I wanted to practice modeling, and I also wanted to see some of the original weapons remade for Skywind. After I have finished modeling them I will begin to work on textures. I am a beginner and any advice would be warmly welcomed.
Currently I am happy with my iron war axe and iron club, however I will likely modify them as my skills develop.
Please leave any suggestions below, as they would be most appreciated.
Checking with this reference image: http://images.wikia.com/elderscrolls/images/5/56/M_IronWarhammer.png
The proportions are off from how they were in Morrowind (handle is too long), which makes it look like it would be an extremely hard weapon to hold onto due to balance issues (it has them already, but longer handle makes it worse). Also, it's too straight. The impression I get from the Morrowind model is that it's curved in the wood portion.
It otherwise looks close, but I must say that I'm not a fan of the warhammer design in Morrowind. It looks ridiculous compared to Skyrim's approach of having basically a staff with a little hammerhead at the end (relying more on mechanical advantage than having just a really heavy weight, which is more practical and what warhammers were actually like).
I'll throw up another image, it's the perspective that makes the handle appear too long, the dimensions were entirely based off that very image you posted.
I agree that the morrowind iron wh was very mallet-like. Do people want the weapons we use for this project to be modern quality Morrowind vanilla, or different?mycorn wrote:
Well, I can only speak for myself, but I think it's best to stay close to the original Morrowind design, but of course there's always some wriggle room for 'fixing' things that didn't make sense or were due to the limitations of the gaming engine and time constraints of the development team. In this case, I think you should keep the vanilla Morrowind style warhammer, since even in Skyrim there is at least one warhammer of a similar design (i.e. Volendrung). Perhaps the handle could be made slightly thicker and shorter, for realism's sake. Good work so far, though.
Some technical points for improvement:
Whenever you have smooth surfaces, you are using more polygons on it than is needed to fool the human eye into thinking that it is flat. If you observe the meshes of pretty much any modern game in plain shading without textures, you will see that the geometry is not very detailed, but the fact is very well hidden with normal and diffuse maps. So take that into account when you are modelling things like rivets for the hammer, or the handle.
Also, the most important thing that you need to understand:
To put things bluntly, NO ONE will do this task for you. UV mapping is probably the most unrewarding process in the whole flow of getting a model ingame, so at the very least, you will need to supply the texturer with a functional UV map, if you want your model to be finished ever. On all of the open source projects I have worked on in my life, not a single model was ever modelled by one person, and then UV mapped and textured by someone else. So, for practice purposes what you are doing is perfectly fine, but do not expect anyone to suddenly volunteer to finish it. You will need to do the job yourself.
On the other had, good job in getting the smoothing groups right. It is painful to see how many people never learn how to use them, so well done :)
For the shape of the hammer, I don't have much to say. I would personally scrap the original Morrowind design altogether, but I know that there are a lot of people who disagree, so I will let the majority decide.
Awesome, thanks for the tips guys. I will get on implementing these tips. JK, I would love to do the textures solo, it just seems to be a very daunting task, but thanks for the heads up, I suppose I shall keep viewing some tutorials, and hope it clicks haha.
I've been pretty busy with work lately, however I've been playing around a bit. I made an Iron club, which I think looks pretty good. I've been learning how to do the UV mapping, and I've been able to get a functional uv map. My texturing skills are very, very limited, so that is what I'm working on at this point. As always, any tips on texturing would make my day. Specifically, how would I make the iron spikes and plate look like iron?
Iron War Axe
maybe you should ask some of the talented armor modders at skyrim-nexus. i think most of them would be happy to help you.