Hi, long time no see.
As some may have noticed I've been gone from the community for a little while. Some of you may care and missed me and my work - others, not so much. But what do I know - not many people asked for me in my absence. What I do know though is that some people unfortunately lost faith in me and my texture projects and have immigrated to other retexture project, much to my regret of course.
I have worked hard for a long time on my textures without ever actually getting any recognition for my work. You see all these popular mods out there, featured in videos and recommended through articles and so on. That never really happened to Hvergelmir's Armor Retexture, and it's a shame really - while HAR "may" have gathered quite a large user base - most of those users started using HAR because they had no other alternative with the exception of vanilla textures.
That said, I still hope HAR will eventually get there. Get the popularity it deserves, I've worked too long on this and too hard to give up on it.
I've burned myself out on the Hide textures though, I know a lot of you have been looking forward to that one, but I'm sick and tired of Hide textures (probably the fault of Fur Armor, 'cause they share some similarities), so I've decided to move on and work on some plate armor instead (Elven or Nord Steel), where I feel right at home and at my best. I don't know when my next update will arrive, but I do know it'll feature my next armor set, plus all the Hide stuff I've completed so far. Because I now have some "competition" when it comes to armor textures, I've decided to take the extra time and go perfectionist on my textures, so I'll release only the best of my best (which hopefully means I won't have to update the textures in the future).
I hope, at least a few of you, are happy to hear from me again and will eagerly await my next update.
See you around people.
- Hvergelmir
24 comments
Exactly - not sure it's gonna be a big challenge, but I'll have all the basics and know-hows from previous work, so it'll get the best outcome.
Your reasons are well founded and i suppose daedric and dragonbone armor must be more challenging because of the complex design. So I really like the last paragraph!
Looks like I removed my explanation from the description at some point.
Anyway, my main reason is; the lower tier armors are the most frequently seen in game. Iron, hide etc is not only seen on bandits either, many city characters wear lower tier armor and that is what you lay your eyes upon most of the playing time, other characters. I realize some people play TES games not for the story, but for extreme modding so they can take screenshots of their OWN character - but in that case people rarely use vanilla armor anyway.
Also, I get better at what I do and learn new things as I work, which means the higher tier armor will turn out the best when I get to them.
Such is life. Nothing I can do about that at this given moment, other than continue my work and hope that triggers some events that makes people want to promote and recommend my work. I realize I've made a ton of mistakes to promote my own work (especially when I started the project, I almost disregarded any outside help). While I managed to gather a very large fan base on my own, I could have gotten so much further if I'd just accept lending hands to begin with. I don't think I get a huge amount of users through STEP though (don't use it myself - but then again, I'm pretty good at modding my TES games on my own as I've done so for years).
@ all:
Creating textures takes time, and I have to admit armor textures are the worst to do. There's a ton of textures for each item. There's the female and male textures and every once and again there's also khajiit and argonian versions as well - it's a lot of work there. Shields are thankfully rather simple to do, and so are the weapons - so I expect to get those textures out a lot faster than the armor.
STEP is looking for consistency across the textures, and since most lore-friendly (and high quality) texture packs are incomplete, they have decided to ditch them altogether instead of having some textures that clearly stand out from the rest.
So in other words, once some proper texture packs are released, they will be included in the next big STEP release.
I saw that STEP used to have my work in their project. It also saddened me when I noticed they'd removed them, but I realized I wasn't the only one. I didn't get their reason for doing that, all I know is, they MAY put them back eventually... at least that's what they say.
Let me start by saying that I really appreciate your mods and the work you've put down here.
I haven't lost faith in you and it saddened me greatly when you'd stopped working on the textures (or so it seemed). The only armour re-textures I actually like came from your workshop, at least until Cabal showed up with his project.
Now here's the dilemma. If I had the choice, I would most likely use your textures - their closer to my vision of authentic Skyrim. Like you have said, polished textures may be great in some applications, but don't work in others. Cabal's work is certainly top notch and I respect him very much as a modder. I use all of his textures. Because I don't have a choice. Cabal have released 7 different armours in a matter of 4 months, you have released 3 armours in 7 months. And then halted the project.
I don't know if you're aware, but HAR, and your other mods, were once part of the Skyrim Total Enhancement Project. They were ditched, along with all other weapons/armours/shields retextures for totally unrelated reasons, but unless the core STEP team decides to use Cabal's textures exclusively (which is fairly likely, to ensure consistency), I can see them going back. I know I, and many others, like your style, but there's just not enough textures to call it a total replacement over vanilla textures. And I don't blame you for that, since it's a fuckton of work.
Not sure if you're aware of my reason to start with lower tier armor sets first?