Narmix's WIP Models

[Narmix]

Hello everyone. I've made my introduction here:

I'm trying to learn how to model and texture, and I really enjoy it. I'm happy if I can get a couple useful things out of all the models I make to practice. I've got a couple WIPs here and I'll be posting more.

One thing pushing me forward is that modding communities usually have a plethora of texturers but not many modelers.

Revenge of Frank the Goat (

)

Generic Snake Staff (intended to be entirely wood with the exception of the gem in snake's mouth)

Staff is carved from a branch with large knothole in it. It's low poly, currently. Gonna take it through a run in Sculptris, then retopo it.

Edited December 10, 2011 by Narmix

[Khettienna]

I really, really dig that axe. Reminds me a bit of Shadowmourne, in spirit, but toned down to Skyrim's practical nature.

[Narmix]

I really, really dig that axe. Reminds me a bit of Shadowmourne, in spirit, but toned down to Skyrim's practical nature.

Dang. I knew the axe was generic, but I had no idea WoW did it already. Almost verbatum! Well, I guess when they've made just about every possible artistic variant of a melee weapon, at least one of them is bound to look like something I make. I've never even seen Shadowmourne before. I googled it just now... makes me sad the two are so similar.

Goat skull, check. Horns wrap around blade... check.

Edited December 10, 2011 by Narmix

[Khettienna]

Well, except that yours actually has a shot at being usable in the real world, and it's not radiating a bunch of blue swirly frou-frou, and also looks like it could actually kill somebody. I consider these some reasonably important factors when comparing weapons.

[Narmix]

Well, except that yours actually has a shot at being usable in the real world, and it's not radiating a bunch of blue swirly frou-frou, and also looks like it could actually kill somebody. I consider these some reasonably important factors when comparing weapons.

Well that's true. I think I went a little crazy sculpting the skull though. While the original skull is really low poly and quite boring-looking, the second skull looks too animated/personified. It clearly has angry eyebrows. I am afraid, now, that it's too WoW-looking. The skull went from trying to be realistic, to being something that looks like it was crafted for the weapon as opposed to found and attached to it.

Edited December 11, 2011 by Narmix

[Khettienna]

I don't think it's too WoW-looking. The blade shape alone sort of prohibits that, and in a good way. But if you wanted to take emphasis away from the skull, you could probably flatten it a bit and make the eye sockets more shallow, rather than reverting all the way back to v1, as a compromise.

Now stop looking at WoW models and just make what you want to make.

[jaysus]

groves and holes and so on which do not really add to the shapegiving outlines can really be done with normal bump maps instead of getting modeled on the ingame mesh (thinking of the eye socket holes for example)

something under 1,5k polies or slightly above is a good amount i think

i like the staff, tho it really depends on what you gonna do with it in sculptris and co i guess but i can imagine it to end up being really sexy, snake scales carved into the body of the snake for example... mmh...

however since its supposed to be all wood id probably have the snake origin from a branch that grows out of the main staff handle or give it a different material, the way it is now the snake would slide off the staff i assume

having the snake be a branch is something that could probably work in the real world, grow a magic tree (lol) and twist one of its branches around the main trunk again and again while it grows over the ages

as for the axe i dont undestand EVERYONES fascination with skulls on their weapons

@sculptris

can you polypaint in it or just sculpt? (only tried it a lil bit)

[Narmix]

The key is balancing poly count with detail. It's best to get as much detail as real polygons where you can (areas that seriously effect sillhouette) while leaving smaller details for normals. I'll do that, I'm just not there yet, haha. I've taken a break from making things for Skyrim in order to practice on some bigger projects. That way, when I come back to Skyrim, I'll be better suited to make things the right way the first time.

Also, poly count is based on the game engine in question. I try to keep my polycount in an average of what the other items in the said game are. For instance, I exported all the staves and checked their poly counts. The average is ~1,800 polys. So I'm actually trying to hit around 2,000 (which I haven't done yet with the staff I made, as it's low poly currently) so that it's higher quality than the in-game items. People tend to prefer higher quality, and most PCs are easily capable of handling more than the console port Bethesda gave us. That's why so many people download higher quality items to replace in game assets.

I'm going to try to make all of my items for Skyrim at about ~25% more polys than the game has by default on average.

I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do, texture-wise. I don't consider myself much of a texturer and had originally planned to just make UV-mapped models for people to texture themselves (because I'm sure they'd be better than anything I'm capable of texturing myself). However, I may.

Regarding the staff: Actually, people have bent wood for a very long time by just soaking the piece until it's plyable, and then letting it dry out while clamping it into shape. But a magic tree works

Regarding the axe: Honestly, I know skulls are really corny. I even named my original picture of it "corny.jpg". I did it primarily for practice. I wasn't yet using Sculptris and I wanted to push myself to make an organic shape without sculpting tools.

Regarding sculptris: You can both sculpt *and* paint (and make normals). It's awesome and it's the only reason I might attempt texturing this myself. A friend of mine got me a program called Filter Forge as well, which lets you create patterned textures really quickly. I intend to make brushes in the program to be used in Sculptris for texturing the stuff.

Right now though, like I said, I'm working on some bigger Skyrim-unrelated projects as practice. That way, in about a week or so, I can start working on Skyrim things. And I hope I can work on things with other people!

Happy holidays

[jaysus]

@tileable textures

just take any texture and mirror it a few times... tileable texture tadaa

@painting and sculptris

sweet, only know it cause it became part of zbrush but from what ive seen you can do some nifty stuff with it... best part about polypainting is that you wont need to bother with seams all that much and can paint directly on your model seeing where everything goes... just make sure you have well mapped, quadded, homogenous low polies... often helps to make your low poly, map it and then change its topography to fit sculpting/painting programms needs while retaining the uv map (edit poly modifier in 3dmax for example), that way you get a nice topography for sculpting but still have a low poly object for ingame use for which the same textures will work

@polycount

true but dont overdo it anyway lol, especially if you intend to add the weapons to NPCs... once the game has to load 4 or 5 at the same time it can get hairy, there was a well liked fallout mod that kinda was unplayable due to the incredible polycounts and horrible use of textures (dxt 5 instead of 1 for example)

and dont just go by what people like, most of them are clueless ,no offense but they dont make the stuff or know what make it be what it is ingame and hence dont even know what "high quality" means most of the time (just take that trillion high res retextures that just up texture size and blur the image)

but 25%+ sounds about right... heck i use 2048 textures atm in my swords mod and thats like 16 times the size of a vanilla sized 512p (rolf... people love it tho)...

@snake

and yes you can bend the wood after it has grown, but getting a spiral round the main staff trunk will take a while

and you still need to attach the snake somehow