That you alteady achieved with me. Anxiously wating for you to finish the project but take your time so that what remains to be done turns up just as exceptional as what's already done. Ooh I'm so waiting for your take on the nordic weapons (vanilla mw ones, not from bloodmoon).

I haven't had a chance to test any of these in game yet, so I'm afraid I can't contribute much to any critique or suggestions. But these are really looking fantastic from the screens, Pherim. The spear and halberd look incredible!

I like the current steel longsword design, but I haven't seen it in game to comment on your concern in first person.

Ok, to give you a better impression of how the new meshes are different from the vanilla ones and how they look ingame I put new screenshots in the start post - first comparisons with the vanilla meshes in NifSkope and then the first person view in the game with the weapon drawn. I hope now you get a better idea of them if you cannot try them ingame yourself at the moment.

Wow, those screenshots are definitely helpful. I don't see any issues with the longsword (or the others) in first person.

My only comment is that it looks like they're positioned to clip slightly into the hand itself. But that is most likely the BB body, not your weapons.

You are right, it's the hands, not the weapons, as the parts where they are grabbed are in the same position and have basically the same size as on the original meshes.

By the way it would be a nice thing to have the weapons rotated a little more towards the player in first person perspective, like in Oblivion or Skyrim so that you can see more of the weapon than the edges of the blade and cross-guard, for example. I never noticed this so strongly before but with the vanilla meshes of many one-handed weapons you have the ugliest parts facing towards you in first person view while the better looking parts are barely seen as they are almost facing away from you. That is why my first version of the longsword looked so bad in first person perspective, because the relatively thin cross-guard looked too weak from this perspective. But I suppose that this is something that cannot be fixed before the release of OpenMW... am I right? Sure, I could rotate the meshes themselves a little so that in first person they are facing towards the player a little more, but this would probably look silly when they are lying on the ground and also it would be different from their vanilla positions, which I try to match as close as possible.

edit: or could the above be accomplished by editing first person animations? I have done a search but all I could find were mods that apply the third person animations to first person view, and I already tried that in the past, and it had some problems. But could the first person animations be edited to just rotate the broad side of the 1h-weapons a little more towards the player when the weapon is drawn? How diffictult would that be?

Instead of creating the next replacer mesh I played around a little with the staff today. These could be used as unique meshes for artifact staffs, I could imagine the one in the front becoming the Ancestral Wisdom Staff and the one in the back could be used for Trebonius' Staff. What do you think?

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gHBCJyQTN3M/UzsgmG2niDI/AAAAAAAABVk/uO4culxB6gw/s0/staffs_unique.jpg

Basically I just pasted parts from some of the other meshes together in the shape of the staff, so they still feel like they belong to the steel category.

Do you see the small nailheads on the metal parts of the staff in the back? I intend to add them to those parts of the spear and halberd as well. I will update them soon!

Oh I love those. Especially the shiny one with brown wooden middle.

The engineer in me sees those slight depressions in diameter on the foremost staff as stress risers which may cause the rod to deform if struck against something with enough force...

But I do really like the staff in the back a lot. As you said, it really matches the set well.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-8JAjYciBndY/Uz3b80w5BGI/AAAAAAAABV4/Q_Xjp8tGFQ4/s0/steel_shortbow.jpg (or simply short bow, as it is called ingame). Before today I was not even sure whether I would be able to include bows in my mod, as I had no idea how to do the animation with Blender in the first place. Took me some time to figure it out, particularly since I could not find a tutorial on this. But eventually I found out that it was not that difficult at all, it just takes some time to do. And I had to do it twice since only after I had completely finished the animation and exported it as a nif file I discovered that I should have applied the transformation in Blender already - before even adding the keyframes to it - as the scale was wrong after exporting which would result in the blow floating above the ground when dropped. So I had to do it all over again, but now it should be working and ready to use! All clipping issues are also present with the vanilla mesh, and I'm afraid I won't be able to do anything about the string clipping through the player's arm (this is happening in all bows, anyway, as far as I know), but maybe I can do something about the grip clipping through the BB hands when the bow is cocked (is this the right word?) in third person view (e.g. when you rotate around in vanity camera mode). All that should be necessary to accomplish this should be to move the grip backwards a little bit, but I will have to try out how far I can go before it looks odd from other perspectives.

Anyway, I hope you like it. I changed the texture mapping a little, compared with the vanilla mesh, but I think it looks much better like this.

Screens and dropbox folder link as always in the start post.

Great work Pherim. Thanks a lot!

Well, I think it'd be worth documenting how you accomplished it! If you have the time. I've always been interested in making my own bows for Morrowind but I've never been very confident with animating in Blender.

I have already been thinking about providing a tutorial on it. Well, there's still the longbow to do, so I'll do it when I animate that, ok?

edit: updated Claymore (fixed a minor uv error on the blade); halberd and spear now have additional details: nailheads on the metal parts.

edit2: updated the short sword. Now it has a new crossguard which hopefully looks a little stronger (screenshots not updated!).

Sounds good to me!

Apparently the construction set crashes when it tries to load the short bow. Any suggestions what to do about that?

edit: Never mind, I solved it. I accidently checked "stripify geometries" when I exported it, which apparently caused the cs to freeze. File will soon be updated!

edit2: Done!

Wow, I just downloaded the WIP folder and took a look at all the meshes. This is really fantastic stuff, Pherim. I'm especially digging that bow!

Added the steel broadsword (imperial broadsword). Not much to say about this, just made it look less blocky, added some details and improved the uv mapping. Not perfect, and I will probably do some more work on it, but I'm mostly happy with it.

Another thing, could as many people as possible please test the short bow ingame? I have no problems with it but there is someone over at the Nexus who claims that it has issues but can't make me understand what these are due to bad English. I really want to make sure that it works correctly. I know that the animation is not perfect and I probably will work on the keyframes again before releasing the final version, but the animation itself is completely taken from the vanilla mesh.

Wow, that is a dramatic improvement in both shape and detail. Great work!

I have re-uploaded some of the meshes with diverse minor adjustments, mostly improved smoothing (vertex shading), as I did recently with my Iron weapon mod, but most of these here were already alright. Other changes include improved uv maps and minor mesh fixes.

Oh, and I totally forgot to tell you that I had already uploaded a new version of the warhammer with the ornamental face part being sculpted in 3D, but it does not make as much a difference as I would have hoped. What do you think? I believe I need to work on it a little more to make it more noticeable, but not too much.

There will soon be new meshes, too.

Update time! This time with the throwing weapons (knife, dart, star), the imperial short sword, and the steel club. I'm slowly getting to complete the set. Screenshots and download as always in the opening post.

About the steel knife: the original mesh for this is not used in the game! Instead the mesh of the steel dagger is displayed. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Throwing_Weapons states that this has been patched, but it is indeed not, neither in my German nor in my English GoTY! However, the unofficial Patch fixes this. I don't know whether there exists a German mod that corrects the mesh, but I will provide an esp for both languages with the finished mod that does it, in any case.

The steel dart is a typical case of "ugly by design", in my opinion, it just does not look good.. I tried my best to improve it, but I can't say I like it very much. If you have any ideas how to improve its look (without diverging too much from the original design, of course), feel free to post them.

The steel star is an exception from the other meshes in the sense that it is the only mesh I did not create from scratch, but it is an edited version of the original mesh. Besides correcting a few small issues like unnecessary faces inside the mesh (I wonder if anyone ever discovered these) the only thing I did was subdivide the edges of the blades once to make them a little curved, which in my opinion looks somewhat better than the original straight blades. But I don't know about you guys.

The imperial short sword is not listed in UESP as a steel weapon, but since I already did the imperial broadsword I felt I should do the short sword as well. What I am not completely happy with, yet, is the pommel, but I might still change that in the future. Besides that, I rotated the mesh a little so that it looks better in first person. The first person perspective on weapons in Morrowind really kills a lot of weapons in my opinion since you only see the side which is usually most ugly. I try to correct this as much as possible with my new meshes.

The steel club was another case where it was quite difficult to improve the mesh without diverging too far from the original look. But the biggest problem here was the texture, to be honest. Many original meshes suffer from bad uv mapping, but I can only correct that if the texture allows it. This is clearly an issue I will address once I create new textures for these weapons.

Anyway, there are not too many weapons in the steel category left to be done. Most noteworthy are of course the steel longbow and crossbow. Besides these, only the steel dagger and the saber are still missing from the complete set. I have not mentioned it before, but I most likely won't remake the Samurai weapons - (Dai-)Katana, Tanto, Wakazashi - as these have already been done by Psymoniser: http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/29906/?

Ah man, I actually like the steel darts.

But, looking closer at the model, isn't that "handle" supposed to be a tassel looped through the "coin" on the end of the metal portion of the dart?

As far as the steel stars go, I'd prefer them to remain linear rather than adding any curves to them. I think it looks better, stylistically. Though, if you are going to keep the curves, I think the way you did it is good because it is very subtle.

edit: oh, and with the Imperial shortsword, I think you could maybe add a little more detail to the pommel and maybe the blade right above the hilt. Just something small, like raising certain areas and recessing others.

You may be right, I didn't think of that. I'll try to create a different version which takes this into account, soon. Thanks!

Yes, I wanted it to be barely noticeable. There is nothing majorly wrong with the original mesh and I was just toying around to find a way to improve it and I kind of liked the slight curve.

I know what you mean, this is the kind of detail that normal maps were invented for, but I'll think about it. Things like this are difficult to do while trying to keep the polycount at a reasonable value.

Yeah, a quality normal map could probably handle it. I just think that particular texture really stood out to me as just begging to "pop out". I certainly wasn't suggesting to try to model every bit of detail in the texture, I just wondered if a couple subtle changes in depth could add to the mesh detail.

Very nice job as always, Pherim! I just wanted to ask: Will you create the dagger based on vanilla model? I know this is your intention, but the steel dagger really looks totally different from other steel weapons. In case you would want to look for alternatives, Kiteflyer made nice dagger that fits to the steel set IIRC

How's this?

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-oWfLfAIuVYc/U08AB_udIQI/AAAAAAAABYs/hFld4UFxbHo/s0/steel_dart_new.jpg

Yeah! That's what I was thinking!