Zero Two Pilot Suit (WIP)

[Horkerkiiin]

Hi guys,

Its been a while. But considering this place is the place that really helped me get started making mods I would be remiss not to post this here! Welcome to my second ever mod I'm making, instead of something for skyrim, this time its an armor (Armor is a loose term here i guess...) for Fallout 4.

Now those here who may remember my first mod... it took me a long ass time to finish. Part of that was my inexperience and the first time modeling anything, also moving house having no internet and a new job. But mainly its because I lacked focus and also when I was focused I kept going back on myself and re doing work.

I'm please to say however with my newest mod I have the whole thing already modeled and it took me less than 30 days : D (as oppose to about a year and a half ) although the model is not as complex as my previous mod it was not without its difficulties to model.

I have recently really gotten into a new Anime that is currently airing called Darling in the FRANXX and have fallen in love with a character called "Zero Two" as seen here

 

 

And I decided I wanted to Make the pilot suit you see her wearing.

 

Here is some images of the mesh

https://i.imgur.com/pvCUlLy.png

https://i.imgur.com/ZYTwLc2.png

https://i.imgur.com/fGipeb4.png

https://i.imgur.com/Q76yC69.png

https://i.imgur.com/SYaXFEQ.png

https://i.imgur.com/ViPRf8M.png

I put them as links so not to clog up the page.

I dont know if anyone really kicks around in the fallout section but I still wanted to post something here, I still remember all the lessons and tips I got from Grond and Hanaisse.

 

I'm currently at the stage of adding seams/UV unwrapping, I need to weight (weight copying will do most of the work... well should do anyway)  once thats done I want to get it all working in game with some place holder textures and then once its all working make some proper testing.

If anyone has advice however about UV unwrapping etc then I'm all ears! I'm currently aiming to try and get this mod out by the middle of March.

 

Thanks for taking a look guys!

 

 

 

Edited March 2, 2018 by Horkerkiiin

[HeyYou]

Neat. I could never get a handle on 3d modeling..... my brain just doesn't seem to want to work that way.

[Horkerkiiin]

6 hours ago, HeyYou said:

Neat. I could never get a handle on 3d modeling..... my brain just doesn't seem to want to work that way.

I'll be honest, my head isnt even wrapped around it haha, I just do things until they work.

Edited March 2, 2018 by Horkerkiiin

[HeyYou]

4 hours ago, Horkerkiiin said:

I'll be honest, my head isnt even wrapped around it haha, I just do things until they work.

Hey, if it works, that's all that matters.

[grond]

Hey Horkerkiiin  

Nice to see you again. You're right - unwrapping this should be easier. You're the tailor here. You can put seams where they would really go: around the arms, along the underside of the arms, around the crotch, down the legs. But if you want it to be a sort of spandex thing without visibly tailored seams, you could do 'smart projection' unwrapping (I think it's in 2.49) and paint the texture directly onto the model. I think 2.49 has OK texture painting ability. . . it's been a very long time since I opened olde tyme blender.

Show us pics of your progress.

[vometia]

Yeah, "mark seam" is your friend.  But I'm not an expert at all, beyond that it's just a case of "unwrap and hope for the best".  If it's really bad I'll interfere with it in the UV mapper, but once that's done it's just export UV layout and then try to figure out the rest in Gimp...

[Horkerkiiin]

10 hours ago, grond said:

Hey Horkerkiiin  

Nice to see you again. You're right - unwrapping this should be easier. You're the tailor here. You can put seams where they would really go: around the arms, along the underside of the arms, around the crotch, down the legs. But if you want it to be a sort of spandex thing without visibly tailored seams, you could do 'smart projection' unwrapping (I think it's in 2.49) and paint the texture directly onto the model. I think 2.49 has OK texture painting ability. . . it's been a very long time since I opened olde tyme blender.

Show us pics of your progress.

HI Grond!

 

Im not using the old 2.49! I'm on to Blender 2.79, Having to dabble with a bit of 3ds max as well to make it work. Yea I'm working to see what I can do here, When I finished my previous mod the hardest part for me was seams and texturing, I was never good at making 2d images haha.

 

Will definitely keep this updated though with no long hiatuses this time!

 

7 hours ago, vometia said:

Yeah, "mark seam" is your friend.  But I'm not an expert at all, beyond that it's just a case of "unwrap and hope for the best".  If it's really bad I'll interfere with it in the UV mapper, but once that's done it's just export UV layout and then try to figure out the rest in Gimp...

 

Ahhh gimp. My old enemy. Im really not great at texture work. But its all I have.

[vometia]

2 hours ago, Horkerkiiin said:

Ahhh gimp. My old enemy. Im really not great at texture work. But its all I have.

That makes two of us.   I just mess about with several layers of brushes until something eventually happens, sometimes more by luck than judgement.  Given the dubious quality of my texturing work I'm definitely not the best candidate for giving out detailed advice, but what I have found is getting the normal and specular maps right makes a big difference to the overall appearance.

[Horkerkiiin]

Kinda NSFW ahead, I mean I dont really think it is but wanted to throw the warning up just incase

This is most likely a question for any texturing wizards here if there is any?

How do people make stuff without seams appearing on the textures? for example this is the UV map for the CBBE body according to my Blender

 

Now examining the CBBE body in blender, Seams where never actually set, where its all split the mesh has basically been separated along the edges like so

 

 

But when I dont move the mesh around it looks like this as standard in the 3D viewer (Applied a Matcap so its easier to see in an image) and you can clealy see seam marks which corrispond with the UV map.

 

 

However when you get in game there is no seam marks in sight

 

 

So my point here.

How do people achieve this? Im currently working on the UV's for my bodysuit (all the other parts are done, just need to do the bodysuit) should I just be "cutting" the bodysuit in certain places like the CBBE body? (and logically cut it in roughly the same places, wouldnt be perfect to the body as I made the bodysuit myself I didnt just copy and duplicate the body) or should I be doing it with seams? OR does it not matter because both things effectivley give the same results?

 

I just dont get how people make the textures overlap like this and hide those nasty seams.

 

Also bonus picture. I got bored of trying to make UV maps and for giggles exported just the body suit of my armor with a REALLLLLLLY BAD UV map just to test it to see if I could get the body suit working  game (As I understand it the Nifskope process is a bit different this time)  and this is how it turned out. Somehow I broke my textures, But I am glad that the heels are weighted correctly and dont distort when they move so thats a bonus haha.

 

But yea if anyone has some answers to my above question it would be very much appreciated.

 

Edited March 7, 2018 by Horkerkiiin
Typo

[vometia]

Slightly surprised at what you're seeing in the 3D viewer there; and skin is also a special case as the colouration is altered to reflect the correct skin tone beyond what you see in the texture there.  I forget the exact mechanism offhand (if I ever knew it...)

In terms of hiding seams, there may be ways of doing it but in my case it seems to be "with some difficulty"!  Some very fiddly use of the clone tool may help to hide it, but the alternative method is to highlight the seam instead.  For example, one of the Bioshock-inspired outfits I recently made includes a pair of stockings based on that CBBE mesh you mentioned.  Once I'd cut the mesh down to just the legs I re-unwrapped with the seams marked out as vertical a line as I could get down the backs of the legs and simply shaded them a very dark colour to give the appearance of that older style of stockings that indeed had seams down the back.  Not strictly authentic to the outfit I was duplicating but it was a handy means of side-stepping the problem!

Edited March 7, 2018 by vometia

[grond]

If you don't see any seams on the CBBE body in blender, it's likely they used smoothing groups. The model is actually split along chosen edges. So no seams!

In blender you mark selected edges as sharp and use an edge split modifier - with "sharp" selected not "angle" - and then, if you marked the correct edges as sharp, then you can unwrap just as you would with seams, but without seams. Now I suspect the weird twists in your matcap pic might just be blender trying to assign matcap to the model parts that aren't really islands, but are the chunks created when applying the edge split modifier. The model's literally cut apart and rotated to fit the UV grid.

If you do the edge split, the least confusing way to get a seamless texture is inside blender with Texture Painting!

If you still want to cut seams, but you then want/need to hide them, the answer is paint them out in blender! Texture painting can be your friend.

[vometia]

Simultaneous feelings of "yay, there's someone who knows what they're talking about, I may learn something!" and "argh, there's someone who knows what they're talking about, I'll look like an idiot!"

 

1 hour ago, grond said:

 

If you still want to cut seams, but you then want/need to hide them, the answer is paint them out in blender! Texture painting can be your friend.

 

And once again I realise that Blender does more than I realise.  I did wonder if there was some form of texture painting within Blender while you can see the UV map wrapped on to the model and... there is!  Cool.  Understanding how to use it may be a different story, it really took a step-by-step idiot's guide and probably a fair bit of luck for me to figure out how to get Blender to generate a normalmap, for example.

[grond]

&   

Here's another introduction to texture painting, but without gimp - youtube.com/watch?v=1iy3pck8gz8

Here's a great one that made it simple (sorta) for me - youtube.com/watch?v=DXGkee_BWHo

I don't mean to hijack this thread but if you incorporate texture painting into your workflow, you'll be less   about seams.

[Horkerkiiin]

3 hours ago, grond said:

&   

Here's another introduction to texture painting, but without gimp - youtube.com/watch?v=1iy3pck8gz8

Here's a great one that made it simple (sorta) for me - youtube.com/watch?v=DXGkee_BWHo

I don't mean to hijack this thread but if you incorporate texture painting into your workflow, you'll be less   about seams.

Thank you Grond, I will check these out. Im dissapointed with myself had a bit of a rough week at work and have not made any progress thus far other than UV unwrapping everything apart from the body suit. I need to not let work affect me so much haha.

 

Thank you for the help it is always appreciated

 

Now if I can just figure out what I want to do with this bodysuit

[Horkerkiiin]

I... I’m pissed. I’m working on something that I’m actually making decent progress on for once. And my damn graphics card has died. No idea when I will be able to afford a new one so sadly this is on hiatus for now. 

 

I font even have a laptop, my only internet access is my phone. This sucks. 

Edited March 10, 2018 by Horkerkiiin

[Horkerkiiin]

Ok. Never mind.

 

My HDMI cable came loose at the back of my monitor and I just instantly went with worst case scenario rather than seeing if there was another issue. All is good.

[vometia]

BTDT, for what it's worth.  "Why has my monitor gone all pink?  Is it dying?  Oh, the cable's half fallen out..."

[grond]

I'm currently ignoring the sporadic clicking coming from the fan of my 9-year-old PSU because if I ignore it it's not happening. Everything's fine.  nervous chuckle

I have a problem with letting other work interfere with this stuff too. Wall posters with 'GET TO WORK' (followed by expletives) in 'Impact' font sometimes do the trick  

[Horkerkiiin]

Slight update,

 

Ive done all my seams and my UV unwrapping. My plan of action moving forward is - Make some dummy textures, get it weighted and working in game. Once I know it all works, then I will work on proper textures. Texturing scares me though, I am not good at it and my general understanding is that a good texture can save a bad model, but no matter how good a model is if the texture is bad then the model will look bad, thats what I've been told anyway. My friend is going to help me texture as he has Substance Painter so hoping we can make something good there. Will try and get it all working in game tomorrow night and will see how it goes.

[grond]

You fixed your video problem I assume.

Nice plan. But ( and I'm writing myself blue in the face here ) remember that blender's texture painting is pretty good, and while substance is great and faster than going by hand, you can and should do it by hand to get the feel for it. I'm still in this stage.

Like vom says, get the height info first ( this is where baking normal maps is really the best way, but you have to make a high poly version of your model ) then move to the colors.

You're right about a good texture saving a bad model - it should be on a tee shirt.

[Horkerkiiin]

Reason there has been no updates. My pc actually died, for real this time. So I’m out of commission till sometime next week until I get a new pc sorted. 

[grond]

Please accept my virtual condolences  

[Horkerkiiin]

13 hours ago, grond said:

Please accept my virtual condolences  

She held out for a long time. May she rest quietly now.

Edited April 4, 2018 by Horkerkiiin

[Horkerkiiin]

Evening everyone,

 

I'm back with a new PC! Took a bit longer than I anticipated to get a new one. Should be getting back on this train at the weekend.

 

 

[grond]

Congratulations and all aboard!