Sentinel Armor Texture - All those little details

There are a lot of details on this armor. I didn't notice most of them because the Sentinel Armor is almost pure black, but after finding the grey version of the armor, just wow. Blood Dragon wasn't like this. Lines, plates, and layers everywhere. Sure, there were a lot of shapes, but they were easy to trace and make vectors out of. Sentinel is comprised almost exclusively of curved, more organic details.

Right now, I have a lot of line segments outlining the shapes. They'll be combined later into the final designs on the armor.

Sentinel Armor Progress 6

I've started laying down the base colors for the Sentinel armor. Now, you may notice how both armor models aren't pitch black. That's because I'm using a diffuse texture from a palette swap armor model to make it easier to trace all the filigree.

Like before, nearly everything at this stage is a vector using blending styles The filigree is an exception. The traces are vector lines, but I stroke them onto a layer with the vector mask disabled.

Sentinel Armor Progress 5

UV unwrapping complete. Well, kind of. As you can see, I still need to take all the pieces and shove them inside that black, square outline. I think I'll make it double height and aim for a 1024x2048 texture. That way, I don't have to scale the UVs down so much and can avoid having to make a bigger texture to compensate.

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The MyBookLive is alive again. Swapped harddrives, ran an unbricking script to "install" the new drive, and copied files back over. Now, I wait.

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I was playing around with blog themes and tried Dynamic Views. It looks pretty, but runs slow and is barely customizable. You can't choose one view and remove the menu items for the others; it's all or nothing unless you edit the theme's source.

Extra widgets do not show, color choices seem to be irrelevant, you can't remove existing widgets, FireFox became unresponsive half a dozen times when I looked at customization previews, and it adds extra spaces in posts which then messes with formatting.

MyBookLive dying: Confirmed.

According to the SMART status, the drive is dying. The read error metric is at 1, which is apparently a bad thing. The drive can still work, but it looks to be all downhill from here. I don't expect any support from WD after tearing the thing apart, so I'm adding "another hard drive" to my list of things to buy.

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I'm almost done unwrapping the Sentinel armor. Just one elbow pad left.

I still don't know what kind of delivery mechanism I'm going to use. I think a quest would be appropriate or even a new dungeon. Placing items on NPCs has turned out to be a bad idea. They wander off, get killed and deleted, fall through the ground, don't die, etc.

The messenger system worked well for the Bassrath-Kata weapons. However, players had to use the console to get all the weapons because I set it up so they would only get one item after finishing the Dragonborn quest. Not a great way to do things. Instead of the messenger system, I think I'll create a quest NPC and let him handle giving stuff away.

Sentinel Armor Progress 4

I'm unwrapping the armor starting with the helmet and the hands. Up next: Boots.

I tried unwrapping in 3ds Max 2012. It was...interesting. The problem was how radically different the UI was compared to 2011. I had to guess that each icon meant and hope that the developers and I agreed on that meaning.

The Peel function is interesting. I divide most of the geometry using shading groups. So, Peeling splits the UV map according to those groups, saving me from doing it manually. Neat trick.

Now, I'm trying to decide how I want to make the mod. The armor I have right now, minus the helmet, contains geometry common to nearly all the massive armor in Dragon Age: Origins. So, a different armor is just a retexture (sometimes, just a palette swap). I can release what I have now in a small mod and make more later or I could model the other unique pieces and release the whole thing at once. I probably won't come to a decision until after I complete the Sentinel armor. I need to see how big one armor set will be to determine whether or not the Workshop will support more.

Sentinel Armor Progress 3

Finished basic shape of the legs, arms, and torso. Now I need to move everything into place. The pauldrons, tassets, and whatnot were based on the shape of the original so I have to fiddle with them to make them fit over the new shell (The shoulder gear needs to drop 5 units and move back 1 or 2).

Once everything is fitted, merged, and tweaked, I'll start adding more details and refining the shapes (boots are too rounded). Then, it's off to UV land!

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After breaking the tabs off of my MyBookLive and disassembling it to get the harddrive, I found out that the backup I was trying to copy was corrupt. It copied over fine locally, but when I opened it, the filesystem was gone. File recovery software only recovered the temporary internet files (seriously?!). I resorted to pulling the original drive and rummaging through file remnants to get data back. Folder paths were shot, but the files were mostly recoverable.

I really don't know what burned the backup. It hasn't done that to me before and there were no errors during the process. Next time, I'll backup to a USB harddrive and keep it there instead.

MyBookLive being difficult

I made a backup of a computer a while ago just in case something went wrong. And sure enough, something went wrong and that backup is now needed. There's one small hiccup though: I made the backup to a MyBookLive.

Why is this a problem? I can't access the file and rummage around in it or get it off the device. Copy/Paste via Explorer (Win7), robocopy, ftp, and Copy/Paste via Konqueror in two versions of Linux all fail. I'd try a wireless connection to halve the transmission speed just in case the device cannot sustain long periods of transfer, but a 20 hour transfer time is too long (not to mention keeping a machine on for that long is going to create a lot of heat). I've moved the device and plugged it directly into the router, but that didn't help.

My first attempt to copy/paste went smoothly until about 90% completion, at which point the MyBookLive lost its net connection. No ping, no login, no access whatsoever. Over 3 days, every attempt after that has failed sooner and sooner with the same symptoms. Now it fails at 0.2% completion. I've updated the firmware twice (there was an intermediate firmware update before the latest could be installed). There are no errors, no bad packets, just an abrupt "No longer accessible" message and I can no longer communicate with the device for a few minutes.

I'm trying OSX now and while it hasn't failed yet, the traffic has stopped several times at less than 6% completion. I gave file splitting a shot with 7zip, but it reported an ever increasing time remaining and I stopped it after it quoted 41 hours. The odd thing was that while 7zip was creating nice 500MB chunks, the connection never dropped. It's like the device requires a give-and-take that is more significant than ACKs.

As much as I don't want to, it looks like I'm going to have to disassemble the drive completely (WD makes it hard to get to the drive itself without going through all the plastic bits and circuit boards), plug it directly into my PC, move the file off, and then put it back together. It's not like there's a warranty on it anymore (it expired years ago).

Odd Note: OSX reports the file as 10GB LARGER than what Windows or Linux report.

Update:

OSX just failed to copy it via Finder and the drive was not accessible for a few minutes, again. Disassembly it is.