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.

Scaled

Completed the scales on the instep. I kind of wish I could keep the higher poly version, but the feet aren't viewed that closely and don't need that amount of detail.

I'm not too sure how many polys the armor has now. 3ds Max reports the polys of everything, hidden or not. I have around 76k polys with several versions of the remake and original armors as well as some reference objects. I may need to trim it down a bit before release (as usual).

Scaling up

After several weeks of on-and-off on the Sentinel boot texture, I've decided to model out the scales on the instep and heel. No matter how I mess with the texture, I can't seem to get it right. The best I've come up with is something that could be passable for phalanges if I tapered them. Just not scales.

Not scaly enough

Fortunately, all is not for naught. By attempting to create the scales in texture, I've aligned them with respect to the model. Making the scales is now a matter of tracing the texture with a spline. I know exactly where I want them.

It's not a bad thing, come to think of it. The boots don't have a lot of geometry to them, so any texture details will, uhm, fall flat fairly easily. Modeling the scales will give me a bit more variation when the boots are viewed at an angle.

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.

Sentinel Armor Progress 2

Got most of the armor around the hips done. Now, it's just the big pieces: chest, arms, and legs.

A lot of the pieces are carbon copies of others. For example, the blue tassets are the same piece copied over and over. While there are quite a few pieces to this armor, the copies will make it a lot easier to texture. I might do sets instead of having all 6 of them use the same texture just because I don't want it to be repetitive. Also, since there's no unique bits across the mirror, I can unwrap half of the chest and not worry about seams like I did on BDA (not a big issue, but still).

Sentinel Armor Progress

As always, female body first because it's my character's gender (eliminates save swapping and summoning the character generation menu for the early stages). Sentinel Armor doesn't conform to the bosom, so I should be able to scale the armor to the male body instead of remaking it like I did for Blood Dragon Armor.

The gloves are almost identical to the Blood Dragon gloves. I took the base mesh, fiddled with exporting/importing their skin envelopes, and removed all but the hands. From there, I removed the knuckle guards and used the trace-spline-rotate method for creating the wrist guards. Massive Armors in Dragon Age: Origins are asymmetrical for the hands and pauldrons, so no quick mirroring for me. This is going to be interesting to unwrap later on.

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Since I haven't heard from the artist in a month and he isn't responding to me, I'm going to go ahead and post an image of the helmet I mentioned in my last post. Just note: Full credit to him for the initial sketch. I made the base model shown below.

The back of the head isn't complete yet. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with it. There's this ongoing theme of protrusions that look like receptacles for tubes, but not all frames have them. Given how this particular one is close to Excalibur's, I think I'll draw from that. Then there's the organic wisps, swirls, bumps, and such that comprise Warframe's art style. I have no idea how I'm going to do that, but it should be informative in either case (I might actually try to use Mudbox for more than painting UV seams away!).

I have no idea how I'm going to unwrap this. Everything is currently using Max's default color selection. It is also MeshSmoothed a couple times.

Sentinel Helmet - Model Progress

I've finished the helmet's shape for now. I was considering chamfering all the edges on the wings to produce the smooth shapes from the normal map, but no one's going to be that close unless they've blown the model up several times or imported into a 3d package. So, I made some really close polygons resembling the shapes and assigned all the hard edges to the same smoothing group.

There is a sun shape on the forehead where the red glow dot is supposed to be, but I'm not sure if I want to make that geometry or not.

This is really the only unique thing about the Sentinel Armor, besides the texture. It seems like everything else is exactly the same for all massive armors in Origins/Awakening.



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I came across a thread on the Warframe forums with a sketch for a certain frames's helmet redesign and, well, decided to give it a go. The sketch is front view only, so I'm using a side view from the wiki to get a head size.

Starting the Sentinel Armor Helmet

I took some time to blast through Warframe and level a lot of gear, but it's time I got back into making things. So, I've targeted the Sentinel Armor set from Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening.

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Come to think of it, I haven't heard a POST beep in a long, long time. Errors, sure, but POST? I don't think they do that anymore.

Trian's Maul Geometry

I forgot to post this while I was making Trian's Maul. Just a quick screenshot of the old model (left) and all the geometry I put on the new model (right).

EDIT:
Due to someone claiming I've stolen textures from Dragon Age 2 (curiously, not Dragon Age: Origins), here is a cropped screenshot (no need to show the tools window or title) comparing the Bassrath-Kata greatsword textures. On the left, mine. On the right, DA2's.

Asala Greatsword - Texturing

I've started texturing the model now and I've hit the all too familiar color matching problem. I don't have access to the source textures (not the textures that shipped) for the original model, so I have to guesstimate the base color of details, highlights, and shadows from the composite. Since I made most of the details actual geometry, I can skip a good portion of the texture and leave flat colors (touch up comes later), but that doesn't exempt me from matching the color scheme.

I'm off to a good start, but the crossguard's filigree is a pain because I have to simulate the shadows and highlights (yes, it can be done using the normal map) and trace the original patterns before distorting them to fit onto my UVs.

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Quite a few of the weapons in Dragon Age 2 are straight copy/pastes from Dragon Age: Origins; no higher resolution meshes or textures. It makes sense to do that from a time standpoint, but don't the devs have the original masters that generated what they shipped? Surely it doesn't take that long to lower the optimization aggressiveness, hit export, and carry on, right?

This is assuming, of course, they didn't originally model the weapons with a 1000 polygon limit using only polygons (no splines, patches, etc), split the UVs awkwardly in half (for swords), and create the textures in 128x256 in sideview without vectors.

Asala Greatsword - No more polygons

Okay. Now it's official, I'm making the bands in the texture. The bands you see above add 8440 polygons and put me way above my comfort zone of 10k polygons.

I looked up, got the gist of, and tried patches, but they're even worse. I didn't even get to double symmetry to cover all sides. There were just too many polygons per band.

I could trim maybe 200-300 polygons from either method, but that still leaves me with an absurd amount of polygons. So, I'm going to try extruding a little tube to merge the crossguard with its rings and leave the rest in texture.

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I have 3 days to learn, configure, break, fix, troubleshoot, and otherwise become an expert on Exchange and Outlook for an interview Monday, 100 miles from home, in the morning, through several heavy traffic areas. Wooo.

Currently, I'm waiting for the Windows Server 2008 R2 VM I just created to finish its first batch of updates (128 updates, 350MB). I have a Windows XP VM ready to go, but the Server VM is taxing my harddrive and I can't copy it over without slowing everything down significantly.

Downloading Exchange was easy. Find it on Microsoft's site, hit download, count to a hundred. Outlook, on the other hand, was annoying. I kept getting redirected to a text-only page saying "Server error!" in 4 frames surrounding a Windows Live login. This lead me to create a Windows Live ID (ugh), log in, verify email, read the "We won't give you the option to opt out of special email offers until you get them" and "We now own your personal information" license agreements, get to the download page, download the downloader for the download (Is Outlook really that big?), and spend 5 minutes trying to sign-out because the Sign-Out button kept redirecting me to a "You can't do that"/"Server Error" page. Once I managed to sign-out, the button did not change to "Sign-In". I don't recall a sign-in button anywhere, actually.

Why was a Live ID necessary? Simple: You have to get a trial key.
I can download a dozen flavors of Windows and install them in trial mode without a key, yet Office and its components require trial keys. I'm not seeing the logic there.

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EULAs and licenses in general have gotten way out of hand. Everytime I install something, it's like I've signed my life away. I can understand the "don't steal our stuff" parts, but all those Marketing/R&D/CYA sections are ridiculous. Every "Agreement" I read just reaffirms it is in our nature to screw over the other guy. Loopholes, specific language, definitions in context, all that jazz.

Then you have all the legalese to sift through. Everything is intentionally written to be vague and hard to read. Additionally, THEY USE ALL CAPS TO MAKE "IMPORTANT" SECTIONS EVEN HARDER TO READ BECAUSE WE DON'T LIKE READING BLOCK LETTERS IN HUGE CLUMPS BECAUSE IT DOES NOT HAVE THE STANDARD FLOW OF LOWERCASE LETTERS, THUS MAKING IT MORE DIFFICULT TO TRACK YOUR POSITION IN A SENTENCE AND THAT EXTRA PROCESSING MAKES KEEPING TRACK OF THE SUBJECT MATTER EVEN MORE OF A STRAIN FOR THE "AVERAGE" PERSON. SO, IN ADDITION TO ASSUMING EVERY USER IS HELL-BENT ON DESTROYING THEIR COMPANY FROM THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION AND WRITING DOWN TERMS TO PROTECT THEM FROM SAID VENGEANCE, THEY DECIDE TO SCREW OVER THAT SAME PERSON FOR GP, GENERAL PURPOSE. BECAUSE, IF THEY'RE GOING TO DO IT TO YOU, YOU MIGHT AS WELL DO IT TO THEM FIRST, RIGHT?
*Now: How many of you read that as yelling?

I'm pulling from Graphic Arts lessons for the above section. Also, the afterimage of the whitespace between lines is uniform when in ALL CAPS, thus making it harder to track your position using landmark letters/words. Try it. Stare at a full page, all-caps section of any "Agreement", shift your eyes until you see the afterimage, and look back. Now, try it for a lowercase section. Or, try reading any book in all caps. Not fun. Although, I was probably the only person to say caps were easier to read on that graphic arts test...oops.

...I'm tired.

Asala Greatsword Progress #2 and Job Hunt Update

The polycount is quickly rising. I'm almost at 6k (original is included in the screenshot's polycount). I'm making the topmost details in the texture physical geometry with the rest staying in texture. This method is giving me some bad vibes about the end result, but I don't want to sit here twiddling my thumbs because it may not look right.

If I made the rest of the metal...uhm...bands on the crossguard geometry, I'd probably add another 1200 polygons. It is quite tempting.

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I got a rejection email, ahem, personal response saying the following:

• I had "a lot of technical skills" (good) "to acquire" (ouch) before being able to work in their Junior IT position.
• "It would take a lot of training" (You said you were willing to train...) "to provide you with all the business, sales, and technical knowledge" (Sales? That wasn't in the description and I'm not going to sell product when I'm trying to fix machines). 
• "We have no problem providing training" (Uh huh) "But $15/hr is too much to pay a Junior IT position" (So, the bottom end of the average salary for a Junior IT position according to Glassdoor is too much.)

For the technical skills, I knew I wasn't going to get the job as soon as I read them. Here they are:

1. Ethernet, TCP/IP protocols (down to the packet capture level)
2. Telephony (PRI/ISDN/POTS/PBXs)
3. Linux
4. Planning, installation, troubleshooting and administration of Exchange 2003 and 2007/2010.
5. Planning, installing, troubleshooting and administration of Microsoft Windows 2003/2008/2008R2 Server and Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 Desktop operating systems.
6. Active Directory and Group Policy creation and deployment.
7. SonicWALL firewall and security products
8. Hyper V and/or VMware virtualization technology
9. Microsoft SQL and mySQL
10. Asterisk PBX compiled from source code and Polycom IP phones
11. Programming: PHP, ColdFusion, .NET

Out of all those requirements, I had half of 1, maybe 2. Should probably add Windows 8/Server 2012 to the list if they haven't filled the spot yet.

From what I've seen of other "Junior IT" positions, the requirements for this position were absurd. For example, another Junior IT position ($12/hr, 3 days a week) I applied for required the following:

1. Installation of Windows XP/Vista/7 and drivers for specific hardware
2. Familiar with joining machines to a domain and setting up/using Active Directory
3. Familiar with troubleshooting Windows machines
4. Familiar with networking

For these requirements, I definitely had 3 out of  4.

I kind of wish there was some sort of standard on what is and isn't "Junior" level because the differences between these two are ridiculous. (I didn't get the bottom position either. Oh well.)

Asala Greatsword Progress

Just a quick screenshot of where I'm at now.

I think I'll have to wait a little before I merge the rings into the crossguard like in the texture. I am considering adding additional geometry that wraps the ring to the crossguard instead of merging the two objects together and have been looking for swords with metal rings on them for references.

Starting on Asala

No, not the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia.

Now that Yusaris has been released, I've started work on it's sister sword, Asala.

Unlike Yusaris, Asala's original model's plainness is rather hard to break away from. It doesn't have a lot of detail I can turn into geometry without really cranking up the polygon count. For example, look at the bottom right viewport. There is so much filigree it isn't funny.

Right now, I'm getting all the big details done. I've worked on the handle, pommel, and blade. I'm currently working on the crossguard and it's a bit tricky. There are a lot of elements in the texture that flow on, into, or over other major pieces of geometry. So, I'll have to selectively raise and lower geometry to better represent the texture's details. Or, I could just draw it all out in splines like I did with both Vigilances and make a 20k polygon sword. Well, 40k because there are two sides to this weapon.