Heya guys, as some of you might know my computer broke down lol so I'm kind off unable to play Fallout 3 anymore. So just to kill the time [being unable to play videogames] and waiting for new vegas to be released I started developing my new character. Since the graphics are quite similar [of not entirely] to fallout 3 and knowing the engine a bit I already started modeling some new gear. It actually also fits FO3 so my plan is to release it for FO3 first, since we still have a long way to go before NV will be released. Nevertheless I still like to call this my little nv project since my actual goal is to use this in nv .

Took me a lot of time to model and texture this thing from scratch and it's still far from finished. It still needs the finishing touch and I have to get rid of a lot of glitches and make some textures seamless. Anyways my actual goal was to give it more like beige and brownish desert colors but eventually I went for a darker color. But when I got the textures right I'll start working on some extra colors.
Textures and models are by moi, the t-shirt model is a modified model by robert's bb? I used non shadow casting light for the renders so all the shadows are baked into the textures which means that they'll show up ingame as well .

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/newvegasprev-1.jpg
edit:http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/polycount.jpg

Like I said right now im working to make this thing perfect but I have no clue on how to bipe/skin models which means I need some help by someone to get this thing working ingame. This is a private project so I take no request [I'm sorry] but I do appreciate criticism

Update 1:http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/recolorgear.jpg
Update 2: some http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/hairender.jpg to go with this outfit

So far so good! I like it. :goodjob:

Haha, that's awesome!
We'll be able to play with New Vegas content before its release!
Looking forward to this, that's a lovely suit.

looks good. i hope you are going to be sculpting that from texture into a high poly mesh and baking out some normal maps. you won't be doing it justice otherwise.

looks like you're using max... for future wireframe renders- http://www.mgrote.com/tutorials/wireframe.php

I know I'm always struggling with those normal maps but I have no idea how to bake normal maps, can I just switch it on in the render to texture tab, judging by the link you seem to know how max works as well ! Thanks for the link btw I'll look into it! It has some bump maps that look okayish for now but I have no idea if I can convert them to good normal maps easily since the normal map filter in photoshop is usually sh3tty.

For now;

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/recolorgear.jpg

Lookin' good. I've always been a fan of your work.

i would do a combination of techniques to get the normal map out of what you have.

the main normal map would probably have to be a zb/mb sculpt. think i would make a few different levels of heightmap from the texture. and use those as masks to deform the high. then clean up the sculpt using brushes. then bake normal&AO maps, then probably clean up the normal up in photoshop-

my only fear is that the normals and the texture won't align 100%, as they were created kinda backwards, might be like few % variance. but dunno if it will or even be noricable. and the AO should help merge the diffuse and the normal, or i think i could transfer the final diffuse map across to the high and back to the low when baking anyway. once it looks like it works, then I would add any extra normal map details, tweak, and play with specular maps.

there are other things that can be done to get a normal map out of what you have. dunno if that helps. :shrug:

all i know is you will never get a good normal map out of just the photoshop filter. or even bitmap to normal map conversion at all.

Hmm I don't have zbrush I looked into it but I don't have it. I only have max. Besides that I don't know how to use zbrush at all is it hard? Mabey I should look into that for future modelling, i've seen some pretty cool video's on youtube [they all make it seem so easy lol but I doubt it is]. I'm gonna see what I can do in photoshop, I think I'll just paint a heightmap on top of the texture blend that one with details from the original texture and see how that looks. It's kind of complex but I hope it'll work. But yeah I know the photoshop filter isn't very good for normal mapping. If I just use the filter without adding highlights or whatsoever my normal map usually comes out flat :/ I'll try to work my way around it! Thanks for your help anyways!

btw thanks guys for your comments!

yeah... well you can try using your height/bump maps on the the lowpoly in max and bake normals from that. never tried. but in theory. clone the model you want to bake from. this is going to be the pseudo high poly. add a push modifier. make it slightly smaller. like - 0.01 or what ever. add the maps to a material. in the bump slot add the height map. (you could in theory i suppose add a displace modifier and try doing that as i think about it.) now just use RTT to bake from that. i think i recall reading that the bump maps bake into normal maps using RTT

is zb hard... yes and no. it does take practice to get good with any individual tool in it. and it also takes copious tutorial watching to get to grips with the tools. Max is way more complex in comparison. but it does much more than ZB. just for sculpting normal maps doesn't take long to get to grips with. but it does take a long time to get a good eye and good hand. same with everything.


to get any sort of result in the PS filter, without ending up with a pile of noise is very very hard. even if you did its not going to be that good, as its not baked. baked normal maps use the meshes face normals to calculate what the output needs to be. bitmaps don't have face normals, and thus will never correctly light and shade a model. so any smoothing issues the low poly mesh has, remain. this is what normal mapping is all about, spending ages getting a good subD model without smoothing errors, then setting up the low so it will best receive that information in a bake. this often involves hard edges of the Lpoly, split uv shells, and all kinda of annoying madness.

This is going to be completely random, but the lady in your avatar is saying "Watch this." (Or, that's what I think she's saying.) What are we supposed to be watching, there?

That is some sweet looking gear, though. I'll definitely look out for it when it comes around for download.

She actually says nothing lol she just snaps her teeth...

Thanks! Yeah it's still not really finished yet but most of the work is pretty much done. Still it will take some time before I can release a working version.

Meanwile I also started working on some other stuff, I have a few projects now that I'm working on for a long time. Today I just finished a new hair mesh to go with my character. I still have to get the .dds files right since now the textures are all placeholder jpgs but I'm also looking for someone who knows how to conform hair for FO3? Like I said before I have no idea about the technical side of skinning or nifskope-ing. I only know some of the basics which are unfortunately not enough. Anyways find the screenshot here or in the first post;

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/hairender.jpg

Ziet er goed uit/Looking good!

hair. yay alpha \o/. <_<

get ready to bash your head a couple times getting the alpha sorting to work well. hopefully this one will be straight forward in that regard. what happens on screen in the zbuffer is that objects are draw on screen from furtherest away from the camera, to nearest. those individual objects seem to drawn by vertex order. with semi transparent meshes this poses an issue. parts start to blink on and off if the sorting is done right, say if you have a few overlaping planes/ mesh layers making up the hair shape. the transparency can get fubar is you don't do it right. at a worst case, sometimes you have to rethink the whole thing in terms of its mesh.

you should use shapes and not strips for these objects. stripifying at export or nifskope tends to introduce alpha sorting issues- see tutorial

so the basic solution in theory, is to detatch all the layers to separate objects. then reset xforms. now select the inner most layer and attach the rest, from inside(closest to the head) to outside.
this basically sets the vertex order so that the mesh layer on the inside, has the lowest numbers in the index number list. so hoepfully is draws those faces first, and hoepfully so they don't blink out when viewed from certain angles.

export set up- exactly like in this tutorial http://www.fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=248

except do not reset xform after you have sorted the vertex order. export as a trishape. add vertex colors. and you need hat and nohat versions of the hair- so you will be exporting 2 objects into 1 nif. and it has a special shader setup. and a special texture setup.

lol don't worry I figured out the problem to alpha clipping some time ago. Besides that this hair is only 2 layers so I don't think I will have many alpha errors. So I kept that in mind when I made this mesh. Multi layer can be done but you have to attach them to eachother in the right order so the engine knows what layer to draw first etc. This problem drove me insane some time ago lol. The only problem I have creating hair is setting it up properly in nifskope and exporting it with the skinning modifier so it changes along with the head in the facegen menu. And I have no idea on how to make hair colorable?

you don't export with the skin modifier. you use a little data node to do bone attachments. far less resource intensive than storing weights for every vert in the mesh. which will all be 1 bip01 head anyway. plus you need to do it like this for the facegen to morph the hair to head properly.

its a special hair shader. it's simply ticking on a single check box in nifskope.

Lol what? see that is what I don't get...all the nifskope stuff. I tried doing it before with some tutorials, I also tried skinning my own outfit and trying to get it to work ingame but I never succeeded. There's always something that goes wrong with these technical stuff and I never seem to find out what it is

Still your new digs are going to be the best looking in all of New Vegas until others catch-up!

Cool! :goodjob:

Love the outfit. The images remind me of some of those high quality collectable figurines I used to collect.
It may inspire me to put more effort into making a decent male character for a change. Especially seeing as I also use your Better Male Face :hehe:
But, I've got a face in mind. Looking forward to the release

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/hero2010.jpg

Lol ever since I finally got fo3 working on my new laptop I finished a new update for the hero race http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6173. I'm going to see if I can make it compatible with breezes male body and see if I can release it in a few days [bug free for once lol]. Head model is completely redone, same as new texture and eye models. Comes with 10 eye colors and optional clean skin texture. I tested the model and it's supposed to work with most [if not all] hair meshes ingame. The jaw is redone so instead of clipping the beards seem to be a little bit bigger than the head itself only downside of this mesh.

Anyways I also finished another hair mesh but I'm still looking for someone who can help me out getting it ingame? I can send the obj or 3ds or whatever fileformat you need - models and .dds textures and have it all set up. The only thing that's left is to get it ingame which I don't know how to do lol