ZixH
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Progress
🕑 Added 2020-08-05 03:05:01 +0000 UTCSo as I said in my previous post, I'm porting assets from Skyrim to Blender. I just wanted to post an update detailing what I've worked on. People who have played enough of Skyrim may recognize that I'm basically rebuilding Solitude's The Winking Skeever in Blender. In pursuit of this, I've ported more than 250 assets from Skyrim to Blender, and I'll be building onto that as I continue. I'm currently at the furnishing stage.
Now, in a perfect world, I could just grab the location data of everything directly from Skyrim, dump it into some sort format that I could read in Blender, and have everything just magically pop up where it's supposed to do. Unfortunately, I only have a little bit of experience with that kind of thing and I don't think it's something I can currently pursue, so I'm doing most of this manually. The Blender Niftools help quite a lot with getting the meshes and materials into blender, but I am currently placing them by hand, and building their materials by hand. Luckily, a lot of objects in games like Skyrim reuse textures everywhere, so many with many objects, I can just build a master material and share it between them. For instance, all the tables use two or three different texture sets and so the ones that do can share a material without any further edits. To save me the headache of trying to figure out what material goes to what textures, I've just been naming the materials after their diffuse texture.
I'm looking forward to Blender's asset manager. This type of thing seems like the perfect fit for that feature. My goal would be to have these all set up as assets that you can pull straight from the manager, complete with little thumbnails that show the objects. Currently my naming scheme for each object is to keep its name from the Creation Kit. Sometimes this is fine, like it's very easy to find all the rugs since they're literally named "Rug01", "Rug02", "Rug03", "WRRug01" (Whiterune Rug), "WRCastleRug", etc; but a lot of the walls and hallways and various lego pieces that you need to build the layout of an area have... completely bonkers naming schemes, like "SMdAArchCon01" that, while I can understand it's some kind of archway, I don't really have a clue which one it is. Now, I admit I was never into creating areas in Skyrim, so I don't have the experience to say offhand whether or not these naming conventions are common knowledge among modders, but I'm also not building these assets for Skyrim modders -- though it would be nice to see some blender users transition to the Skyrim modding community. So basically, having the ability to see what an asset is before adding it to your scene would be a great thing to have if other people want to use these.
I'm keeping a bunch of notes about my process porting these that I'll include with the release. These will have nice details like converting from Skyrim Units to a form Blender can understand. For instance, 70 Skyrim Units is supposedly 1 meter in real-world units. When you're trying to snap these lego-pieces of assets together, being able to control your unit size can reduce or eliminate the potential for hair-thin holes between these pieces as you build your stage.
Comments
it's pretty crazy.
Bloody Rain
70u = 1m... if I wouldn't know Bethesda by now, I'd wonder how in the world you manage to come up with a fucked up scale like that...
