Why, hello there! Today, I am going to post another devlog for A Shadow in the East, my Sub-mod for the popular Battle for Middle-earth II mod, Age of the Ring. And I apologize for doing this today instead of Friday. And I have to do another article today to make up for my slacking from yesterday. Wow, I'm really behind on my own schedule, aren't I? Anyway…
The good news
I am getting right to work on the 3d and 2d art being prepared for Demo 0.2 of A Shadow in the East. As seen in this article’s image, one of these projects is Dwarf Warriors of clan Blacklock, one of the four Eastern Dwarf clans that are unified into two different cultures. I am starting that one with the helmet, and this time I did a Smart Unwrap in Blender with the UV editing. Historically, what I've done is Unwrap from View, and the result was always that some areas of a given texture for helmet, weapon, body armor, badge of honor, etc. would look blurrier than other areas.
Notice the giant touchscreen next to my laptop, too! I drew the helmet’s outlines in Annotations in Blender with a stylus that is all the touchscreen ever responds to. Then I did the Smart Unwrap I mentioned above before doing some texture painting. Believe it or not, the Blacklock helmet is the second time I ever did Smart Unwrap. The first time was with an Easterling cone helmet as depicted below:
Now while I can take credit for the conical helmet that I made from a basic, 16-sided sphere, the forehead fin was Mathijs and the AOTR team. What I did for this and the Blacklock dwarf helmet was add a brass texture in Gimp using the “paste into selection” technique at a lowered opacity. One of these projects, the Blacklock dwarf template, shall be revisited for reasons I will explain below.
New software?
Yes, I have a new piece of software I'll be using to make my characters’ heads and fists going forward. It's called MakeHuman and it basically allows me to make a low-poly, but still high-realism, person mesh. My first MakeHuman project ever? Making a person mesh as bedrock for the Great Khân known as Amdûr! Once I get all of his clothes and armor scratch modeled onto him, I’ll delete faces from the person mesh until the fists, head, and neck are all that's left. But so far, I have spent 3 hours just modeling his robe and his pants onto him. And the robe includes his sash as part of it. I will note, however, I've had trouble getting a scratch modeled cape to export properly as a Westwood 3d, which is the type of 3d Art the Battle for Middle-earth games use. So, only the capes will be borrowed from that which is already in the Age of the Ring 3d art. As for scratch modeled parts of Amdûr, I still have these left to do:
Helmet
Shawl
Scarf
Boots
Gloves
Hauberk
Rerebraces
Vambraces
Cuisses
Kneepads
Katana
Scabbard
Horse armor
Yes, you read that last one right, scratch modeled horse armor. As for the horse itself, I'll just use the Shadowfax mesh that Mathijs and the AOTR team made.
What this means
It means that not only will I have fresh new 3d art ready for Age of the Ring 9.0, it also means it will be almost entirely scratch modeled! And I do have a lot left to do for the Blacklock dwarf template as well.
Thank you all for reading this article! Please subscribe to this journal and to my YouTube channel, which I'll have a new video on every Friday.
https://www.youtube.com/@KylePerkino