I finally decided to make my own sword. For kicks, giggles, and of course the inevitable fame and fortune. Ok, maybe no fame and fortune, but the kicks and giggles are nice.
Took me about three and a half hours, most of which was just fooling around with the interface, glancing through a few tutorials, and having my way with various shapes. Ended up picking a cylinder for my base shape, then just stretched and edited it as I liked. It came out a whole lot better than I expected, and after I got it extended to a good length and fiddled with it enough to figure out what general shape I wanted it to be in, I did a google and found me some images of swords for sale for inspiration, and of course shameless texture stealing. Actually wound up taking the blade from one sword, the handle from another, and the middle section is a small cutout of a gold bar, heh heh. All done in crappy old paint, but it works fair enough for just cut&paste... next on my list is getting a better program for texturing, but for now I’m happy with paint.
And now that I’m finished with it, I figured I would show it off a bit, get some constructive (or not so constructive) criticism, and just generally brag about my great achievement.
Update: Figured I would go ahead and update this post so that the first one included everything. I removed the previous pics and im putting these in place of them. I uploaded it to the repository, and here are the new images I took. Disregard the part on the repository about first images being old, these are the new ones
Long version ingame
Medium version ingame
Short version ingame
The urukhai scimitar (same image that was below, just moved it up here)
And a comparison of all of them together.
And heres the little how-to post that was on page two, went ahead and moved it here.
First you need a module to put it into. You could put it into native if you wanted, or pretty much any mod. You put the three brfs in your module's resource folder, and the dds in your module's texture folder. Then open up module_info.txt, which is in your module's main directory (ie: native, or whatever). In module_info.txt you simply need to make it look at the brfs to get it to load them, and also make it read your textures. So first you change scan_module_textures = 0 to scan_module_textures = 1. That makes it read the dds. Then you need to insert three lines to read each of the brfs,
load_module_resource = TMLtexture
load_module_resource = TMLmaterial
load_module_resource = TMLmesh
Make sure you put them in that order. Some people say to put each of them seperated in a bunch of diff places in the file, but Ive never had any trouble just putting them down by the end right after load_resource = churches. But the order does matter, since it has to read the texture before the material, and the material before the mesh.
After thats done all you need to do is create an item to apply the texture to. For that the unofficial editor makes it a whole lot easier. Just open your module with it, go to the items section (View -> Items), then you can either add a blank item and fill in all the stats, or just copy an existing one. For instance I can go to nomad sabre, highlight it, click edit->copy then edit->add copied. Type in whatever name you want for the item. It will have the same stats as the nomad sabre, which I'll leave up to you to be able to change (its simple with the editor, just look around whats there). To get it to use one of the meshs go to the "Meshes and Modifiers" tab, highlight the current mesh (shashqa in the case of nomad sabre), then click the minus sign to delete it. Then click the plus sign, scroll way down to the bottom, select one of the meshes for it, click ok, and there you go. All the new ones will be right at the bottom if you put it all at the end of your module_info.txt file, since it loads them last.
As long as the "merchandise" check mark stays checked and it has at least some number in "Abundance", it will spawn at merchants. It wont magically pop into your savegames until the merchants refresh though. Since its on the end of the item list it will always appear at the top of the merchants.
Update 2: Added Chu-ko-nu and the hungarian axe to the upload on repository. Renamed the package to weapon pack since its got a pretty decent variety now, and I'll be adding more to it when I get some more items made. Wont make another update till I have a good many more items made, so this is the last one for at least a few days. The screenshots for these items are on page 3 and page 4. Yes, im too lazy to move them this time.
I guess I should also note that these are free to use in any mod as long as im at least obscurely mentioned in the credits as having made them.(thats kinda obvious since their on the repository, but I figured I'd say it anyway).
Took me about three and a half hours, most of which was just fooling around with the interface, glancing through a few tutorials, and having my way with various shapes. Ended up picking a cylinder for my base shape, then just stretched and edited it as I liked. It came out a whole lot better than I expected, and after I got it extended to a good length and fiddled with it enough to figure out what general shape I wanted it to be in, I did a google and found me some images of swords for sale for inspiration, and of course shameless texture stealing. Actually wound up taking the blade from one sword, the handle from another, and the middle section is a small cutout of a gold bar, heh heh. All done in crappy old paint, but it works fair enough for just cut&paste... next on my list is getting a better program for texturing, but for now I’m happy with paint.
And now that I’m finished with it, I figured I would show it off a bit, get some constructive (or not so constructive) criticism, and just generally brag about my great achievement.
Update: Figured I would go ahead and update this post so that the first one included everything. I removed the previous pics and im putting these in place of them. I uploaded it to the repository, and here are the new images I took. Disregard the part on the repository about first images being old, these are the new ones
Long version ingame
Medium version ingame
Short version ingame
The urukhai scimitar (same image that was below, just moved it up here)
And a comparison of all of them together.
And heres the little how-to post that was on page two, went ahead and moved it here.
First you need a module to put it into. You could put it into native if you wanted, or pretty much any mod. You put the three brfs in your module's resource folder, and the dds in your module's texture folder. Then open up module_info.txt, which is in your module's main directory (ie: native, or whatever). In module_info.txt you simply need to make it look at the brfs to get it to load them, and also make it read your textures. So first you change scan_module_textures = 0 to scan_module_textures = 1. That makes it read the dds. Then you need to insert three lines to read each of the brfs,
load_module_resource = TMLtexture
load_module_resource = TMLmaterial
load_module_resource = TMLmesh
Make sure you put them in that order. Some people say to put each of them seperated in a bunch of diff places in the file, but Ive never had any trouble just putting them down by the end right after load_resource = churches. But the order does matter, since it has to read the texture before the material, and the material before the mesh.
After thats done all you need to do is create an item to apply the texture to. For that the unofficial editor makes it a whole lot easier. Just open your module with it, go to the items section (View -> Items), then you can either add a blank item and fill in all the stats, or just copy an existing one. For instance I can go to nomad sabre, highlight it, click edit->copy then edit->add copied. Type in whatever name you want for the item. It will have the same stats as the nomad sabre, which I'll leave up to you to be able to change (its simple with the editor, just look around whats there). To get it to use one of the meshs go to the "Meshes and Modifiers" tab, highlight the current mesh (shashqa in the case of nomad sabre), then click the minus sign to delete it. Then click the plus sign, scroll way down to the bottom, select one of the meshes for it, click ok, and there you go. All the new ones will be right at the bottom if you put it all at the end of your module_info.txt file, since it loads them last.
As long as the "merchandise" check mark stays checked and it has at least some number in "Abundance", it will spawn at merchants. It wont magically pop into your savegames until the merchants refresh though. Since its on the end of the item list it will always appear at the top of the merchants.
Update 2: Added Chu-ko-nu and the hungarian axe to the upload on repository. Renamed the package to weapon pack since its got a pretty decent variety now, and I'll be adding more to it when I get some more items made. Wont make another update till I have a good many more items made, so this is the last one for at least a few days. The screenshots for these items are on page 3 and page 4. Yes, im too lazy to move them this time.
I guess I should also note that these are free to use in any mod as long as im at least obscurely mentioned in the credits as having made them.(thats kinda obvious since their on the repository, but I figured I'd say it anyway).