Nekronom

Packaged inside these files is the key to happiness, every texture is handcrafted by myself from high poly sculpture with the utmost care to bring you, the player, the most satisfying, most immersive oblivion experience you can find. For those that are skeptical, I've remodeled every part of these meshes by hand, staying true to the original topology and than baked these textures down to something that I hope not only surpasses the quality of the originals, but raises the bar in player satisfaction! And with that, i'll lay the floor to, "A Perfect Normal". Keep in mind that not only is this an alpha mod, but everything I release is a WIP (work in progress) and will continually be updated and improved, there will be artifacts and ugly red spots to begin with, but they will soon disappear. Installation: backup your data folder before dragging and dropping the textures into there corresponding directory. Uninstallation: Simply delete the files that came with this download and reinstall your backups. End User Agreement: You MAY edit and REDISTRIBUTE these textures in your mod, as long as credit and a link point here. Thanks to: Bethesda for the wonderful game (that I regretfully cannot play). Autodesk for the wonderful program that is 3ds Max. Pixologic for the sculpting program that without I would be oh so mediocre. Adobe, for...well, for photoshop, we'd all be screwed without it. Nvidia, for the .dds plugin, couldnt do this too well without it now could we? Santiago Orgaz, making normal maps easier by the day. and last, but not least, The community here, for keeping me inspired to keep at it 24/7. Discussion topics on the nexus and bethsoft forums http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1167985-wipz-a-perfect-normal/ http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/307496-relzwipz-a-perfect-normal/

While reading through IS's blender tutorial earlier today, It struck me that it was the perfect opportunity to write a tutorial on baked normals and there advantages. So here we go, Hold on to your hats everyone. Requirements: 3ds max, blender, or other 3d modeling program. Skill Level: Easy Time to Complete: 5-10 minutes. So we start off with two cubes: IS's (IS Variant) standing at 113: and the other method brought up in the thread (tri box), standing at 76polys: From here, we see the differences in Sub-D on each one. Notice all the nice edges in this one. and while this one looks vey similar, notice the excessive warping and pinching in the wireframe and on the corners. Here we have a quick Uv map as well as smoothing groups layed according to the uvw islands. This is CRUCIAL, If the smoothing groups do not line up with the islands, you will get blatant seams! In this image we can see the "cage"(blue wireframe) being setup to encompass the High poly model so the textures will be captured correctly Notice The box on the left(Tri box), appears with an Ambient Occlusion texture, and normal map baked from the correct Sub-D mesh (IS Variant)

Heres just a short list of a terms and definitions, so everyone can stay on the right page and not reinvent the wheel and have a place to look if they don't know a correct term. . Those marked with an asterisk are directly related to OB. *Diffuse map: Texture map holding only color information for a mesh. *Normal map: Texture map generated from a high polygon mesh or heightmap, directly affects normal direction and lighting. Heightmap: Texture map used to store elevation data, usually used to generate terrain. *Specular map: Texture map that defines how shiny a material is (shiny metal=white Dull cloth=dark grey). Ambient Occlusion pass: Texture map used to simulate global illumination, very useful in bringing out shapes. *Mesh (game ready): A properly triangulated mesh ready for import into a game engine. Mesh (High Poly): A mesh far beyond the poly count of any game engine, quads must be maintained to refrain from pinching or other artifacts. Used for baking Ao, Nrml, Disp, Bmp, and Hgt maps. Quad: Four sided polygon, regarded as the holy grail of polygons, a mesh consisting of all quads will give you very little fuss, lest it is to animate. *Tri: Three sided polygon, perfectly acceptable in low poly work and a must for an animated mesh, not good for high poly work, will cause pinching. Ngon: Five or more sided polygon. Not acceptable. Except in extremely rare circumstances. Vertex: Single point on a mesh. *UVW mapping: Laying out the 3d mesh, in a 2d environment, UV's should be well packed and layed out to avoid stretching, but allow at least 8px of bleed to avoid seams. Texture baking: The process of "baking" the information in a high poly model (or model with a material layout) into a low polygon game mesh. Greebles: Extra geometry or baked texture that doesn't do anything practical (Greebles can be anything, from nuts and bolts, to sky scrapers). Keep an eye out, I'll update this regularly, and answer any questions posted. Cheers guys! Nek

If I may pitch in my twenty five dollars, I would like to say, That while there is nothing wrong with IS's way of modeling this hole, it does indeed waste precious verts that if left un-optimized could lay siege to the CPU; However, given that it is placed in a cube, It would in fact be optimal to do it his way if you are using sub-D modeling methods. The optimized tri corners are a completely acceptable method however, given that correctly layed smoothing groups would make them imperceptible to the player. So in conclusion, both methods are acceptable, and both methods are correct, and while both methods are preferred in a specialized area, they suck in the other, tris don't sub-d well, and lots of wasted quads are well...wasted quads. However, I feel I'm ranting to completely competent people who already know what i'm sayings, so I will be quiet now.

Hey all, you might know me as the author of APN, or the guy that never finishes anything. I'm working on creating something akin to decomposition, by writing a script that tells the dead npc's in cell (if dead for more than 1 week game time) to switch to its corresponding "DEAD" race, which i'll use the age slider for more extreme decomp. Problem is, i cant script for my life, but i can sculpt or model anything anyone could ever ask anyone to model, so i need help figuring this out...or help learning to code. Thanks!, Nek

Hai, my names Nekronom, been modeling for ten years nao, nice to be here.

Cant figure out how to post in the shoutbox...i wanna play tew...

That looks like a smoothing group problem, oblivion is famous for them when you look at them in a modeling program, the shading error near the blade is probably caused by a single smoothing group applied to polygons facing in opposing directions without supporting edges. The shading error near the middle of the head could be caused a cluster of long triangles welded into a single vertex.