Need help with a skin :(

[Bastinka]

Well,
Long story shot a friend invited me to an oblivion mod team. So I gladly go along. I modeled a nice looking sword in less than 5 mins :words:. Anyway, I thought this would be a great chance for me to learn how to skin!

I have already UV Unwrapped it and this is what I have sitting on my Photoshop Window.
http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o290/SilentWindPL/sword_oopsfix.jpg

Anyway, I am partially color blind.. Believe it or not, I don't really care, but the problem is I can't get a nice silver type of texture on this sword. Yes it is supposed to be sort of a steel sleek sword, but I can't get the lighter greys to shade correctly. Whenever I do it it comes out to be cartoony looking, and I don't like that. Is there anyone that can help me, or give me some pointers, on how to go about skinning this?

Also, I already know skinning is a thing that you just pick up.. But everyone has to start somewhere :(

[Agamemnon]

Uh, what type of blade is it supposed to be? Looks like of silver make, but the curvature near the hilt hints Elven.

[Bastinka]

Its a steel-silver/ish texture, I got it down. I made a dull texture with some minor scratches... The only thing now is learn how to make a shader in oblivion :S

[DaneO'Roo]

um, MASSIVE waste of space. Break the UV's up and fill up all that black space.


Also, this is for Oblivion isn't it? You'd wanna make a bump map and specular instead of dynamically shading it.


Just make a steel texture, cover the entire uv sheet with it, once you've utilized the uv space, and then just paint a new layer where ever the handle is.


" Also, I already know skinning is a thing that you just pick up.."

False. It takes a certain amount of pre artistic skill to learn. Generally, most skinners/texture artists are incredibly good drawers/painters in real life. You don't just pick it up one day and LOL IM GOOD AT IT NOW K.


For a good steel material, go render clouds, with a light and dark shade of grey, on your background layer, get a soft brush and low opacity, and even out the tones of the render clouds. Then, go apply a sponge filter. Immediately after it's applied, go up the top to Edit > Fade *last action* which is Sponge Filter. Fade until it doesn't look that harsh. Then, go filter, Splatter, or Sprayed strokes and tweak the levels. Apply after combos and tweaking, like sharpening, bluring, scratching some detail in (fiddle with brush presets, I couldn't be fucked explaining)

Or, you could, If you have all your blade uv's lined up vertically along, you can go render > fibers and tweak those. Combos of sharpen, blur drawin scratches, corrosion (again, fuck with brush presets) etc.

[Bastinka]

What do you mean Break the UV's, it's only a quarter of the model which is mirrored onto each side. :downs:

[Con]

He means cut the UV's up into seperate sections that you can make larger on the UV's and take up more room. This will let you have higher resolution texturing except using the original texture size.

[DaneO'Roo]

^^^^

yeup