[RELz] Kurgans Blade

[TheUnknownChemist]

I am a huge fan of the original Highlander movie, my favourite character was the Kurgan played by Clancy Brown an absolutely superb actor. I always wanted to have some highlander themed weapons and armour for Oblivion but was surprised that I couldn’t find a single Kurgan sword or armour set.

So that left only one option to make it myself, this is the first new mesh I have made for release. This file contains only the Kurgans sword. I will at some point be working on a full set of Kurgan style armour to.

The texture is my first attempt at EnvMap to make it very shiny, as the Kurgan sword doesn't have any real detail, it made it quiet hard to make a decent texture. I will continue working on new textures for this sword but right now this is the best I can come up with. Although not brilliant it still looks decent enough for release.

Hope you all like and enjoy

Tools Used

Blender 2.49b

Nifskope 1.0.21

Photoshop CS3

Credits:

Bethesda Softworks

Highlander film for inspiration and original ideas.

Download:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37712

[InsanitySorrow]

Congrats on your release

[TheUnknownChemist]

Thanks IS, was a lot of fun making this one

[TheUnknownChemist]

New texture and mesh uploaded (mesh hasn't changed UVmap needed a tiny bit of tweaking.)

[InsanitySorrow]

Took a closer look, looks good, especially for your first weapon release , One little suggestion though, I'd increase the size of the blade's UV Island so it fills more of the available space.

[TheUnknownChemist]

Ah thats the one thing that still stumps me a bit is getting the uv maps right.

What is a UV island? is that the little sections of the uv map itself? I tried manipulating each cell of the uv maps on a previous test mesh and it just distorted the texture. granted it was a curve that I made straight so the lines did not match up for some reason.

Overall though do you think the unwrap was okay, I personally am never to sure if they are all that good as they can be a bit complicated to my eyes when moving them to photoshop.

Thanks for the interest and advice

[InsanitySorrow]

Yeah it takes a lot of practice to get good UV maps and to learn how to best arrange the parts of the model.

Yup a UV Island is each seperte section of the UV map, so for example the Blade is a UV island, the grip would be another seperate UV island , When placing the parts of the UV map, make sure the parts that will be seen close up have bigger UV islands, this will allow you to make more detailed textures for those areas, which will look better in-game , Also be sure to leave games of about 4pixels between each island, makes sure there is no overlap when smaller mip maps are used.

Aprt from what I mentioned about the blade it looks pretty good, I've not see any errors yet, so that's always good

[TheUnknownChemist]

Thanks IS nice to know I am on the right track at least, and cheers for the good info will be sure to remember and put it in my big book of Blender stuff

[InsanitySorrow]

You're welcome , Glad to share everything I've been learning

[Vince]

I found both links in your topic on the OF broken. You might want to have someone else check to make sure it's not just me. They both work correctly from here.

[TheUnknownChemist]

Cheers Vince will look into it, not sure why it wouldn't work on the OF just copied and pasted from this topic lol