Making Covers, and Building Characters

So I've said a good amount of times, that I like to make covers for my stories. Well, I make them by doing a kind of panorama, and joining the images together, to get a larger image. The console helps heaps in this. Simple "TFC 1" to pause all the action and then use "FOV 10" to reduce the field of view. This reduces the amount of warpage that occurs around the edges of the screen, making it easier to make the panorama. I then take a series of shots. Working on larger images helps, as I like to round out the polygonal edges with a warp tool in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8. Yes, you read correctly. I use software released in 2003 (Jasc PSP being Coral PSP in 2005 onwards) and it works well with windows 7.
Anyhoo, the panorama goes from top to bottom, creating a rectangular image on the vertical.

This is the image after it has been put together from the series of screenshots, scrolling down. And then after it's all been messed around with in PSP. If I did this today, I would have taken 2 shots of  Mag. One with the Hide armour, and one with the master mages outfit, and then merge them to create something unique looking, as I did with M, on an image I posted earlier.

I also redid the Valerie and Tam images as I wasn't happy with the way they looked. Another thing I did was start making more characters, as I thought it might help me when describing them. (May go back and add more description on characters when I go back to repair part 1 of it's typos and such.)

Anyway, I thought it might be good to show some characters from part 2.

 

Sorry, no Darovin as I didn't make him. Just imagine Brendarr, but with black hair, older and with five-o'clock shadow. (Getting a Dunmer to look young is actually quite hard without him looking like a high-fantasy elf or something) (Might see if I can fix the way he looks later)
EDIT
Changed Brendarr's normal map to make him look closer to his age.

Rasha's appearance is kind of an accident. I wasn't happy with how the Ohmes Raht race, from a mod on the nexus, was simply a re-textured Bosmer. I threw the Race Morph Tri into blender, and made some changes. I was worried that it would cause problems, but in the end it turned out quite well. I kind of gave her a slight muzzle, and made the morphs eyes narrower on the horizontal plane. the eyes themselves use the Khajiit eye texture from cover eyes, just altered so they fit on the non-beast race eye texture.

Faldan on the other hand was easy. I used some hair mod (Apachii Skyhair maybe) and tried to make him look a bit dorky. He's around 35.

That's all for now

JG

I mod also, well not any more I don't

I made a Race mod for Skyrim a while ago, and while I tried hard on it, I can't get the thing to fully work.
The problem is that the Formlists don't exactly function as I think they're supposed to

Example:
If you add a race to HeadsPartsAllracesMinusBeast formlist, then everything works. But if any other mod uses that same formlist, even in reference, then things begin to break.
Also the Vampire and Werewolf change scripts begin to act up with multiple race mods.

I've tried using the "Generic Race Controller" scripts from the mod "Creating Playable Races the Right Way" and I tried following the instructions, but all I get is script failures and issues. I might have start fresh, but that ain't happening. So for now, the half working mod will stay.

I tried something I haven't really tried before. Creating a mod. In the end it's a partial success, partial failure.
The success was creating morphs that are different from vanilla. Learning texturing and how to alter texture-maps. Being able to create custom spells for the races.
The failures are simple. Creating a race in Skyrim is broken. You need other mods to get a race mod to be properly functional with other race mods. Otherwise, you have end up with the possibility of a bald race, and/or a race that bugs out when becoming a vampire/werewolf etc.

Anyone interested in taking a look, it's here.
The Dwemer and the Falmer
I also did an elven eyes mod. Might expand that a little more.

JG

An Elder Scrolls Saga: Part 2 - The Final Stretch

Part 2 of my Elder Scrolls Fan Fiction is almost complete. Already I can tell that some aspect of the story are not going to feel complete as I thought they would feel, and an upcoming battle (this was posted after chapter  15 had been posted/before 16) may feel as though a last minute thought, when it has been planned for a long time. I just didn't allude to it as I wanted it to feel sudden, and out of the blue.

After this is complete, I will begin to take another look at my Fallout FF, and also fix errors and typos in ESSaga P1, that really need to be corrected. I was reading through it the other day, and was amazed at how glaring some errors were. Extra words, using the wrong words etc. It'll be fixed as well as me getting back into the Fallout universe.

That's all for now
JG.

Backup! Backup! Backup! Always remember to backup!

So part of my thing is making covers, and I spend a lot of time setting these up and "photographing" them. Then editing the images to "yellow" them and give them a bit of a painted look.
To do this, I make a non-functional mod that has all the characters. Well around a month ago, Skyrim was starting to run slow. So I decided to essentially remove everything and reinstall it, as I couldn't be bothered to go through the script folders and meshes and textures etc, and do it that way.
Come to a few days ago, when I realised that I had deleted the 'mod' I used to make the covers. Of course by this time it was long gone, and I checked all the storage devices I backup my stories on. Turns out that I hadn't backed it up.
Re-making the characters from scratch wasn't something I was looking forward too. While the first book "Old Wounds" didn't show any faces, the second cover showed Valerie, and the cover for the third book had already been made (And I didn't want to have to remake it)
Anyway, in making new faces, I'm quite satisfied at how close I was able to get. I also "enhanced" the faces using a HD texture from the nexus and a modified custom normal-map, to give them that extra nudge away from that "vanilla" look.
Anyway, here are some pics of a select few characters.

 

Valerie uses elements from the "femaleold" normal map texture and dropped parts in as a new layer, making them almost transparent before merging them into the layer, giving a slight wrinkled look. Val also has elements from the Redguard (Nose and cheeks I think) and Breton (eyes and forehead)

Rontag uses elements from all over the place, including wrinkles from both maleold and femaleold. he has an Altmer nose.

Magoza was the hardest to do. I had to make her young, while having her look both Orcy and Altmery at the same time. her skin colour is custom, and is closer to yellow, than normal Orc skin-tones. Her normal map I found on the nexus (can't remember where now, I think it was from one of those mods that make the women look freakishly young. Took the Normal map and deleted the file :P[sorry to the original maker of the NM]) I then modified that texture adding in an Orc brow and more Altmer-like features around the eyes.

Tam uses dark elf elements for wrinkles as well as the female old map and some Breton.

Meratur uses Altmer, Breton and Redguard normal maps all skillfully crafted together.

Normal maps for anyone reading who doesn't know, is essentially a texture that tells the engine to give fake shadows/lighting/bumps to an object. It enables an object to have more detail and make it look more 3d. The illusion is often shattered though. For example: looking across a stone wall from along it's edge. It's clear that the stones are not "bumpy" but are flat.

What I aimed to do here was to make them look "real" and not like supermodels. (and yes Rontag is supposed to be tanned. He spent five years in Hammerfell. At somepoint I will make a small correction to Old Wounds mentioning his darker skin due to being in the desert for so long.)

I've backed all of this up :)
JG

Tales of the Bold and the Brave to be Renamed.

The title of my Elder Scrolls fan fic series has been bugging me for quite some time. "Tales of the Bold and the Brave" is a long and clumsy title for a series, and I think sounds a little dumb to be honest.

As the idea of this series is a long one, and I have a lot of ideas about it in the future, I've decided to re-brand it as "An Elder Scrolls Saga" (I went through several title ideas, and this one I think this one is simple and to the point.)

"Tales of the Bold and the Brave" to me, always sounded like a title you'd give to a compilation of short stories, with different characters. Perhaps I will use this title again, for a series of short ES stories, that do not have enough material for a proper novel length story. Or perhaps this title will fade into distant memory. Who knows.

Here is what the cover will look like under the new title /\
I feel it's less cluttered than before, and I prefer it . I have no idea if this will help with views, but it will help put that gripe about the title out of my mind.

JG Pliskin (Sorry, I had to)

JG

Been Playing GTA V Along with the Billion Other People

Been Playing GTA V (I've heard people pronounce it GTA Vee, which seems dumb to me. V is 5) Liking it so far. They addressed a lot of complaints people had, reducing the amount the euphoria physics affects the player and the heavy cars and heavy damage. Problem is now people are complaining again that they removed all the realistic driving etc, that was in IV. Truth is you'll never please everyone.

Anyway, so far the experience for me has been solid. The graphics are pretty good, considering it's on old hardware, and it appears R* are pushing boundaries, regarding what you can get away with in a video game.
Textures can get a little muddy (Blame low RAM) and the frame rate seems to hover around 30 (With drops here and there) The resolution is also 720p with very little AA, so it can look a bit bad at times, but never awful.
The amazing thing is the countryside. Leaving the city on a highway/freeway and it 'feels' like you're leaving a city. Everything looks sculpted, and I have to say looks better than Skyrim in terms of the wilderness. (But Skyrim is doing a lot more things in the background that can slow a machine down, so graphics take a hit for performance.)

The game allows you to take pics in game. Not as good as "Print Screen" on PC. (Or other image capture software) The resolution of the images just plain sucks.

Declasse Tornado. Based upon the 57 chevy Bel-Air with some Cadillac Eldorado influences. (Look at the ground. Muddy/blurry textures are everywhere in the wilderness. Still looks amazing though considering the age of the hardware)

The thing I've always liked about GTA is that it's a showcase of the worst parts of American society. Be it Misogyny/Murder/Robbery etc. It takes the piss equally out of Liberal ideals as it does Conservative ideals. (Both tending to go too far one way or another)

It certainly won't keep me as long as Skyrim has due to the fact that GTA even on PC is inherently less moddable.

JG

Fan Fiction and Me

I was thinking recently about the misconceptions and biases towards Fan Fiction. To those who have never read it, or know what it's about, they usually see it as something "Nerds" or "Wierdos" do. They see it as badly written, and also as mostly slash fiction, that is there solely to quench some sexual desire that the writer has.

In the late 90's (I would have been 10-13 at the time) I wrote fan fiction on half A4 sheets, that I bound with glue in a cardboard, and tried to make books. They were Star Trek DS9 stories and were absolute trash with no merit to them whatsoever. They usually involved them flying somewhere in the Defiant, finding some-thing and then flying home again jiggidy-jig. At some point I stopped doing it as I grew up and the very memory of it vanished until recently.

Jump to 2005. I thought that fan fiction was trash. I'd never read any, but I thought it was trash. I thought that Fan Fiction prose was just Kirk/Spock stuff that I had no interest in reading that.

Around this time I saw a Fan Production by the name of Star Trek New Voyages: Come What May. It was truly terrible. I thought it was nothing more than a stupid 'High School Play' level of production. I shook my head and thought that fan-made stuff was simply garbage. (Come What May is still truly awful)

It wasn't until I caught their episode To Serve All My Days, did I start to take notice of what fans were capable of. I waited with a strange excitement when I saw their trailer for World Enough and Time, which at the time I kept calling "World Not Enough and Time" for some reason. In fact my last name appeared in the e-mags they used to release, with my short forum review and my forum name (which was my last name) misspelled in it.

Anyway, this took me onto the Audio-Drama side of things. Things I could listen to when walking. I caught something done by Darker Projects, but they mixed in other Sci-Fi universes and I didn't like that. I also listened to Star Trek: Defiant (Which has since vanished from the face of the internet) and then later Star Trek: Outpost (Which I still listen too)

But before Outpost and after Defiant, I read my first full Fan Fiction. It was a TOS fan fic detailing Scotty's time at the academy. I think this was 2009 or 10. I wish I knew what it was called. All I know was that it wasn't on the Fan Fiction site, and on another with a load of other fan fics. I know the cover image was of a bridge or something. I really enjoyed it and now am quite sad that I cannot find it again.

Then As I'm writing this, I found the story on Ad Astra, an archive for Trek Fan-fic. It's called On the Nature of Wind. This was the story that made me second guess the legitimacy of prose in Fan-fiction.

Jump ahead (or maybe this happened before reading On the Nature of Wind, I can't remember) I wanted to do something with Audio. It never came about, but instead Ideas for writing came about. I think in an earlier post I mentioned it when discussing my Trek story that is sadly on hiatus right now.

Anyway, at this point I still had no real interest in reading it, even if I wanted to start writing it. Though it wasn't for a year or two till I started writing, and strangely enough it was Elder Scrolls and Fallout that I started with. I continued with ES and Fallout kind of fell by the wayside, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to add a Trek story to the mix (Don't try and write more than one story at a time. You'll either lose interest in all three, or two of them won't see an update for MONTHS)

At some point I started to take a gander at other fan-fics. I would tell you my first favourite (Which I favourited to know what stories I was reading, but I cannot remember and I'm getting a 408 time-out error when I try and access my profile on FanFiction.net. and has completely ruined the end of this post.

JG

Edit:
Heh, my first favourite is a story I've not actually read.
Second is Solace in the Sand by Banger1897, a Fallout Fan-Fic that I haven't read any of the updates in a few months.
Third is Accident and Destiny by SuperGreG. The first Elder Scrolls Fan-Fic I saw that wasn't "The Ever Repeated Adventures of the Champion of Cyrodiil/the Dragonborn" Four days later I favourited his second.
My foray into the world of written FF is a rather new one, and I'm glad I found it.

JG