Pendor Assets

"Ho there young one."

Some of you know me from forums and digital spaces as Sairtar.  Recently, more of my work made it into a Prophesy of Pendor update, and more is on the way.  Here I will be detailing some of the work so that you can be involved in the process.  Here we go:

K0nr@d has produced a very nice model for the team to start replacing all of the full plate, it comes in a variety of designs and is therefor quite versatile.  The best part yet, is we have some variety so that not everything we use is from Narf.

Artist: K0nr@d

Here is a photo of the model that I will be working with first.

I have not done much skinning in the past three years, only the Barclay shield that I featured previously.  For fun, I might go ahead and make a new armor for them and not tell anyone about it... Shhh.

The goal is to generally increase the number of faces, and quality of skins for a large number of characters in game.  Plate is very plentiful, and uses some old godawful Mount&Blade sans Warband models.

Artist: A2k 

This plate will be replacing the following two armors.  I will be adding a texture to keep them looking fairly nondescript, but nice.


As you can see, this texture and model was produced at the same time that Warband came out and PoP was migrated over.  Neither armor looks particularly bad, but neither of them really look particularly good.  The goal here is to freshen them up a bit without spending countless hours on it.

Artist: A2k 

The difference in meshes from old to new is relatively small.  The space between the leg shields is wider in the new mesh, and the new mesh has circular protections under the armpits, and added flourishes at the knees and elbows.

I will be generating the new textures by using grey, black, and white pallets, perhaps with gold inlays and embossments using physical effects.

For a few minutes I was thinking about live streaming this process, but because I live in Korea, the chances of an audience being awake for this lazy Saturday is slim.  I will keep reposting images here, and I hope that you enjoy this process.  I do not think that this work will make it into the next hotfix patch, so feel free to check back here often to see the progress that has been made.

Edit 1: UV MAPS

I played around with a few things, I started replacing chainmail with leather and after checking the internet did not find any examples of leather under plate... so now that's gone.  Then I started trying to line things up in uv maps to do some detail work.  Here are a few pictures to see how that works.  I think I am going to have to forgo some detail work so that the overall effect is nicer with less fiddling with maps.  I have also been playing around with a more mottled iron look so it isn't just a flat grey, I will cloud it up soon so it has a little more depth and polish to it.

As soon as I kinda line things up nicely, I can go in and start texturing the newly painted bits.  I am planning the girdle to be detailed, and for the arms to have some added plates there.  I will then texture the arm pits, the hip plates, and the thigh guards.

EDIT 2: Armor 2

Trying to push out a less original texture for next patch.  Right now I am checking color changes and balances.  Trying to greate a shinier metal like the plate in the old Pendor days.  The current test involves using overlays of multiple textures to dive the metal some depth.  The lighter color is the motif that I am going for, the darker color is the original texture that you will see in other plate such as the Mettenheim plate.





So, I have settled on a design, the following picture shows the development of the idea, but, keep in mind that there are no spec or bump maps yet, and things will look pretty flat.