BDA Progress 6 - The rest of it

Tada! Base colors in. I'm going to skip details (texture, belt buckles, etc) and go to Vertex Weighting. Not having a busy texture will help me see what's going on (admittedly, so will hiding the texture from viewports or removing the texture altogether) and I don't want to get too far into the texture and realize I have to do some major overhaul just to make deformations work.

The plan is to SkinWrap the Skyrim female_0 body and make various parts rigid. I may need to assign the tassets to skirt bones by hand though.

26,634 polygons now. I added some more details to the greaves

BDA Progress 5 - Helmet

I spent about two hours on the torso today. I originally had the torso as a front and a back stitched together on one side. While it looked good, the relax tool wouldn't produce straight lines; everything was skewed towards the side stitch. So, I split the torso into 3 pieces: Front, Back Left, Back Right. From there, I pelted and relaxed them individually. Then I target welded them together, relaxed the entire piece, and fitted it back into the existing UV maps for the other pieces.

The only piece I have left to do on the torso is the thigh. I still need to find a whole Bioware dragon logo.

The helmet is done for this stage. It wasn't very complicated and only took about half an hour to get the pieces in. The hands are next.

I am definitely not looking forward to reshaping this to fit the _1 body. There's also the issue of Glow Maps disallowing Specular Maps. For the helmet, this isn't a problem. Not so for the chest. Those 6 rectangles are in texture, not geometry. So, I'll have to either a) cut the rectangles out as geometry but leave them flush or b) not have a specular map at all.

Oh right, I'll have to recreate some, if not all, of the armor for the male version as well...ugh. I could use the SoMuchMorpher tool to automate pretty much everything above (rigging and body shape changes), but the last time I did that, I wound up reweighting everything by hand. I'll probably use it to morph from 0 to 1 and then Skin Wrap from 0 to preserve weights (not sure about the weighting).


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So many "Dragon Age" and "Skyrim" posts...

Blood Dragon-ish Armor - Progress 4 - Solid Details

I have most of the basic details for the torso done. The Bioware Dragon will come later as I'll probably trace it as a vector so I can scale it up.

Note to self: Large angles + few polygons = obviously distorted texture. Small angles + too many polygons = obviously distorted texture. See the pauldrons (large angle) and lower hip plates (small angle) for examples.

I mentioned UV Unwrap problems in my last post and, well, they struck again. Look at the center angled rectangles and compare them to their neighbors. They are being rotated counter clockwise and translated until they meet or pass the UVs for adjacent polygons. As that line became progressively smaller, the amount of distortion grew (some UVs even twisted themselves). To correct it, I had to drag each UV vertex to its proper position and delete some stacked polygons (no idea how they were made).

Blood Dragon-ish Armor - Progress 3 - Unwrapping

I've finished unwrapping all the pieces of armor and merged all the torso pieces into one object. Right now, I'm applying base colors on the main body of armor to get a better idea of what the armor will look like.

The current torso texture resolution is 2048x4096, twice the size of the original (instead of 4-8x like with the weapons). The entire armor set is about 26,000 polygons; not bad.

There's a lot of UV stretching that I don't like for nearly all the pieces. My UV unwrap process goes like this:

1. Add Unwrap UVW Modifier
2. Manually create seams
3. Select each section of polygons (Select one polygon, expand selection to seams)
4. Pelt
5. Relax by Face Angles
6. Adjust if needed

This usually works and gives great layouts, but in some cases relaxing by either Edge or Face angles causes vertices to overlap or implode into nothingness. When that happens, I have to cut objects into more pieces than I'm comfortable with due to how much work it'll be to make them seamless later on. For the pauldrons, I had to add some seams and delete some unnecessary edges because they were throwing the algorithms for a loop.

Odds and Ends

Steam just tried to redownload all of Fallout: New Vegas for no reason. It didn't even check for integrity first. It just went "Well, gotta download all 9.2GB again". After stopping it and invoking an integrity check manually, it hit 100% completion and stayed incomplete for a bit, then came to the conclusion one file had to be downloaded (most likely the one it was trying to download), and downloaded that file in about 10 seconds.

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I've trimmed 5k polygons off of the Blood Dragon Armor and added a belt. No new screenshots as you probably won't see where the polygons were cut (unless I used wireframe or edged faces, and even then, barely) and the belt is only visible from certain angles due to all the plates obscuring it.

It's about time to start unwrapping.

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I found a fun group on Borderlands 2 (PT2.5) several days ago and we opted to take on all the raid bosses. We managed to kill Vermivorous, Terramorphous, and Pete without much trouble (Vermi was a pain to create) but Hyperius and Master Gee were ridiculous (everyone died within 15 seconds while spread out). So, we decided to make ourselves immortal (instant second winds) just complete the set.

Terra, Pete, and Vermi weren't too bad. Pete's annoying because of his near unavoidable novas, Vermi just has ludicrously high HP, and Terra, well, he's a bit better after the Bee nerf patch. They gave okay loot (a green or two, half a dozen blue and purple). Nothing to write home about and just enough to recoup ammo costs (except Terra, who drops tons of ammo anyways).

Hyperius and Master Gee are way too overpowered and take forever to kill. Even with immortals, it took 15 minutes of continuous fire from Infinity Pistols to kill them. Loot? A dozen Seraph crystals, a single blue, a single purple, a couple greens, and, if I remember correctly, a white. Barely enough loot to buy 12 rocket ammo.

Seraph gear is supposed to be the next step below Legendary, so you "farm" crystals and wait for something good to show up at the Market. Still not worth it. Why? The cost of the items is greater than a single run through the Guardians. At least Pete is available more than once a day (for now).

I don't even like the Seraph items anyways. Legendaries and some E-tech/purples hold more visual appeal and, in some cases, better stats/utility than them anyways. Anyways, by the time you get to the point where you can take on these bosses, your gear is already better than what you could buy after you kill them enough times; effectively making the whole process pointless (not to mention how comfortable you are with your gear now).

So, what's the point? You spend hours killing bosses that easily deplete your ammo, drop less than mediocre loot, and give you tokens to buy items that are even less stellar than some standard items. Maybe I merely hate the token system. "In addition to standard currency, you have the following [insert number here] other currencies which take [insert high number here] times as long to collect for items that are probably not better than what you had before. Oh, and you can't get more than [insert number] of them per day."

Conclusion: Raid bosses aren't worth it. For all that time and effort, you get next to nothing in return. "Oh, congrats, you just beat a really, really hard boss. Have a high fi...nevermind." On the plus side, Terra is still kind of fun.

Blood Dragon-ish Armor - Progress 2

Slight clipping on the right side due to local alignment on the Symmetry modifier

Well, there it is. Skyrim-fied Blood Dragon Armor. It is approximately 29,000 polygons. My next tasks are to correct MeshSmooth errors (2nd-3rd pass), harden edges, round out a couple components, and make sure the standalone pieces (gloves, boots, body, and helmet) have caps just in case players don't use the full set (no see-through joints). Once those are done, I'll start unwrapping.

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Just listened to the Hellgate: London theme after forgetting about it for, probably, a few months. Ah, fun times. I still have the game install directories, but I'm not sure if the game is functional after migrating from XP. However, it gives me the "insert CD" prompt for singleplayer (promising).

Torso Progress 5

I've made the collar, but the circumference is a bit too hard. Same goes for the, uhm, sleeve holes. The overall shape has also been changed to remove the form fitting curves it had last time.

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The Witcher 2's bonus content was updated on Steam and it had some problems. First, the soundtrack is now 23 tracks in WAV format instead of 46 tracks in MP3 format (fortunately, I found a post that mentioned this as the update was downloading and promptly made a backup). Second, it deleted all downloaded content and downloaded EVERYTHING again (not the game, just the bonus content), resulting in a 2.8GB download. Third, all the bonus content folders are no longer in the "Bonus Content" subfolder (in fact, Steam tried to delete it), they're placed in the main game folder.

On the plus side, there's a whole bunch of high res artwork to look at.