Art In Pinkerton
(mis)adventures of Martin in Writing, Podcasting, and more
The Magnificent Seven
Jiub has competition
The first texture for my Borderland’s Morrowind experiment was Jiub. Jiub turned out merely OK. The lines were too thick and not well planned. Below you can see the other six textures I did for the original “vanilla” Morrowind head meshes.
Evolution in style
I think these pictures show how quick I progressed. They also show how I tried out different styles (such as #1’s beard and then #6). I felt I had reached a good grove. I drew the lines, smoothed the face texture out and added minor highlights and shadows. Another thing that evolved over time was the eyes, the original ones were indistinct and dead looking so I tried to add some highlights to make them pop a little better. If I hadn’t stated it, I’m taking artistic license with the Borderlands style and adding my personal touch.
Nifskope
I used a program called Nifskope to aid my in visualizing the changes I was making. Nifskope displays the 3d models (meshs) from Morrowind with the textures overlaid. This way I could see how it would look without having to tediously check in game. It allows rotating and zooming in/out.It is also where I discovered that the ears portion on the main textures was not actually used. Apparently at some point in development, Bethesda Softworks decided to make the ears actually 3D meshs that attach to the head and have their own texture.
Here are some of the heads in Nifskope:
Coming of Jiub 2.0
It was after the sixth, which I was pretty proud of, that I decided that the vanilla heads were just TOO terrible to continue with them. I did a quick refresher on the most popular mesh replaces (Morrowind has quite a few after 15 years). I waffled back and forth between the classic mod Better Heads and a more expansive mod that provides unique faces for every NPC. Obviously the every face version would take some work but the real reason I chose the mod Westly’s Pluginless Head Replacer is that it’s closest to the vanilla experience. I also figured, if I every wanted to go all the way with this, doing the faces was already down to 1/2 hr at the end of just 7 textures so it wouldn’t hurt to do the rest in a different face pack. Westly’s mod directly replaces the old model and doesn’t require a ESP MOD plugin activated to make it work (as vanilla friendly as possible).
Westly Heads
Westly’s mod ups the polygon mesh in the head models and has much higher resolution textures (4x as big, if I remember correctly). Higher resolution textures allows for better detail and finer smoother lines. My main complaint is that the heads all similar sizes/shape where the original heads had a few that had unique structures (narrow chins, deep eye sockets, etc). I only did one head in this new pack….Jiub. As you can see it’s a dramatic difference from version 1.0.
Overall, I have to say that doing these textures in a borderlands style is actually EASIER than the tiny pixel by pixel editing of Arena’s textures. I will probably come back to this some more. I’m still curious how I would apply this technique to objects and architecture in the game.
– Martin
Art In Pinkerton 