Billyro's Camp

Thursday, 18 February 2016

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.

Friday, 12 February 2016

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

Saturday, 6 February 2016

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.

Friday, 5 February 2016

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.

Monday, 1 February 2016

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.