In previous posts, some of you may have seen me lamenting that no complete Adamantium weapon sets exist for Oblivion. And there's only one Adamantium armor set, in Vvardenfell Imports. I think this is a glaring omission considering Adamantium was a "major" set in Arena and Daggerfall, and was in an expansion for Morrowind.

I'm happy to report that Kriscrash, who created the awesome Madness weapons in the WEPON mod, is designing a beautiful Adamantium weapon set. It's still in the early stages with no projected release date, and may or may not be included in WEPON (that's up to her).
So, I would like to recruit one or two people to assist with bringing Adamantium to Oblivion!
--I'd like to find someone who can take a look at kriscrash's work, and emulate that design (or at least color scheme) in a set of heavy armor. It may be possible just to retexture the existing set in Vvardenfell Imports (with permission of course) rather than build a set from the ground up.
--Anyone who has ideas for a "canonical" light armor set and matching weapons, a bit weaker than Elven, should let me know. In other threads some have suggested Chitin, Dragonscale, or Stalhrim.

Kriscrash has been kind enough to share her in-progress work here: http://forums.uesp.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=19808

Thanks!

looks very good i hope you will find someone to help :goodjob:

1: being that she is the concept artist, and the design is her concept, I don't see why she would need someone to design a armor set for her. :shrug:
Asking to do a complete suit of armor, that is good, and gets released, is a tall order. GL on the search.

2: The UV mapping will get better. Just make them distortion free, maximise the UV space, and keep UV islands the same pixel density(well more or less, along seams especially, some times you can increase an islands size to just fill up part of the map, but this can lead to unrealistic look, it can be quite sharp to the eye seeing different pixel density on the same mesh.

This quote is kinda wrong "So a polygon has 3 normals, one for each corner. That's fine." faces have 1 normal, which is perpendicular to the face. She means vertex normals not face normals. And that when you make hard edges you are creating extra vertex normals.(which is also why when baking, you must split UV islands at the hard edges, if you do not then there is only 1 vertice in the UV. where as the mesh geometry counterpart has what it considers 2 vertices, and if the shells are stitched you get missed rays when baking any normal maps. She mentions this in relation to normal mapping. To render tangent space normal maps, you need tangent space calculation, in addition to the vertex normals, you need their tangents, and bi tangents(binormals). These 3 vectors (3 way axis, ie vertex local xyz) + pixel color (RGB=XYZ) on the normal map will be used determine the direction any lighting offset is to have.

anyway that's close enough. You don't even need to know how or why they work tbh. But that will make sense to her I expect.

I assume she uses photoshop. make her DL this: http://www.cgted.com/
I want to say bad things about the normal work flow and how hard, time consuming, and inaccurate that method she is using actually is. that plugin should change everything for her. :hubbahubba:

Oh and 255:255:128 RGB is not neutral value for normal maps. That's backwards, I think she mixed it up. It should technically be 127:127:255 RGB. But it usually isn't in games, normal maps in games are unsigned normal maps, and the mid point would be 127.5, but you can't store integers, so 0 is stored as 128. and the normal always has a slight bend to it.
ZB and crazy bump use 127:127:255 as neutral normal value. Max uses 128:128:255. Oblivion normal map shader is based on max's version. I have actually tested fo the neutral value in Fallout3, and it is indeed 128..

While I am waffling, DXT compression cannot save values of 128 in either the R or B channel, It can in the G channel. This is because the bit depth of the channels are 5:6:5.
and this will always give you a slight seam at UV seams.

Heh, I forgot a very important detail: kriscrash only wants to design the weapons; she has no interest in creating armor.




Yep, it's way beyond my abilities. There is an Adamantium set in Vvardenfell Imports as mentioned above; a recoloration (retexture) of that set to match kriscrash's work might be sufficient, rather than a full remeshing.




Thank you very much for the advice! As Arthmoor says in another thread, you are WAY over my head in terms of the advice you have given. I forwarded your comments to Kriscrash and will leave it to her to respond if she wishes to.

Since it's the most rare and tough material, I suggest that you can very rarely find adamantium equipment from merchants and enemies (5% chance they have one, 2% chance they have 2, ... )
You have to find adamantium nuggets and bring them to a smith to forge the armors and weapons.
Something like amber and madness equipments.