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.

Sentinel Armor Skin Weights: Female_0

I've sorted out the pauldrons...mostly. Oddly enough, the solution was to not use the pauldron bones. Instead, I had to use a combination of Spine02, UpperArm, and Clavicle. Using the pauldron bone caused the pauldrons to clip into the upper arm and generally act weird in relation to attack animations. I also had to add a handful of polys to the arms and stash them inside the torso so the stretching wouldn't rip arms from their sockets.

Up next is a couple tweaks to the leather straps that hold the right pauldron in place and then it's time for the Female_1 model so I can implement weight sliding (Remember folks: Don't let the NIF exporter weld vertices or else you get weird stuff happening in game).

For the male models, I'll have to undo the Lattice compression I applied to better conform to the female body, check the skin weights, and export. An easier task compared to Blood Dragon Armor where I had to create a new torso mesh and texture due to the female armor's bust.

In Skyrim, the glow and environmental mapping shaders are mutually exclusive. There is a way around it involving clever use of alpha textures (as mentioned at the end of this post http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/1188259-bslightingshaderproperty-basics/), but I'm not sure if I want to implement it. I like the way the armor looks with environment mapping, but I prefer the void-ish nature of the armor with the glow enabled. The armor appears out of place with the environment and that makes it feel a little more imposing.

Sentinel Armor Skin Weights - Part 2

I finally caved and went with what the DAO devs chose for the lames/tassets. While not as "physically accurate" as I think they could be (skirt bones...), I can hardly expect it to be lifelike. That said, it looks pretty good.

Up next: The Upper Torso

Sentinel Armor Skin Weights

According to comments on the NifTools 3dsMax plugin Nexus page, 3ds Max 2014 and later flat-out fail to run the plugin. There have been a couple projects to get 2013+ working, but all appear to be dead. Fortunately, I found I had a 2012 install that was gathering dust, so, one license transfer later and I now have a few more months to bang the Sentinel Armor out.

It took some fiddling to get the armor into the game. I forgot 1) that the first person model, if not explicitly assigned a model, will use the item's model and 2) the first person model cannot use bones that the first person skeleton does not have or else the game will CTD once the item is equipped.

I currently don't have a normal or specular map for the models, so the above screenshot is using the Blood Dragon Armor's for now (and the helmet looks pretty cool with the wrong maps). The glow map, while made, will have to wait until I either fix or give up on the skin weights for the lames/tassets.

Dragon Age's Massive Armor model looks awesome, but the hips are just too busy. I have the original model loaded in 2012 and can see how the DAO devs skinned it, but at the same time I really want to use the skirt bones present in Skyrim's skeleton. However, with the way things are going, I may go back to using the original armor's weight distribution to avoid all the ridiculous clipping.