Sentinel Armor: Almost done

I thought I'd have the armor done this weekend, but I ran across a handful of issues during testing:

• Normal maps were barely being applied
• Everything was overly shiny
• Only the necks of character models weight slide, heads stay the same.
• Collision for the objects were way off.

Normal maps weren't being applied correctly due to 1) my meshes using the wrong value for "BS Num UV Sets" (1 instead of 4097) and 2) me not updating the tangents. Correcting those mistakes actually brought out the normal map's details.

Up next was every setting I used turning my armor to chrome. After looking at Bethesda's textures, I noticed that not only was the "Specular map" (actually, the environment strength map) different from the alpha channel of the normal map (which is actually the "specular map"), it was also a fraction the size of the diffuse map. As a test, I removed the black lines from the base texture to see how well the normals showed.

After a quick jaunt through NifSkope and Photoshop, I was presented with decent looking armor.

However, something looked rather off about the edges. They were the wrong direction and rather choppy. Given it'd been some time since I made normal maps, I mistakenly hit the "Invert Y" toggle in Nvidia's Normal Map plugin. Direction issue solved.

The jaggedness of the normal maps was due to not having layered normal maps (read it in a tutorial somewhere, a few years ago). A layered normal map consists of multiple layers of the diffuse texture, using a different normal filter type on each (4x4, 5x5, 7x7, etc), and overlaying them on each other. This reduces jagged details and helps accentuate varying heights on the normal map.

Adjusting the necks looked to be a tedious venture. Reason: I exported the neck AND the helmet meshes together as a single NiTriShape instead of separate. This meant any change to one element would require completely replacing the target mesh. Additionally, I would have to use 3ds Max to remove the neck mesh and re-export it for the Mundane variant. Given that my 3ds Max license is on its last legs, that wasn't going to fly.

To fix this, I split the helmets into their components and exported them together so the resulting Nif would have two NiTriShapes. That way, I could use NifSkope to delete the neck meshes for Mundane variant without much hassle.

I never made a collision model for the Sentinel Armor pieces. Instead, I swapped collisions in from vanilla armors. Bad idea. Aside from having differently sized meshes, I had no idea what values were needed or what they should be set to (translation, radius, rotation, etc). Throwing the ground objects around resulted in some wacky collisions where they'd clip through walls, the floor, each other, etc.

I took to Google for the answers and came across this thread (http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=4207#p26754) which included step by step instructions for convex shape collision creation.

Side note: Making collision models 10x smaller than the actual mesh is bizarre. You're going to make them fullsize in game later, so why not cut out the middle process? *sigh*

With those four issues taken care of (and replicated for the Unique Sentinel Armor variant), I'm testing how the armor works ingame. Specifically crafting, tempering, and enchanting.

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.

Well, it did work last time...

I tried getting back into 3d modelling again and my Student Version of 3ds Max 2011 gave me a nice little window: License Expired. Well, crap.

I've been using the Student License for it because I started while still in school (clearly). And, because of that, I made sure to never make money off what I made (i.e. donation links on Nexus). But now, I'm looking at having to spend nearly $4k (the cost of a perpetual license for 3ds Max) to open up my models again. Over 3x the cost of my PC. Awesome.

I'm not going to kid myself, my models weren't that great, but some part of me thinks having a donation link on the Nexus would have offset some of the cost. So, in an attempt to skirt this, I ran the Gmax installer I'd been holding onto since high school. A quick account creation and registration code later, I had a functional installation of Gmax ready to go, except for one thing: .MAX file import. A cursory websearch yielded one result: It was never done. Or, if it was, it's no longer available due to the required websites dying off. Double crap.

So, here I am, trying to think of something clever to gain access to my models again. The really annoying bit is the Sentinel Armor was in the rigging stage. I was tacking it onto the Skyrim skeleton and preparing it for an animation test. Naturally, there were quite a few erroneous bone weights to remove, but I was almost there. After that would have been weight sliding and a resize for the male bodies.

Now, there's a trial of 3ds Max I could use to give myself a short extension during which I covert everything I have into a Gmax compatible format. So that's an option. The more unsavory idea of creating and wiping VMs or native VHD Windows installs probably won't get me anywhere as license enforcement has moved to requiring an internet connection. I guess I could use the trial of the latest version once a year, but I'm not a fan of that idea.

This is bad planning on my part. I didn't write down or remember how long the Student License lasted for, so I didn't export everything when I had the chance (though, not having an expiration warning from Autodesk didn't help). I suppose I should write a note to myself to make sure I always export to common formats when using Student Licensed software, but since I'm no longer a student, that note would probably go to waste.

The current plan? Save up for a year while trying to figure something else out. At least I can still work on the texture.

Moving Along

I've been working on the Sentinel Armor here and there when I get free time. The big details are all done. I'm making metal look like metal and leather look like leather now (or at least what I think metal/leather look like). After this, it's normal and specular maps followed by skinning to Skyrim's skeleton.

--------

I'm almost ready to call it quits in Warframe. It's a fun game to play sometimes, but I'm finding that anytime I want to talk about it, I have nothing good to say. If I can't state a positive other than "the art is cool", why am I playing it? Oh right, time invested. Should I stop playing, I've effectively admitted I wasted my time. Therefore, I should keep playing to justify my investment.

Like I said on my first post about it, the grind gets worse with every update (except hotfixes!). It took until trading was introduced before I could acquire the last part I needed for Ember Prime. And now, it's just this huge RNG grindwall for pretty much everything.

I went through 35 Void keys and only got 1 Rhino Prime part. 10 more keys yielded 2 other parts, but getting the last key type is a 15 minute commitment for a 2% chance of it being rewarded with diluted void drop tables further reducing the chance of obtaining that last part. They had to stash all the parts for the 2-4 piece prime gear recipes in something's drop table, so they pretty much doubled the number of items for a majority of Void Missions.

The solution for this further dilution? DE finally removed resources and credits from the Void drop tables. There have been dozens upon dozens of screenshots showing credits/resources making up 70-90% of the rewards for all Void Missions. The claim was they still had to do internal "testing" to make sure the drop tables worked properly without them. And now, when they worsen the issue, they pull this out and go "See! We addressed this problem!"

With Update 13, the grind is truly ridiculous. Instead of making Vay Hek a standard "Go here to kill him" boss, you have to farm his randomly spawned lieutenants for rare drops, make a one-use key that takes an hour to build, use the key to confront him in a 4 stage fight where you mainly have to wait for a flashing dot to appear (if it ever does) in order to damage him, and hope he drops what you are looking for. Rinse and repeat. And, should you get all the parts you need, you have to farm the Void for a resource that expires at 0:00 GMT, not 24 hours after you get it.

I really want to try the Stances mechanic DE added to the game, but weapons don't have a default stance mod and the Stances themselves are rated Uncommon or Rare. They are also mod drops that were not "included in the proper drop tables" and subsequently "fixed" in a patch. I haven't seen a single person use the Stance mechanic aside from the developers on a livestream.I have now.


I tolerated waiting a week to get my hands on all the new gear/systems/etc when I started playing the game, but now I'm waiting months to even touch aspects of it. I...think I'm done.

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.

------------------------------------

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

------------------------------------

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.

----------------

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!

---------

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.

Plain old text post

I've been working on the torso of the armor. Instead of turning the Skyrim female body into quads like I did for BDA, I scaled and translated the original armor, roughly molded a cylinder around the torso, then adjusted it to fit around the Skyrim female body. It's less work, but also lets me keep the polycount down until I want to bump it up.

------------

I'm getting into Unity now. I'm not too thrilled with the brush tools because they're quite limited compared to Hammer and UDK. There's also an acceleration to the 3d view that really slows things down. Sure, I can pan quickly, but I prefer flying through the map (like in Hammer, UDK, CrySDK, and 3ds Max).

Right now, I'm looking at the tools from SixBySeven. They seem to add what I consider missing functionality to the editor.

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.

---------------------------------------------

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.



 -------------------------

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.

--------------------------------------------------------

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.