Blog Conversion

This blog is going to become a place for me to talk about the work I am doing on Prophesy of Pendor 4.0.  However, there aren't any posts on it yet, so I shall start by detailing my journey thus far.

I volunteered my services as an artist in early June, I had no experience in skinning thus far, or at least very little. I taught myself how to use the tools of the trade an in about a week I was accepted into the team.  The game has a laundry list of hundreds of items that need to be created, so I set out on my journey to make armor.

Today I am catching up all the work that has been done so far; each model needs specified shaders and red green blue values to match one another and look nice in game.  My research has concluded that r10 g10 b10 with a coefficient around 15 to be the accepted range, so this is where I will begin.

Currently we have 16 items that are finished and ready for this refinement stage:

3 shields
3 boots
2 weapons
3 helmets
4 armors
1 horse

So today I will be getting those shaders ready to be imported into the game, as well as making normal and specular maps for all of those items.

Specular maps are black and white, and the difference in contrast adds a shine to the model in game.
Normal maps show dark colors and shade changes and were around before specular maps also called bump maps.
The combination of both types of map create more depth in an otherwise flat surface.

When I have finished compiling the BRF I will begin either a helmet for a special knighthood order, or I will start an armor for a faction unit.  Cheers, Ill try to update this blog frequently.

EDIT:
I got quite a bit further than expected, I cranked out all the extra maps that I needed, the number of files involved have swelled.  For that reason they have all been uploaded to our mods media fire site, a coder will now pull those files down, integrate them into the game, and reupload new resources so I can get a feel for how the items work in game.  The neat aspect is that the coder is stationed in Japan, so my work is about to circle the globe.

Also for those of you who do not know what I mean when I say brf, it is a type of tile that contains information for a game to read.  The information are .dds files (pictures) that are pasted onto the armor, including spec maps, and normal maps.  The actual rigged mesh (the model that is capable of being animated), and various shaders that make the image all glossy.