Monday, August 27, 2012

The many projects

I have been sick for the last two months, nothing too serious, but it has left me tired and lacking energy. As a result I have not been so active with the modding as I would have liked. But whenever I found some extra energy I've taken new photos of all the nice summer plants and flowers I could find :)
Now I have more then enough texturing work to last me through the autumn and winter...
I thought that I would share what's in the pipeline. But don't hold your breath, it will take some time to finish all of this :)

Projects

Climbing plants

The idea is to make more climbing plants to have something else than ivy climbing up houses and walls. So far I have made some variants of Morning Glory, but I'm planing on doing Clematis and Honeysuckle as well.


Spring plants II

I have some additional spring flowers I would like to have, some are present in the first release, but most are new. For example I will be making new bluebells and at least four new variants of Lily of the valley. There will be around ten new flowers including Forget me not, Hellebores, Violets and Fritillary.

Summer plants

This is by far the largest project right now. I have calculated that I have photos of 64 different species of summer flowers, and for many of them I have several different photos (with some color variants) to add some variation to the world. As of right now there are 170 textures I will have to clean up, and the summer is not over yet :)
I have only started to work on this, and I'm done with 3, a large Bellflower, Lady's bedstraw and one Heather.

Grass

I have talked about this earlier, that I'm making more grasses for the game. Now I think I have all the textures I need, about 50 different ones. I had no idea there where so many different species of grass growing around here. The idea is to have both different blades and grass "flowers", short and tall grass, as well as green and yellow variants. I will also include oat, wheat and barley among the grasses.

Water plants

When I first had a look at the different plants in Skyrim I was struck by the lack of water plants. It really makes the water feel like a wasteland. So far I have photos of 15 different seaweeds/kelp, 3 fresh water plants. I will also be making some above water plants like water lilies, bulrush and reed.


Walls and houses

I have already shown some of the re-texturings of houses I have made. So far I have re-textured Whiterun town and farm houses. I'll also look at Solitude and Riften houses and see if my new textures will look good on them.

And the more I build the more things gets a new texture variant :) Like stone walls and wooden fences.


Update 2012-09-05

Rocks and Cliffs

When I build with rocks and cliffs they are only one color available and it looks rather odd togetter with my rock ground textures. I applied the same texture to the a rock and around 20 of the ground textures looks good. I'll also have to match up the grass/dirt part of cliffs and banks to my ground textures. 

And then there are some projects I haven't really started yet, like new cobblestone ground textures and new bushes and trees. I have a feeling there will not be many things with the original textures when I'm done...
I'll keep you all posted on the development of these projects and more :)
/E

Sunday, August 5, 2012

House Foundations

I've been building the city, and there is a problem. The height map is not even, and the Whiterun houses have no foundation. I tried making a stone foundation using ImpStoneBlocks, this looks nice, but takes forever to build.


I figured it was time to try my hands at 3D modeling, and a stone foundation should not be too hard, it's basically just a box.The first tempt is a foundation for the WRBreezeHome, and making it was not that hard. Granted the model has no finesse at all and is very blocky :)


I made a texture I think will look nice for the base (purple), the corners will be solid stones (turquoise), and then there will be smaller wood beams as support (brown).


Next task is UV mapping, and I'm really at a loss here... back to browsing tutorials for 3ds Max to see if I can figure this out.

/E