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.

vometia: I really like the new look you've given to those armours. I prefer your armours to the vanilla ones. Myself I've only exported helmets and swords at present. I was just wondering why Skyrim armour meshes need the dismemberment modifier on everything it seems a little odd considering the game only allows decapitation. I haven't seen any NPC's get chopped into bits like F3 but if it needs it thats fair enough.

daemondarque: Yes I agree entirely with what you are saying. Personally I've gone back to Morrowind and New Vegas, my Skyrim days are over until someone injects some real roleplaying into the game. New Vegas at least offers choice and multiple endings. As for Morrowind the reason that game works is because I never feel like the centre of attention, I have to earn my place in the world with some hard grafting (grinding to some). At least I can play the game how I want and never feel railroaded into quests that my character would never logically pursue. Now while I love Skyrim's design of the world and its artistic look the mechanics just seem inherently flawed to me. A distinct lack of choice and the stupidity of becoming master of every guild in Skyrim through almost no effort. Thats my own opinion however and I don't expect people to share it.

Thats great to hear Arthmoor. Hopefully between you and ThomasKaira these quest/roleplaying limitations will become a thing of the past.

I'd definately like to see this happen. The game frequently offers a set of choices only to go back on itself later and offer no choice at all. The Parthanax quest was completely silly. Why should the Dragonborn choose to follow the instructions of two dried up Blades agents whose judgement has become bitter and twisted? If they thought so highly of the main PC, why was the option to reason with them and convince them of their foolishness never presented. Or if they refused all attempts at persuasion then the option to kill them should have been there. It was annoying following the Civil War quest only to discover that the main quest had to be started to complete, which once more leads to the spawning of Dragon attacks. Finally I'd really like to see an even more important option implemented: I'm not the Dragonborn. Something similar to the Neravar Say Neravar mod for Morrowind. I don't want to be the saviour of Skyrim everytime I play the game, so many of the quests are linked to the MQ it limits roleplaying options. I'd also like to see character backgrounds and optional start locations like the Alternate Start mod for Oblivion. Of course anything you can fix will be greatly appreciated all the same.

Those conversions to which you refer are typically illegal. Clarification: Are you planning on releasing a mod that combines assets from Fallout New Vegas and Oblivion? If the answer is yes then you would be breaking copyright law. If no and this is just practice work to understand nifs and everything you produce remains on your own computer then you are fine.

The way I understand it is its illegal to port any asset between games, even those produced by the same company. However porting assets at home as a guide only for learning about the nif files etc falls into the grey area of not something that would typically be actionable providing you own all the games in question and do it purely for yourself. However the moment learning gives way to actual mod releases it becomes illegal due to distributing said assets and I do hope fredlaus has no plans in that area, because that would cause a veritable storm of trouble, be very wrong and lead to banning on many sites and possible legal action by Bethesda. Of course if you plan to entirely remake NV meshes and port them yourself thats entirely different, but all the work done must be your own, or once again you would be in breach of Bethesda's copyright.

Well it works definately. As an aid to learning about the process, what you do on your computer is entirely up to you and not a problem. Of course I'm sure you are well aware of the legal ramifications if this were an actual released mod so I'm not going to go on about that. In my own 3d experiments there are various differences between the nifs for the currently released games as people have already pointed out. You have the whole dismemberment issue with the F3 and FNV meshes for a start. The fact that most of them are built as complete outifts rather than individual pieces like in Oblivion and to a lesser extent Skyrim. This is a trend seen in recent games since its more time effective to build a complete model, do a high poly sculpt in Zbrush etc than it is to model individual variant pieces, a shame since it limits diversity but understandable for companies on a tight schedule I always found exporting Oblivion static meshes the easiest. Using 3ds Max, building the model, exporting it with collision. Everything seemed to work properly without extra effort. Whereas Fallout was a pain because the collision mesh and model had to be copy/pasted over the branches of the existing model. The process may be different now I haven't done any Fallout stuff in years. Outfits and armour were reasonably straightforward too. Rigging is a pain, but thats true for any game engine. Dismemberment was my personal issue since previous versions of the niftools always crashed Max when using a dismemberment modifier. Later versions ironed this problem out. As far as I am aware of what people have said about Skyrim meshes is the way the shaders work, apparently its quite different and requires more work. However in many regards the meshes and general nif structure is very similar to F3, NV and Oblivion, clearly thats because Skyrim uses a tweaked Gamebryo engine not a completely new one as Todd Howard led us to believe.

I'm interested to know where this so called Star Wars reference is. Not sure if I believe it, but then again if Bethesda lets you get away with stealing from NPC's by putting buckets over their heads it could be very likely.

While I'd love to see a return to Morrowind the current events in Skyrim's timeline prevent it, due to Red Mountain erupting and the exodus of the Dunmer. So I'd like to see DLC focused on the Summerset Isles and the evil Thalmor, clearly given Skyrim's main quest ending that situation is still to be resolved. Hammerfell would also be of interest to me.

I too would like to see a little more life from characters in game. Expressions seem almost non-existant. Regarding head tracking though that could be annoying I remember having companions that my character constantly kept turning his head to see while running through the wilderness. Always looked a little silly to me. Of course any future mod that promotes more activity from NPC's and characters would be a welcome addition and increase immersion a great deal.