani, tell it the number of letters you want, it can provide some authentic sounding results. Of course it gives you some useless ones too. I used it to provide me with Imperial fort names when I made the Silverfish River Valley mod for the Unique Landscapes team.

charlescrowe: Yes it might be worth me taking a look at glass armour, may be useful. Thanks. Regarding the Hammerfell garb: Yes I know the vanilla rigging is far from perfect, you could edit the alpha channel and remove tthe bottom half of it. That might help. Important to note that wearing certain types of gauntlets with that outfit also results in the characters wrists becoming invisible, due to it having shorter sleeves. The Nocturnal dress is also another culprit that clips badly too.

Porscha: Thank you, very nice of you to say so. This is an image of the current WIP of the Paladin Plate armour.

ThomasKaira: Well all I can say is that I'm only going by what I've read in 3d books relating to DDS Textures as well as what other people have told me. Still working over original DDS textures and resaving is not a good idea, so I stand by that comment. DXT5 is also bettter than DXT3 and saves typically result in exactly the same file size. Regarding Martigen mentioning the ATI Compressonator. I have to say I think the results are far better than the DDS Plugin from Nvidia. Heres a link to an example to download. You can see the difference better if you zoom in. There are colour discolouration artifacts, noticeably green and purple with the Nvidia version. Please download the image its easier to see the difference in quality. Link in spoiler tab

Regarding the Namira quest Arthmoor pointed out. When you first go into the Hall of the Dead and find the woman there who offers you the chance to become one of their vile members. If you refuse and kill her, you fail the quest.

The textures look really good. I really like the fine sparkling quality the snow has. The shadow issue, well I'm certain thats the normal map I've seen similar issues with some of the landscape texture packs I've downloaded off Nexus. If I remember something I read, the alpha also works as a blend map in some cases. Not sure how to fix it though, I don't do landscape textures it involves making so much tileable it drives me nuts, sorry I can't offer more help.

Thats easy I can do that for you if you can get me a better reference pic than that little thumbnail. Otherwise I'll just do a generic worn book with Myst wrote on the cover if that would suffice.

Last time I saw Martigen about was when I did some textures for his Mutant mod. Its definately a useful thread for newcomers but there are some minor points I'd like to point out. DXT1: While this is the format you want the vast majority of your colour/diffuse maps saved as you have to remember that this has a compression ratio of 8:1. It can result in lossy image quality, certain colours can also bleed and have unwanted discolouration but these artifacts can't be avoided and are a result of the very high compression. One of the biggest mistakes I see is people painting over the original DDS texture and saving it again. This has the result of multiplying the compression further. 8 times compression saved again becomes 16 times and so on. This is why you start to get horrible artifacts. The best way is to increase the original texture to the size you want and use it as a template/guide to paint an entirely new texture, obviously you delete the original guide before saving your nice new texture. DXT5 is superior to DXT1 simply because DXT5 uses 4:1 compression as opposed to DXT1 8:1 compression. Of course DXT5 needs to be saved with an alpha channel so its not something you'd typically save as for colour maps. Martigen suggests DXT3 or DXT5 for normal maps. Use DXT5 in all cases its an improved format over the older DXT3, the quality is better and the file size is the same. I used to use DXT3 in some cases but it was pointed out to me by other artists on Nexus that I should always save as DXT5. Not saying Martigen is wrong at all, I just thought I clarify a little.

Okay just had this idea today. I saw a painting of a Knights Templar in Arabian style clothing so I thought I'd try this.

Lanceor, vometia, lonewolf_kai: Thanks to you all for the positive feedback, its good to know I'm going in the right direction with this. I'll post up some pics of new stuff as and when its ready.

Hi everyone. Just thought I'd share some pictures of what I'm working on at present. I joined a mod group that wants to bring Templars, Crusaders and Paladins into Skyrim. These pictures represent WIP of the current light armours, basically the equipment for raw recruits and retainers. Light Templar Armour Templar Style Great Helm

vometia: Ok thanks that explains things better. I guess thats the reason why if you wear the wrong boots with the Archmage robes your characters calfs just vanish. I honestly thought it was just down to how an alpha was being used, the dismemberment modifier explains a lot.