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

Friday, July 6, 2012

Re-texturing WR houses

I'm continuing building on Emblar, but I don't really think the worn look on the Whiterun houses is right for the rich city. I have been playing around with a new look, any Swede will see where I got my inspiration :)


I'm thinking of doing some different colors to get some variation.
/E

Monday, July 2, 2012

First build - Emblar


I started building the capital city of Hoddminir, Emblar.
So far I only have walls, but it's a start and I'm having so much fun :)

 

Emblar is one of the oldest and largest cities in Hoddminir. The city is situated at the mouth of the river Ymin, spanning the river and controlling all trade going from the sea. Where the fjord meets the sea lies Askum, a smaller town and fort that protects Emblar from sea raiders. The names comes from Ask and Embla, that according to the mythology was the first humans created by Odin.


In Hoddminir there are ruins of a large road system, a relic from an ancient civilization. These roads are called Heimdallr's roads, and one of these roads pass through Emblar and cross the river Ymin.

/E

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

[REL] Hoddminir Ground Texture Pack


I have made 162 new ground textures for the Hoddminir project and I thought I would share it with you.
You can download them from the Nexus site.





The resolution is 2048 px, and all textures are seamless and have normals. There are new grass, moss, leaves, sand and rock textures, with two different color variants of each, in total 324 textures.
Some of the textures will look good on larger areas, but others have details that make them a bit repetitive and probably work better as smaller details. There are many different kinds of textures, some colorful and some more dull. All may not be useful for you, but hopefully some will be.

Enjoy!

Update:
Added 1024 and 512 resolution textures as well.

I have made an Image Library of all the textures so it will be easier to find a specific texture and see how they look in the game.
This is the only way I can find the textures I'm looking for when making my mod :)  

/E

Monday, June 18, 2012

New ground textures of rock and other

I'm now done with the rock ground textures, in total there are 40, each with two color variants.

I also made some more Bark, Dirt, and Grasses.


I think that is all I will do for now. It's time for me to release these, just have to go through them again to check that they work, and look OK. At the moment I have made 165 new textures, each in 2 different color variants, that is a total of 330 new ground textures to play with :)

I'm sure that I will find more possible textures later on, but they will have to be released as a separate resource pack.

/E

Sunday, June 17, 2012

It's alive

I just resided these screenshots from Wamster33 and Rosedale on the nexus mod site. They are making a mod in the Hoddminir world, and it looks really nice. I just had to share this:)
It's a very nice feeling to see someone improve on the work you have done. It's not at all what I had imagined for that part of the coast, but that's the beauty of it. All of the sudden, the world has a life on its own. I hope to see more people using this world or part of it for there mods.



This mod is located in cells around 131,-20. Wamster33 suggested that people should be able to reserve cells they are working on in the Hoddminir worldspace. I think this is a great idea, and I'll see if I can set up a page for that.

/E