Hi guys, I’m modelling this weapon for a game (The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion if any bodies interested) It’s just a quickie one, mostly for practice. It should be done pretty soon, but I think I’m having a problem with the normals. I’ve uploaded some screenies which hopefully will be helpful, I’m not sure if they’ve been re-sized too much. I can re upload if necessary.
My normal map doesn’t seem to be baking correctly (believe it or not there’s a LOWER poly version I was planning on applying it to, probably after detailing more) and it just looks a bit weird when set to smooth (not that I plan on doing that but I was wondering if that meant it was a normals issue) So, yeah. >.> I can cope without the bump map if it looks like it will still work in the game okay, but I was wondering if this would be an issue in the long run.
Hmmm? You doing a Daedric crescent? Better make sure it’s faithful to the Morrowind version, the oblivion daedric stuff looks like it belongs in a rust heap.
Heh, tell me about it. The Daedric Weapons in Morrowind were FAR superior to Oblivions. My original idea was to do a higher detailed Daedric Crescent (there is already one, I believe it’s a direct port though, which is illegal and looks out of place) but making it look like it came with vanilla oblivion made it look like poo… So I was thinking of kind of going halfway, making it similar to the Morrowind Crescent while still taking it in my own sort of direction. And possibly eventually sticking gas tanks on it and porting it to Fallout.
The full object shot does look a bit like normal problems. Ctrl-N with everything selected can fix that.
The close up shot looks like there might be a couple of edge loops that are tucked under each other. Along the handle and the hand guard, the shading and the black strip looks like a fold there along the centre.
Remove the mirror modifier.
Create a descent uv map, you’re wasting a lot of uv space there.
Get smoothing groups… and set your normal map to bake as tangent space maps, world space/object space won’t work in oblivion/ nearly every other game.
And finally bake your normal maps in xnormal and not in blender.
Thanks, LoopyShane, I thought I’d removed all of the problems with the edge loops but there were two I’d missed. All the normal issues are fixed now.
Normal map is baking… but it is all just blank, same with AO. I tried to create a decent UV Map. I’m using MUCH more of the image, but it’s probably still extremely amateurish. Are there any tutorials that would teach me how to make them properly? Did you mean to remove or apply the Mirror modifier, Soullance? And what are the advantages of baking with xnormal?
Well… you can use smoothgroups for which the blender baker fails (at least in my experience), and the ambient occlusion maps are better. And regarding the mirror thingy Oo
Why didn’t you just duplicate the verts/faces and merge the stuff at its seam?
My original idea was to do a higher detailed Daedric Crescent (there is already one, I believe it’s a direct port though, which is illegal and looks out of place) but making it look like it came with vanilla oblivion made it look like poo… 
So I was thinking of kind of going halfway, making it similar to the Morrowind Crescent while still taking it in my own sort of direction. And possibly eventually sticking gas tanks on it and porting it to Fallout.