Female Sentinel Armor

I just implemented weight sliding. It was a bit scary due to the realization that I forgot to cap the boots and legs until after I finished conforming to the female_1 body.

I don't remember what I used for BDA to resize it to the female_1 body (probably just a blog post check away), but this time around, I found the FFD 4x4x4 modifier to be extremely helpful. The increased number of control points let me pull and push individual elements around without distorting their original shape too much and I didn't have to deal with making sure I selected the exact same poly/vertex/edge on each side with soft selection.

 So far, the animations seem to be fine. I haven't had any porcupine moments yet, but I'm not holding my breath. I don't appear to have any vertices impacted by more than 4 bones and the _0 and _1 models have the same number of vertices in the same relative places, so I think the model will be okay.

Now I have to load in the male_1 body and scale the armor to better represent that shape (Squarer hips, less up top, etc). Once that is done, I'll probably throw together a helmet to go with the "mundane" variant of the armor. There's the Duty helmet from DA:O, but I don't have a corresponding armor texture for it.

Come to think of it, I don't know what armor texture I used. I pulled from pn_arm_masb which is supposed to be for Cailan's Armor set, but the texture was grey, not gold like the armor set ingame. Given the massive amount of resuse in DA:O, they probably used recolor options in their model format.

I should note that, while the massive armors swapped textures around willy-nilly in DA:O, I'm more restricted due to fully modelling the dragon's head onto my mesh. Massive armors with other normalmap-based details (or lackthereof) will require recreating the chestpiece. Due to the expiration date of my 3ds Max license, it might behoove me to create those two chestpieces and release the texture templates for all three variants...but that's something for later.

I should probably kill the glow and see what this looks like with environment mapping.