Rooxon's WeaponsHD

[Omicron]

For the (what I assume is) wood on Vindicator, I'd add some knots, as it looks too smooth and 'perfect'. Doesn't have to be many, nor do they have to be that bug, but a few would make it look more realistic imo

[Rooxon]

@@Omicron, what does the material in question on the original look like? I had no clue, I tried to create something that resembles wood, yes, but I think that's not it. Maybe it's wood underneath and with a coat of... I dunno, straps? something like that. In that case, there's various things I could model into it. If it's wood, than I could just leave like that and meddle with the textures some more to make it look better.

Just please don't give critics about the screws on the Vindicator not being modeled into, I need to consider that I double the saber to make dual sabers out of it, so if I hit more than half of the elements/verts, I need to delete various things for the dual sabers. Though I was thinking about modeling them anyway, with small 6-sided cylinders or something like that. I have such problems with the champion right now... but I guess it's okay to leave it like that, as I am probably the only one doing close-ups on these hilts and maybe some player here and there, just out of curiosity.

[Omicron]

It's quite hard to tell what it is meant to be on the base hilt. Perhaps varnished wood that has got dirty?

[Rooxon]

It's quite hard to tell what it is meant to be on the base hilt. Perhaps varnished wood that has got dirty?

indeed it seems that's what it is. Hm let's just imagine it's wood, okay? And now, let's imagine I'm gonna change it into something else, something that actually gives a good grip. but I still have to make it resemble the original, so... schould I texture some straps or something like that onto it? And make the bottom/top of this grip part metal, would look a bit more realistic I think.

[Circa]

I figured it was leather.

[Rooxon]

@@Circa, you're great at reviewing my hilts, wanna take a shot with these 3 made until now? I might go around fixing them before the release or keep things in mind for these two I'm doing right now.

About the vindicator, I could go with leather actually. I'll make something similiar I used on the Retaliator for the Single sabers pack, fitted onto the hilt with some metal circular parts. Might look great, actually. Ooh I can't wait to finish this and fix the previous packs with better quality models and textures

Actually there's only the top of the emitter and bottom of the hilt left to finish on the Champion, also I decided to make a bit of a modification to the original model. Perhaps it will be nice to bring a bit of change:

Champion new design change:

Some might notice, the texture is a lot crispier than it is on previous sabers. Well, it's a shame I don't have all the previous .psd files... the crispness comes from the fact I simply used .png format and a 1024res map. Now, this results in two things, first the look really is 10 times better, but secondly, so does the file size get bigger also. Before I went with around 200kb for the textures, this png has a little more than 4mb. 4MB just one texture file! So I need help deciding whether I schould go with these big files or the standard .jpeg ones. @@AshuraDX  you said you use png files, right? isn't filesize a bit of a problem?

[z3filus]

 

The Vindicator:

 

 

 

I also thought it's some sort of leather, since it sounds weird that anyone except a Wokiee Jedi would use wood for lightsaber building material.

[Rooxon]

Well, or Yoda. There is some truth to that... And it's actually quite a grippy surface, so yeah, why not. Let's make it leather, then.

A little showcase of my progress on the last, the Vanquisher hilt model:

 8 objects, 1126 vertices, quite low poly for my standard. But it'll do, it's got all the requiered details modeled in, only a few details remaining.

This time, I started modelling the other way around. First the dual saber and out of this one, I'm gonna make 2 different single sabers. Why? Just for fun and because the dual hilt isn't symetrical like the others in original in the first place. So this calls to create single_15 and single_16 saber hilts. Possibly I'm gonna have to rename these hilts to single_15-single_21, as I'm gonna add 6 additional single hilts to the updated Single Saber pack. I thought I might share also some progress on the concepts with you, as I was simply stunned when I looked at zefilus's designs yesterday:

Alora's Saber hilts (unchanged):

 
Tavion's hilt (quite a daring design, but it's something I did not yet see before, that's why it's interesting to me):

Stinger (unchanged, zefilus version):

And now, the first two hilts I've decided to use as additional options featured in my packs (I'll come up with some names myself also):
Rooxon's Dual_6, The Fighter:

Rooxon's Single_10, The Veteran (classically designed hilt with handguards):

Now, I need to state just one thing. I believe @ has the most talent designing saber hilts I've ever seen. Honestly, I haven't met anyone who could come up with such great original Ideas! I was stunned when he sent me his pictures yesterday and I can't wait to start creating these! I'm honored that I can model these concepts into real weapons. There's no other way of saying it, really.

[Omicron]

I don't like the new shape you've done for the Champion hilt; It's my favourite base staff hilt and it just looks really silly to me having it curved like that

[Rooxon]

Allright, I'll throw it in my pack as an additional PK3 option, then  I've been thinking about this myself too. This way I come around the problem for people who don't like the shape, as everyone can decide which one to use by themselves. Hm and maybe changing the bend modifier to 15 would be nice to see, right now It's at 25.

At this point, I would like to ask if anyone knows how to put together an installer and could help me or either teach me how to do it myself. I plan on throwing in some extras for other mods too, using an installer where someone could choose their options and then only the selected PK3s get copied would be great. I might not use it for the releases on JKHub if there's a problem with it, but I sure would love to once I've finished the whole hilt weapons pack and uploaded it to ModDB.

[AshuraDX]

[Rooxon]

@@AshuraDX haha I had it without these lips and went through the extra trouble to make them well but you're right I suppose. Give me your oppinion on the png thing please; schould I use pngs to get nicer textures and have big filesizes or rather the highest quality jpegs like before? Oh and I'm thinking I'm gonna remodel the center part of the Vanquisher, I don't like it being a cylinder like before. I think I could actually make a model out of the thing that's supposed to be underneath.

[Circa]

I'll be honest, I think you should try to stay as close to the original design of the hilts as possible. Not to stifle your creativity and freedom here, but to keep in mind that people have used the original hilts for years and have their favorites. If you change them too much, it might be a big turn off. They look good, but I'm worried about that. I wasn't a fan of what you did with the Sentinel hilt or Firebrand hilt, which are my two favorites.

 

For the Champion hilt, the emitter cone would look better how the original had it, shorter. 

 

The emitter on the Vanquisher doesn't look wide enough to me. It also looks a lot like a plunger.

 

Keep up the good work though!

[Rooxon]

The Vanquisher finished more or less, just some dust layers remain and a few light levels touch-ups:

I schould have the whole pack up and working in a few hours and I'll upload it then. I just need to make sure I didn't leave anything important out on the previous models.

And I simply love PNG files. I mean, look at the texture! CRISPY AS POSSIBLE! Why I did not use it before, I don't know.

I'm quite proud of myself, actually. I created the last hilts, making my pack now somewhat complete at last. Here's a group picture of them:

The Guardian, The Avenger, The Vindicator, The Champion, The Vanquisher staff hilts and their single hilt counterparts:

The Guardian and the Avenger have .jpg textures, while the other three have .png, just for your information. The difference is incredible!
 

[Rooxon]

Moving on, the work has just about started to be fun. Now that I've released the first versions of my saber packs, it's time to change my priorities a little bit - I'll start working on the weapons for The Dark Pastime mod, which will require a lot of concept working and talk with the team, so I'm practicing a little bit drawing the weapons. First off, I'll show you two hilts (to the left) which are somewhat my own hilts, if I were a jedi and use any. To the right, it's a concept of The Laser Sword from Castlevania, which is a mod request by Angel Soul.

I will be updating these released packs more as side-work now for a brief amount of time. There's tons of work I promised to do for others and it's time I live up to my word.

@@Circa, I was thinking about adding holster rings to all my weapons, equiped with the tag_holsterorigin. I'll be working on new models for the first two packs and I've got the finished Dual pack already in max, so it's not a lot of additional work. I just need to hear that I schould go on and do it.

[Circa]

Yep, go for it.

[Rooxon]

Alora's dual hilts:

 

And the Veteran is also starting to take shape, keeping it very low poly for now, I'm gonna make the hilt look nicer after I finish all basic parts and calculate the vertices a bit:

EDIT: Well this is the shape I'm gonna go with. I've made some rendered pictures, to show you all the smooth surfaces better. In addition to what you see on the previous picture, it's now a tad longer, a few more details are modeled in, I've fixed some smoothing group problems and resized certain parts of the model to make it look realistic. Now it isn't exactly as the drawn design, but a realistic version of the hilt:

Now, just FYI, I've finished these three models and from this point onwards, I'm gonna leave the Veteran for some time and focus on Alora's, Tavion's, Rosh's and the training saber hilts. After that I need to fix Katarn's hilt so much, I'm probably gonna do it from scratch (the same applies to Luke's saber). The sith weapons are fine I think, I'll just need to work on their textures a bit more, maybe do completely new ones. I don't know, but the point is, I'm now working on finalizing the Misc Sabers pack, as I got enough information and feedback on all those hilts to know what yet needs to be done. After that it's the singles (hopefully @ manages to finish yet 5 more single hilt designs by then).

There's one more concept I've decided to work on for the Dual Sabers Pack, and that's an Arbiter look-alike. I'm probably gonna temper with the colors a bit, because the design might not look appealing at first to some people. Anyway, here it is, I give you the masculine version of the Arbiter, The Arbitrator (dual_7):

 

Edited January 3, 2015 by Rooxon

[z3filus]

That's exactly how I imagined them in my head. I will try to come up with some more designs as soon as possible.

 

I have an idea for the Veteran; A glowing chamber where the blade starts from, making it hollow could allow the saber color to glow trough nicely, here's a quick photo-shop:

 

 

 

 

[Rooxon]

That's exactly how I imagined them in my head. I will try to come up with some more designs as soon as possible.

 

I have an idea for the Veteran; A glowing chamber where the blade starts from, making it hollow could allow the saber color to glow trough nicely, here's a quick photo-shop:

 

 

 

 

It's a bit of additional work for me to create the right poly shapes around the inner circle, deleting them and making it "transparent"... And the smoothing might look ugly, I wouldn't go into that. But I could try a trick later on with shaders, I might still get it to work!

[Bek]

That's exactly how I imagined them in my head. I will try to come up with some more designs as soon as possible.

 

I have an idea for the Veteran; A glowing chamber where the blade starts from, making it hollow could allow the saber color to glow trough nicely, here's a quick photo-shop:

 

 

 

 

I wouldn't try that, being that there'll be different saber colors beside the basic ones in the finished mod. If you were to somehow emulate the rgb sabers in the mod with hilt then it would work.

[z3filus]

  just and idea, maybe some other day then.

[Rooxon]

We'll see how it turns out when finished. Right now, I think I'm gonna leave it like it is. If nothing else, I'm gonna do such a version simply with alpha channels just for you zefilus, so you can have your own unique hilt in your base.

[Rooxon]

Alora's hilts:

There's a total of 2 mistakes on these two models. First, two UV map errors came through or rather, two circles I forgot to map separately, seems I repositioned them to have no map at all. Second, I'm thinking about adding an emitter inside the upper part, it looks dull without one. Or rather, as a toy  And of course, this is just the base map + some scratches, dust and a noise overlay, to make it seem more realistic. There's still certain small details missing, like the shining light on the buttons, the text and so on. One more hour or so and I'll be done, I'm going to keep you posted, as always.

[Rooxon]

Finished Alora's hilts:

The rest of the magic will be shader-made. Now it's Tavion's turn.

[z3filus]

Amazing - those twin hilts are perfect for Alora but what other opinion could you expect from me?