Packaged inside these files is the key to happiness, every texture is handcrafted by myself from high poly sculpture with the utmost care to bring you, the player, the most satisfying, most immersive oblivion experience you can find.



For those that are skeptical, I've remodeled every part of these meshes by hand, staying true to the original topology and than baked these textures down to something that I hope not only surpasses the quality of the originals, but raises the bar in player satisfaction!

And with that, i'll lay the floor to, "A Perfect Normal".

Keep in mind that not only is this an alpha mod, but everything I release is a WIP (work in progress) and will continually be updated and improved, there will be artifacts and ugly red spots to begin with, but they will soon disappear.


Completed and downloads:
Lich:http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37375


Installation: backup your data folder before dragging and dropping the textures into there corresponding directory.

Uninstallation: Simply delete the files that came with this download and reinstall your backups.

End User Agreement: You MAY edit and REDISTRIBUTE these textures in your mod, as long as credit and a link point here.




Thanks to:
Bethesda for the wonderful game (that I regretfully cannot play).
Autodesk for the wonderful program that is 3ds Max.
Pixologic for the sculpting program that without I would be oh so mediocre.
Adobe, for...well, for photoshop, we'd all be screwed without it.
Nvidia, for the .dds plugin, couldnt do this too well without it now could we?
Santiago Orgaz, making normal maps easier by the day.

and last, but not least, The community here, for keeping me inspired to keep at it 24/7.

Heres a little update for everyone, started work on my favorite creature, the Lich!

http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/9991/preview002.jpg

and heres http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/8015/preview001p.jpg showing off them sixy normals

Looking good! Skyrim good, even. :thumbsup:
How big are those normals?

all weapons are at 1024x, at the moment im using a custom modular mesh for the lich (skull under flesh for variation), but im baking that down to the vanilla model at 2048x and 1024x for people who only want textures replaced.

This looks really promising. I have dreams of completing hi-res textures of all the vanilla weapons and armor that haven't already been done yet (if only http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27414 was complete, it wouldn't be necessary, such incredible work there). If I end up having the talent for it and actually do it, these normals will most definitely be complementary. Of course they're awesome on their own anyway.

You should post before/after comparison screenshots, though, just so people have an idea of the quality difference.

Looks great! :thumbsup:

Any pics of the weapons or the lich ingame?

Great subtitle. Also great looking mod.

Thanks everyone, progress is crawling along due to my [censored]astic computer, so no ingame screenshots since i cant run oblivion >.>

heres a side by side of http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/9738/preview003.jpg, as well as a http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/7774/previewmodular001.jpg. Also, the jaw on mine is detachable as well so huzzah for even moar modularity!

**edit: keep in mind, these are all very WIP, the textures will be updated as time goes by.

Very nice! Are you planning to update the actual textures of the equipment when you get to it, or mostly stick with the 512x512 originals? It sounds like quite the project just doing the normals; I'm thinking an all-encompassing overhaul is beyond the capabilities of mortal men! looool

hah yes i am, when i release this, i'll release it in a high res/modular mesh pack, a high res pack, and a low res/modular mesh pack so people can decide whether they want to replace what.

as soon as i finalize the texture for the face and the skull, i'll be moving on to the body, robe, and equipment.

**edit: heres a http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/6233/preview004.jpg view of how things measure up

Damn that's insanely ambitious, sounds like it will take forever. I suspect you may be a robot...

Ha, anyway did you check out http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27414? It's probably the best, most consistent work I've seen of hi-res armor textures. If anyone can point out others that would be great as well, my exhaustive searching didn't turn up much. Most retextures are the same 512x512 resolution as the originals, or occasionally you get the odd scaled-up-vanilla-texture-with-sharpening-filter, which is like, worse than not doing anything at all, I'm sad to say. I do find it kind of strange that with all of the incredible, wide-ranging work done by the Oblivion mod community there isn't a standard set of hi-res clothing/armor/weapon textures. You'd think some obsessive person with plenty of time to spare would have done it at some point. At some point I'll be trying it myself, so you may have a competitor! Or collaborator! I am less confident about normals, all I have is the GIMP normal map plugin, and so far I've only achieved perfect results with a texture already having an alpha channel that could be used to define the displacement. Maybe it's less difficult than I'm expecting, but you've already got this all covered, anyway! heh

It seriously is ambitious! I plan to rework every single editable mesh ingame as well as its textures in an attempt to bring oblivion to what it was meant to be. aka. Skyrim.

Originally, my plans were to release on 11/11/11 the release date of Skyrim, however, with my current financial (broke), living (homeless), and computer ([censored]) situation, I would believe that date to be a tad too ambitious...

Anyone want scraggly old beards for modularitys sake?

Well just don't give up! It's really one of those things that will become essential for everyone should you finish all of it. And I have no doubt that even after Skyrim's release there will still be plenty of people playing Oblivion to enjoy it. In fact, wouldn't it make sense that Oblivion gets a boost in sales when Skyrim gets released? You have PC users who are interested in Skyrim as their introduction to TES but don't quite have the system for it, and they see Oblivion on Steam for $5 knowing it's the previous game in the series and really similar, so they pick it up instead. I don't know if that's at all what actually happens but it popped into my head today while considering Skyrim's impact on Oblivion modding.

It will be similar to the boost Oblivion gave to Morrowind. Skyrim looks like it's going to be much better then vanilla Oblivion and maby even as good as fully modded Oblivion (or better).

Well, when the project originally started, i had planned to go about figuring out which designs from morrowind and oblivion were better and making those, however, now we have skyrim in the picture, designs, designs, designs...

Beep Beep, slowly working my way down this thing.

Started work on http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/2943/preview010.jpg

Looking very very nice. This is definitely on my most wanted list, and in a few months during some lull when the thread has slid down to page 20, you better believe I will bump it and DEMAND updates, haha.

Have no fear, after i finish the lich, i think i'll work on some clutter and more weapons, creatures are not only time consuming, but its not guaranteed that youll run into them often, especially the lich, during my gameplay ive only ran in to two...

I'm just gonna say you are bonkers!

Carry on.

Oh lawd, I think i teared up when i saw your name, lol!

So since xnormal has been wierding out on hard surface objects, ive been baking most of these out by hand in max...and i just imported my zbrush export, oh my lawd, it took like fifteen minutes to load into the viewport!

While you're working on creatures you might want to look at the Mythic series of retextures as references or for inspiration or something. Really great work and I never play without them. He's working on all the SI creatures now too, http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1150483-wipz-mythic-madness/.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29569
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36000
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29638

I use decimation master when I do high poly ZB exports/imports into max. It's really good at what it does. It's pretty smart at preserving all the sculpted detail.
However whenever I import an obj into max, not only have to wait for it to load into the scene, but then have to select all the polygons and add a smoothgroup to the mesh- it just doesn't import with smooth groups from ZB outputs.

lol, have you have a "failed to render out of memory" when baking in max? its so funny, it does the whole entire render, and only at the end when it goes to write the image it gives you that error.

happy fun times :rolleyes:

Luckily i've never had the displeasure of running into that sweet ol message, but than again, i never import over 700k, wouldnt want to risk killing my machine now

ZOMG ! :woot:

Your work is amazing Nekronom !
Don't worry about missing the 111111, better being a bit late with awesomness than early with averageness.
And now ladies and gentlemen !
Here is my entry for the dumbest question of the day:

Have you decided how you're going to release it ?
In a hudge pack à la QTP3 with different choice for resolution or a modular à la Mikal33 ? (releasing a category when it's ready)