First Hlaalu Building model completed

[Quentin Fortune]

Ho, ho, ho ... good luck to you and you're spouse and for all the endeavours that lie ahead of you. =)

Here is a set of bumpmaps for the textures I made a few posts ago and I named them accordingly to the normal textures, they just start with a BMP instead of the Tx_ and they are all .tga files.
For those of you who know what to do with them - do it.

And good that all the textures can be used for the interiors as well.

Greetings

Quentin

[Razorwing]

Jon: Sure, go ahead =) Making set pieces doesn't take very long so I'll hold off for your revised model and then do set pieces for all levels, also using Quentin's bump maps.

Quentin Fortune: Excellent, I'll fire up 3DS this weekend and get to work on them, so we can see what they'll look like

[Smight]

Originally posted by Razorwing
Planar mapping is definetely the easiest, I think. Morrowind can't handle Multi-Sub objects and probably Oblivion can't either. Multi-Sub objects is what Max calls several textures on the same mesh, and it makes it easy to make textures look good on all sides of an object, at least inside Max. If you've checked out Bethesda models I'm sure you've seen how they use planes all over the place to build many of their meshes.

multi-sub mapping works in morrowind it just doesn't like to call it that. You just have to have a certain element or faces selected when you apply the different textures. They have to just be normal textures and not multi sub. I've done it several times, I didn't think you could do it with the physiqued objects but adding NiTriShape to the user defined properties allows multiple textures on a physiqued object too.

The nice thing about statics is you can actually have entirely separate meshes and textures in the same scene and they will all be rendered in morrowind.

[Razorwing]

Smight: Kk thanks for clarifying that =) Well beyond my own capacity, but I'm sure the info is useful to a lot of people.

Building Mw objects from several meshes however is something I do a lot, because I find it simplifies texturing. The BB sign mesh I did yesterday for example uses a plane as the sign and a modified cube as the wooden frame. I think I'll stick to editing and making simple things, generally speaking.

Edit 050722, 23:44 C.E.T.:
I removed the model downloads from the thread, so they're not confused with Jon's future final version (when he finds the time... no stress).

[Razorwing]

Regrettably I've been informed by Jonathan Dodds today that due to RL he won't be able to continue modelling on the Hlaalu project

He submitted a final version of the model on ESF and gave it free for use by the whole community as long as he's credited. I'll update the front page shortly with information and a download link to the final release, which also includes Quentin's great textures. Perhaps someone can pick up the project.

A sad day for Silgrad indeed

[jonrd463]

I just want to say thanks for Razorwing for the encouragement, and thanks to the whole ST team for inspiring me to actually do something to give back to the community. I know this is a very, very small contribution, but I enjoyed making it.

Also, I want to say that I'm not out of the game for good. I just wanted to be honest and explain that right now, I can't devote the time a project of this magnitude demands. If nothing else, maybe the one single building I completed will serve as a proof of concept. There are a lot of talented modellers out there, so maybe this can see the light of day by the time, or shortly after Oblivion is released.

Finally, I want to assure you all that the important things going on in my life that are taking priority aren't bad by any means. On July 26, my lovely fiance became my beautiful bride. I'm also shouldering more responsibility at my job, and certainly not least, my wife and I are in the process of getting a new home.

Whew! So you see, while I'd LOVE to be more proactive, I think you all will understand that I simply can't right now. I'll still be around, though. Who knows... maybe a surprise or two might pop up out of the blue every once in awhile.

-Jon

[Razorwing]

I'm happy to hear that you still want to keep in touch with Silgrad Tower. We'll always be here, whether you want to chat a bit, or offer your views on current affairs in the project, or model. There's no stress.

[Razorwing]

I think I can make it work to some extent. I've attached a wip shot and the max scene incl. textures and original source model. The underlying problem (apart from it being a single mesh) is that the polys don't follow straight lines, which makes it hard to cut the model into smaller components. That helps me when mapping textures, because I find it a lot easier to use one texture per mesh rather than setting up subobject mapping. So when I cut it, it caused holes in unwanted places that, at least for me, aren't easily fixed. But as I said I think it can be made to work if no one helps me, though it won't look as good as it could have.