"Final" shack models here...

[SACarrow]

Well, I finally wrapped up (I think) the shack exterior, complete with collision and textures. The hold-ups were the roof (I finally used a spline cage to define the cross-sections that I wanted) and the textures. It turned out that none of the textures necessary were in the RP pack, so of the 7 textures required, I did three from stock photographs (with permission), three from photos of wood in my backyard, and found one (the foundation) that was not derived from TES3. Of course it doesn't tile! I've discovered that I enjoy texturing a great deal less than modelling, so if anyone wants to improve these textures, be my guest. In particular, I'm not happy at all with the siding tex; it's not dirty enough.

Zarf brought up a very good point. Although I am reluctant to be too aggressive with vertex welding, not merging the shack framework resulted in about 50 texture entries in the NIF file where there should have been two, so I do that now.

The texes in the 7Z need to be put in the ST subdir. I'll put the interior up in about an hour. I put this in a new thread just to let people know new versionS of the models are out there. My hope is to knock out a door model tomorrow; those three models should be the absolute minimum necessary to play with on the TES4 CS. If not please let me know.

Thanks for the feedback,
Steve

[Razorwing]

It's a great model, nice work sacarrow :goodjob:

I'm especially impressed that you seem to have gotten opacity and collision working at the same time. How did you do that?

I'm not sure I like the textures very much though. The bottom texture looks stretched and fuzzy, the one on the body looks unnatural, and the one on the poles just look strange. The hay textures look nice though. For the poles, might I suggest the oldwood-strip texture from RP? I use it a lot on the sticks and poles I make and I think it works okay. Just a thought.

[SACarrow]

Thanks, RW. But if you think I've solved an issue that you haven't yet, the odds are that I just messed something up royally! I'm not sure what you mean about "opacity and collision"; the way I made the collision mesh was to clone the shack body and roof, lift the clones in the Z axis, simplify as much as possible, merge the two into a single mesh, assign a transparent material to them, assign collision in NifProps, and gently lower the mesh back.

As for the textures, you ain't hurtin' my feelins none. They are mainly designed as placeholders for real textures. The foundation is not one of mine, but it's so bad you'd think it was; it doesn't even tile. I think the two thatch textures and the screen (the three done from stock photos) came out pretty well and can possible make the cut into RP. The weathered wood actually looks pretty good up close but is way too patterned-looking from a distance, while the rings aren't bad, but not anything special. I didn't think to use the main oldwood texture, and you know why I avoided number #3. I have not gotten the hang of the non-boring yet tileable texture; any pointers are welcome. Better textures (preferably usable on TES3 & TES4) are even more welcome. The planking was frustrating; I hated it. Please somebody make something better!

Thanks,
Steve

[SACarrow]

Here is the interior for the shack. There is one more texture needed here, a dirt floor that I got from the MVP and renamed to TES4 conventions. Again, I hate the planking; please help me! A question about interior collision meshes: how do they work? I just built one like I did for the exterior and flipped the normals after placing it, but that was just a logical guess and based on no real knowledge whatsoever.

Thanks,
Steve

[The Old Ye Bard]

For the ints, even in MW they had enough spare polys to make indicidual floor boards, I suggest you do the same. Also for the Exterior piece, it was on stilts, meaning you could suspend it over water.

[nerbod]

I like the model, but the textures seem very low quality to me, from my opinion, it looked alot better with the placeholder textures on it... I'm sorry if I'm sounding rude I just try to be honest...

[SACarrow]

No offense taken. I think the minor ones (screen and thatch) look at least no worse than the TES3 ones, but the major ones (wood and foundation) are absolutely horrid. Trust me, I would have used the TES3 textures except for that, well, TES3 thing. Although I seem to be OK at reference modelling, I have no idea where to start with reference texturing.

Later,
Steve

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

Well, I took a shot at retexturing the shack, and this is what I did using the stock textures from ST and oblivion. This is what I came out with. You know what, I'll even give out the textured shack NIF.

[Axen]

Hmm... you could probably throw in some bumpiness on the ground of the shack interior. And maybe some more vertices on the wood to make it less jagged (we have a larger triangle budget now than we did back in the days of TES3).

[SACarrow]

My textures suck. Fair enough; I for the most part agree. In my defense, I do think the thatch texes capture the feeling of the originals w/o being a retex. Having said that, Stilgar managed to whip up very quickly textures that stole my textures' lunch money and sent them home crying. Here are a couple of Max render screeners with his textures for the poles, siding and foundation. I also changed the UV mapping for the poles to cylindrical with different U/V tiling values; it's hard to get wood textures from looking either too blotchy or too patterned. As for the gray around the fringe, anyone know how to get the Max renderer to recognize bitmap alpha?

I thought we could take these pix and come to a consensus as to how to make these shacks all Bitter Coastal. My first thoughts are that this is pretty close and with a light wash of green over all the textures except the siding, it would look very mossy and kinda moldy in a swampy way. Let's hear your thoughts; I think Stilgar has given us textures worth consideration instead of laughter.

To Stilgar: Danke a lot, and the texes I used were "iflaflo 2" for the poles, ecatra_diffuse_moos for the walls and one of your Misc textures for the foundation.

Later,
Steve