Normal maps

I'm having a lot of fun experimenting with Zbrush! It's a great tool and it makes the proces of creating normal maps a lot easier. However the difficulty is not to go overboard with the normal map. I'm trying to achieve a leather look and have a little bit of a tight fit. However the pants are way too wrinkled right now and look like they have been made from a different type of fabric. I think I have to tone down the wrinkles a lot, make them smaller and more detailed.

ZBrush

I recently downloaded a trial version of ZBrush because I wanted to be more in control of my normal maps. I've been playing around with some of the tools lately to figure out how everything works but I feel like it's going to cost me a lot of time to really get into the ins and outs of this program. However I have to admit that it's a lot easier to use than I actually thought! I would recommend it to anyone who has some painting skills with a tablet!

Right now I'm working on a new normal map for the leather pants. It still needs to be tweaked a lot but be gentle on me it's my first time using ZBrush;

Boots WIP

Today I finished the boots textures and meshes. There are still some texture glitches that I have to fix but it's comming along nicely. For some reason I find shoes and boots the most difficult part to model but I must say I'm pretty happy with the result so far.

I actually wanted to finish the boots with a fur trim on the top but I decided to make them blend in with the pants instead. I might change it later on but I have to see what looks better. Off to work on the pants and tassets!

Put Skyrim on hold for CK

I stopped playing Skyrim for a while now until the CK is released and started to work on some of my own projects. I would really like to get into new character and npc design which is unfortunately not possible without the CK. Therefore I decided to focus on some armor for a change.

I always liked the outfit design they did for Balthier from Final Fantasy XII and decided to use his design as a base for my armor. You will probably see some similarities between the two however I want mine to be somewhat different. I don't want it to stand out too much and I want to keep the silhouette simple. Also I'm trying to maintain a certain look that is used throughout the game so it won't stand out too much from the original content and would easily fit within the TES lore.

So far I've only been working on the cuirass, which is almost done. The bump map is ready however the colors still need to be worked on. I'm planning on doing different color versions after finishing up the main version. Anyways enjoy! I'm back to work ;)!

First Post

It's been a while since I've had my own website for hosting my mods, apart from the nexus community. I used to host my mods up at geonox.silgrad.com however I recently found out that the website has been removed from the internet. No wonder since it's been a few years since I last updated that website!

Therefore I decided to launch a new website in the form of a blog. I'm quite new to bloging but I thought it would be a nice way to show what I'm working on right now!

Modding is not always easy, even after working as a modder for a lot of years I run into various problems every day. Thankfully the community on the boards have always helped me out. However many of these topics have been lost or removed over the years. Therefore I hope that next to my projects this blog will also function as some kind of reference book to those who run into the same problems as I do.

I will keep all of my mods hosted at the nexus websites however you can check back here any time you like to keep track of what I'm working on!