"Board" Animations in Fallout 4 - Not Good For Swords

I spent a good amount of time making a great sword for Fallout 4. I knew that a normal long sword (shorted grip) wouldn't work with the animations, but I assumed that a great sword would work pretty well.

I was wrong.

Here you can see the normal grip in third-person. Looks pretty decent... until you walk, in which case the crossguard clips through the hand.

Here's the normal grip in first-person. Same mesh, completely different position. For some reason, I am now holding the blade. You can't really see it here, but it's noticeable in-game.

And here's the real baffler...

Blocking. I just... why? Why does the hand suddenly shift all the way down near the pommel?! It makes no freaking sense!

So yeah, no two-handed swords using these animations. It's just too inconsistent for it to look convincing in the slightest.

Baseball bat animations work much better, but the way the player character grips the sword looks far too rigid for historical accuracy... but oh well.

Argent Brand

A silver sword. Generally, I'm not a fan of making weapons silvery (the details get washed out when it's too bright), but yeah.

I'm still not too sure about the leather colours. I messed around with them for a solid 20 minutes, and couldn't find a colour scheme I liked. Oh well...

Not up for download yet. 

Imperial Captain Sword with DREADED ornaments!

I don't really like making ornamental designs on my weapons. It's too hard, takes up too much time, and sometimes doesn't even look that good. But this sword needed a little extra. So I did some!

I think I'm going to go play Skyrim now. That's enough texture work for today! :P 

Imperial Captain's Sword - Possibly Temreki

An Imperial-inspired sword. Originally, I was going to do some fancy designs on the crossguard and blade-flat, however I don't have a tablet and it probably wouldn't turn out very good. 

Not available for download yet. 

Testing out normal map "chamfering"

With my recent model The Regent (based off the Albion sword), I did not chamfer the edges. While this is generally seen as good for performance (even though the performance improvement is negligible on a single mesh), it's not quite so pleasing to the eye. The hard edge is particularly... fake-looking.

So, I decided to play with the normal maps a bit.

As you can see, there is no apparent chamfering of the mesh edges - all that smoothness is from the normal map itself. Is it the optimal solution? No, not at all. For instance, the fake chamfer looks pretty decent from a distance, however up close it becomes apparent that the smoothness is just a lighting "hack". It's certainly better than no chamfering whatsoever, but a slight chamfer on the mesh itself would be ideal. I'll probably chamfer the mesh, not the normal map, from now on (unless the poly-count is high, in which case I may have to compromise).

The Fiore

The Fiore is ready. I included an optional file to increase the shininess, since this one is noticeably duller than my other swords. 

Downloadius Hereius.

Stuff I've been working on

Haven't had much content for a while now (work takes up much of my time) but I haven't been idle. Here are a couple of things I've been working on...

Feather ENB Version 2. I've almost completely revamped it, tweaking settings from bloom, depth of field, ambient occlusion, image-based lighting, sun and volumetric rays, distant terrain and associated mist, fire strength, adaptation, and lighting strength values. It sounds like a lot, but it was really just fine-tuning until I got something I liked.

I will probably update it once I can take some more screenshots.

The Regent, an Albion sword that I liked the look of. I will upload it for both Skyrim and Fallout 4 once I'm ready. Unfortunately, I didn't chamfer any of the edges of the mesh before I unwrapped it, so some of the hard edges look particularly sharp. It's not inherently a bad thing, but it would have looked a bit better if it were smoother. Perhaps I'll tweak the normal maps and try to improve it.

The Fiore, another Albion sword that I decided to make. This one was actually something I modelled last year, but I never got around to unwrapping and texturing it, so that's what I did today. I'm particularly happy with the metal on this one, and it's probably how I will attempt to do metal from now on.


Anyway, that's just an update on what I've been up to. I really need to use this blog a lot more. Maybe I'll revamp its look or something - really personalise it - then I might feel more at home.