Marthgun

hahahahha i completely forgot about this thread. yes, its alive and ticking. I have created about 9 interiors so far and written 5 of the quests. I have alot of the dialogue written and recently learned scripting, so I would guess I have about another 7-8 months till completion.

Oh hai marthgun, I do have a few tips for you! 1. When trying to setup notepad++ for skyrim, it will fail on multiple levels. The Creationkit.com tutorial is fail. click on the discussion tab to see why. So you should use Sublime Text 2 so you don't waste 3 hours trying to figure out why your scripts cant compile and why the papyrus text isn't supported. 2. Just use the complier in the CK, b/c you are a newb and there is no advantage except confusion. 3. Reverse engineer the vanilla quests to figure out how they script everything, how they use aliases, how they setup scenes. This may seem very obvious, but i didn't think of it at all until it was pointed out on a youtube video. 4. Get very comfortable with the CK, you'll be spending your every waking day and thought in there.

Herro, I was playing through skyrim and came to the mages college in winterhold and remembered how bare the quest line was. It was depressing, so I am now going to add about 20 quests to it. We shall see how far I get. I am making this thread for moral and technical support, and also to seek some tips from fellow modders. The Plan: Add about 10-15 NPC's to the college. Create about 20 moderate to long questlines. Learn, fail and fail again. I am watching tutorials, I have no questions for now. If you have any tips to start me off, I would be grateful to hear them. Thank you.

thanks for the welcomes minions *eats cookies until sick*

perfect thanks! isn't there a higher version of blender though? Is there a reason you use the old one?

oh ok, the highest poly single object probably wont be above 1k, phew, I understand now. I guess I misunderstood what grond was saying about retopology, the tutorials i looked up for 3ds used the tools i was familiar with and after playing around for a bit i still needed to use a ton of polys to get a similar effect, and i really dont want to buy another super expensive program, do you know any other ways or programs i could use or learn about this retopology? Here's my newest WIP: This will be relatively high poly after I finish, smooth and shell it. I figured i'd make the model i wanted then by the time i was finished I would have investigated ways to drastically reduce the poly count without losing the general shape and then relying heavily on a normal map. btw, I'm modeling this from planes, I know I can do it this way but how would you guys go about tackling this project? Thanks!

well i had planned on using about 50k, the arena was supposed to be extremely large bigger than whiterun's hold. That includes clutter and everything. but i could always scale it down i guess considering there is going to be a large mansion next to it. I'm still not quite understanding the high poly to low poly concept, using the meshlabs software, there is just no way i could possibly get this arena down to 5k polys. If i reduce the polys too much it loses its hieght. without enough polys i cant deform the mesh to create real depth like in the center of the snake. without that many polys it loses form. I just watched a youtube tutorial of a guy who baked his own normal maps in 3ds from a uvw map with some basic modeling over the plane. super duper confusing and complicated and it was just a normal map. a really good, clean normal, but that doesn't really help my situation. I guess im saying im confused. I can make the high poly, but to keep the relatively complex geometry as the snake above its going to be expensive. should i even be trying to model the intricacies?

i know it works for 3ds, but i think i might grab a copy of blender just in case. I've heard its alot easier to get collision on an object in blender. thanks for the link. a bit more about the poly count, if i broke it down any more it looks pretty terrible, in fact without the normal and diffuse it looks pretty funky. what should I be striving for? The relief you see is about character height, so 6 ft x 6 ft in game. what should me Arena be at maximum? I've been very conservative with my poly count so far, but putting together these reliefs, statues and clutter is going to rack up pretty fast.

Here;s an update, I watched this tutorial here: http://eat3d.com/free/meshlab and used meshlabs, to reduce the polycount from 4000 to 450; what is a good number for a static mesh, wall relief? the result is pretty good imo, but before i realized it, i was working with a 300x300 pixel picture in photoshop so i could really only make it 512x512 w/o looking too bad. I would have made a higher res, but i didn't save the outline before adding a few texture layers. that's something on the bottom of the to do list though lol the only thing left I need to learn is how to get proper collision. I've followed all the tutorials and currently am in contact with the guy over at nexus who did the 3ds tutorial, apparently something changed from 2010 to 2013; doesn't work. I've been using chunkmerge, it says it successfully adds collision, the ck shows proper collision, but in game i can't click on or activate the object, even though its a static mesh, but i walk right through it. not sure if something isn't ticked right in nifskope or what. I'm assuming chunkmerge takes an existing collision mesh and squashes it down over the new custom mesh. but idk how it works heres the nif with texture files https://www.dropbox.com/s/35w4ujikbdz7zas/Oroboris.zip

cool, thanks for the response! I'm working on some basic texturing right now, but when i get some stuff done i'll post it

so i'd be making a high poly model just to make a normal map? then take that normal and put it on the low poly? as far as zbrush goes, like mudbox those models need to be super high poly to sculpt, so is that just for the normal? In this arena there is going to be a lot of npc's, so i'd like to keep it as low poly as possible.

hellow, bowing is not required...necessarily. muhahahaha I had heard rumors this place was in need of some modding instruction, fear not, your prayers have been answered. Make sure to divulge all your secrets and learnings to me first, so i can make sure you are on the right track. I will appear to know very little about modding, dont fall so easily into my guile. I'm only testing you, to see which minion is worthy of the true esoteric and occult teachings. For now, I am known as Marthgun. And I bid you all a magnanimous greeting of well being and blessings.

Lemme know what you think, i made a fairly simple mesh and then used a heavy normal map. I think it looks ok, but i'm wondering if/how to improve it. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uhullsuwya9h91z/Lionface.zip just drop into data folder, open nifskope and navigate to your meshes folder and open lionface.nif

oh hai grond, thanks for that, i didn't know where to put it. Kinda hard to justify going back to blender after dropping 3.5k on it i got the disposable income so its not a big deal but when i got into blender i figured i might as well learn the best program. and my student version had some problems. so whatevs anyway, i thought about making two planes, deforming one into the sorta shape, like you said, then texturing a bump map of the diffuse on the other and sliding it over it, attach it, and then UVW Unwrap. but i had no idea that was even possible. The hardest part is there aren't any good tutorials on making low poly/high detail things like this. It's usually high poly, then more high poly, plus a few subdivision modifiers. but that just aint gonna work considering I'm probably going to have over 100k polys on the arena itself, if not more. So I'm trying to add some fun detail at low cost. And all the tutorial sites were pay to view and didn't have much content or content i couldn't find on youtube. p.s. i like turtles

hey, someone over at bethesda forums gave me this link and it goes through unwrapping all basic shapes and ways to do it, even pelt mapping. maybe you know all this, but for me this was the best resource i had ever seen for this http://cg.tutsplus.c...p-uvw-modifier/ Edit: and there is an intermediate tutorial from the same guy on the same site too, you just need to click his name or search for it.

Hello, InsanitySorrow said I may post a tutorial suggestion up in hur. If I may; 1 I am building my arena mod for skyrim, I use 3ds max 2012, photoshop cs6 and I'm using a trial of CrazyBump for teh bake. The first problem I'm having, is creating the face. Now in blender this wasn't so much as issue as long as i had a front and side view I could model it from a simple box. 3ds is far more complicated, and should probably be easier done with splines or their tons of modifiers i dont know half of what do which and who do why. Alas, this isn't really why I'm here. I am very interested in creating reliefs for my arena walls. The first thing I thought was use a picture, create a deep bump map, slap on wall. But I'm not really sure that would work, so I'm wondering how one would go about making a low poly model look as the above, which parts would need to be modeled and which parts could be texturing. Here's a few more pics that maybe you all could give your impressions on, or ideas about how to go about (5 & 6 being the two i'm really interested in, however 2,3 and 4 are more likely considering the size and the arena, which will be huge and assuming i need to keep the polygons down to a minimum): 2 3 4 5 6