Ancient Lunar Temples of Elsweyr

[morcroft]

Reviewing old concepts threads, I was quite taken with Kyoushu's Ancient Ruins of Elsweyr and thought I'd have a crack at the Astrolisk. Here's a first cut, placed just outside King's Walk.



I've given it the Dune sandstone texture although it looks a bit white.

You wouldn't normally see one of these outdoors like this, either. They're supposed to be inside the temple buildings. Some of these would be ruins. I think there should be two models: whole and ruined; in desert and jungle textures.

I also thought that new temples get built on top of old ones, so in the big cities the original Astrolith would have been preserved when the old temple was demolished, and should still be tucked away, original use forgotten, in a corner of each major modern temple.

If this seems a good idea to people I'll add a collision to this, maybe tidy up the UV and post it. Then maybe I'll look at modelling the original temple idea.

[The Old Ye Bard]

Looks excellent! Prehaps abit of vertex shading (I can't really tell if it does or not though, given the lighting and the bright texture), definetly worth pursuing, as it's a very important cultural piece

[Ja-Kha'jay]

absolutely

[morcroft]

OK - that's enough of an endorsement for me! I'll have this on the go as my "big" modelling project, while I'm finishing up my clutter.

@TOYB - I've heard of vertex shading but don't know what it's used for or how to go about it. This is a first cut, so I haven't started on the niceties yet - and I'm a modelling newbie so don't really know what's needed. Any tips gratefully received.

@anyone: bearing in mind this is intended as an indoor monument, is this the right tone? Should it be something yellower like Orcrest sandstone? Should it be regional (preferably not: too many nifs) ?

[The Old Ye Bard]

Simplified, vertex shading is pretty much just painted on shadow, (mostly) seperate from the engine lighting, and seperate from the texture of the model, you'll see it on most stock models in game, helps to give your model a nice finish, and make it look more real (which sounds ironic, given it's faked shadow, however it looks alot better with it than without)

What program are you using? Blender I assume?

[morcroft]

That makes sense - so do you paint on the bits where the shape sort-of shades itself?

... and yes, Blender. 2.49b with up-to-date NIFtools.

[The Old Ye Bard]

Originally posted by morcroft
That makes sense - so do you paint on the bits where the shape sort-of shades itself?

... and yes, Blender. 2.49b with up-to-date NIFtools.

Here's a tutorial on Vertex shading. Though you can use any colour to use the vertex shading, when you're modeling for Oblivion, you'll almost 100% of the time be using black (for shadow).

And no, you use vertex shading for parts of the mesh that should always be shadowed (say for example, the underside of a roof, or where two objects combine with eachother). Take a look at some of the stock meshes (mainly architecture, though almost everything has vertex shading to some degree).

And make sure that when you're exporting the Nif, that you include Vertex shading (not sure exactly if it's a box you tick or not in Blender, as I use 3ds Max for modeling, but there should be an option to export with or without Vertex shading in the Blender-Nif exporter).

[morcroft]

Thanks - took a quick look but couldn't make it work in 10 minutes. That means I'll actually have to pay attention and think about it, which means doing it tomorrow. I'll figure it out. And I'll look at some original meshes, too.

Would you normally shade to 100% opacity, or just a smidge?

I don't see an export option - although there is a "Do not use Blender Properties" which may switch it off. I'll have to experiment.

[llamaranger]

blender nifscripts will do it automatically

[morcroft]

That explains it, then. Thanks.