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.

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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.

Time. Flown.

Work has been keeping me busy lately. Losing some of my day to travel time, but I guess that's how it goes.

I haven't touched the Sentinel Armor for a while. I was working on an entry for the Warframe Melee Weapon contest since it started and submitted my entry hours before the deadline. Despite reading dozens of pages of entries to make sure there wasn't anything similar (even searching for "hammer"), I got smacked in the face with an entry from the day the contest started (naturally, it was posted after I thought I cleared the page).

I've since deleted my entry and am left with a hammer that can't go anywhere but here. So, here it is:

Gouge: The jet-assisted war hammer.
Faction: Grineer
Description: Rocket on a stick. Two-handed heavy weapon. Rubberized grip with one hand on the lowest grip section to control the throttle/keep from letting go. Jet is active for every swing. Intake will bore into any target caught in the claws. Charred bits may or may not spew out the exhaust. Charged attack could be a 270 degree spin (starting at the wielder's right) ending with a 270 degree vertical smash (back to front). Flames encouraged.

I'm not that good with capturing aesthetics it seems (both my models and levels have been criticized specifically about that) and this time I'm inclined to agree. I had no idea how to make this weapon Grineer-ish and instead went with the idea that the race prefers things simple and a rocket on a stick is about as simple as it gets.

I wanted Gouge to look like it was put together with whatever was lying around. So, I pulled references from the Grineer tilesets with some peeks at their weapons (rockets have to come from somewhere and levels are the best places to look). The white text says "Greet".

But, with the effort for mostly naught, at least I had fun making it. I'll be getting back to the armor now.

Yay. 111th post.

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.