I'll post my current projects here.. You are very welcome to give suggestions, criticque (constructive).


Reflective Ice for Solstheim

http://piclair.com/data/jwhnw.jpg
http://piclair.com/data/gnmaf.jpg
http://piclair.com/data/p5kft.jpg

For now all terrain_bm_ice texture is reflective (and retextured). Anything else i should make reflective in this region you think? I take requests, as long as you provide the name of the mesh and as long as it's for the Bloodmoon exapnsion

Glossy Netch

http://piclair.com/data/uen7q.jpg
http://piclair.com/data/85o51.jpg

Gloss maps and (partial) retexturing for the netches. My main purpose here has been to make those creatures really glow in the dark, they should go well together with my Mushrooms that i also want to add a glow to.

New Ascadian Isles Mushrooms

http://piclair.com/data/znpzn.jpg
http://piclair.com/data/deqwy.jpg
http://piclair.com/data/4wsrk.jpg

I like how they look in the last pic, they remind me of those machines in War of the Worlds - threatening and alien, that's what i want for my mushrooms. Still unsure about the glow under the caps.. It makes the nights look more interesting at least.

Ok i suppose you can disregard my post in the screenshot thread, it appears you are aware.

Anyway, How about adding some bump mapping to that ice? :hubbahubba:

But bump maps doesnt work for MW do they? From what i understand MW recognizes it, but it won't use it as in their later games. If you know of a tutorial i'll gladly read it though

Wow, some awesome projects you got there vurt. I really like the reflective ice specifically. :goodjob:

If you use a normal map in conjunction with a gloss or "reflection" map the engine will render the hight information. Something to do with the games lighting system that will not allow it otherwise.
Also if you add black areas to a normal map it will cancel out the gloss or "reflection" map and render it as a flat texture. So you can basically add selective bump and glossiness to whatever object you are working with.

Very interesting AoF, then i'll definetely try to add it

You can see some good examples of this in Painkiller_Rider's mods:

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=User.EntriesListing&id=92712

Basically what I have done recently was rip his coin and just place my models in its place using the effects it has set up. :whistling:


Also Hedghog_12's (SP?) "Better Armor" uses the same technique.

Great, i'll take a look at the coins.. would be nice to add bump maps to the tree barks too

What was it that Vality did to his ice mod that made it shiny? Is it similar to this?

yes, but if can add bump maps it'll be even nicer

I said it before and I'll say it again. Those mushrooms are amazing! Cool idea with reflective ice, adds to the believability.

I really doubt you wanna use this method to bump the tree bark. Shiny tree bark doesn't sound so good. :S


Also, I am pretty sure that Vality did add bump maps to his ice cave textures. I don't think he did anything to the exterior ice though.

Yeah very nice additions Vurt! Would love to see that netch in my game right now

that ice is awesome, do you think you could add some translucency oh so slightly as ice is see through but make it so its quite dense so not too see through. for extra meshes to place in random spots you could add static(frozen) creatures and other random stuff to the ice make Solstheim fun

The bull netch looks kind of weird in that pic... Reflective type stuff can't be shown very well in screenshots though.

I believe that, with the code patch, bump maps can even be used on skinned meshes now. Hello shiny/bumpy armor!

Very nice ideas, see-through ice will be interesting to see how it looks, now when we have water caustics it could look great. Frozen creatures would be fun to make too, but the ice will be first priority with this mod.

Glow in the dark mushrooms YES YES YES!

I am excited to see anything you cook up Vurt!

Ice and netch do stray a bit from your comfort zone (vegetables). :hubbahubba:

If your using a lot of effects on the ice, take a look at oblivion's frostcrag tower for inspiration. The ice looks greet because of it's effects being coupled with a fairly flat, basic texture.

If the ice goes well, what do you say about giving the frost atronachs a face lift too?

The glow underneath the mushroom is awesome! Please keep that in and don't get rid of it. Oh, you know what would be cool is to have different glows, like blue and purple colors, or green. I'm not so sure about red, orange or yellow though.

I'll take a look at that mod. we'll see about the frost astronachs


I made the ice http://piclair.com/data/x4bet.jpg. It looks great apart from the really wavy MGE water under the ice, it looks like there's pools of water on the ice when it snows, you can see the water rings that the falling snow makes.

It bothers me that the MGE water waves cuts through the ice, i wish it could be set differently than other areas in the game. I don't think i'll make it transparent because of this problem, it's better to hide the waves i think. I will probably have to alter the height of the ice layer meshes so that the water dont cut through.

The bump mapping does work. It looks really great up close, but at a distance it tends to make the texture look low-res and "http://piclair.com/data/avcc4.jpg".


Tes96: It's yellow i'm using but yes, i could try to mix them a bit..

that looks nice though, you could always move the ice up or only make what is the ice rocks transparent, or do two versions one with transparency and one with out for us to choose whats more important, that way any water glitches we can fix our selfs by moving the ice up on the z axis rather then expecting you to do it

I think it could deal with the angle that your seeing the more distant ice from aswell.

westly used bump maps on faces in his Master Head pack he did so with an all black glow map that made nothing glow.

EDIT: now if anyone could point me in the direction of making bump maps correctly that would be great!

You could also thicken the ice meshes in NifSkope by right clicking on it and going to Transform->Scale Vertices and adjusting the z-scale. Then the water wouldn't be as much of a problem, right?

Is it possible to animate glow maps like regular textures!? If so, I'm sure you could pull off a beautiful, slightly changing glow.