I tried downloading this a few times, but they always appear blank to me. Is there something wrong with the upload, or am I somehow messing something up?
I wouldn't have thought anything could top your book and journal meshes, but this just knocks my socks off. I can't wait for it to finish downloading so I can endorse. But, would you please consider adding the text of your Nexus descriptions, here and for the meshes, as ReadMe files in the downloads? I find your discussions so illuminating that I like to keep them handy as references, which means grabbing the text off the page and reformatting it in a text editor. These are such great mini-tutorials that you should make it easy for us newbie texturers to refer back to them time and time again! Properly grunging things is something I've been struggling with, and I've learned a heap in a couple of minutes just from reading this page.
I am very glad that they are proving useful. I know that the hardest part of doing all the book covers was finding the inspiration for the covers themselves. Phoenix Amon had done a lot for the Oblivion books but I still had to adapt and improvise. I will be releasing the Journal covers once I have finished them too but that will be a while.
About the tutorial idea - I can actually upload a readme to the Nexus and it will be displayed on a tab on the mod page. If I embed it inside the mod I will have to re-upload a new version of the mod so I will investigate the facilities here on the Nexus first
I think I will pick one cover that represents a technique clearly and then do a start to finish on that cover. Subjects would include gold lettering and its height map. I would probably have to cover decorative brushes, dirt and stains and possibly one for dings, divots and scratches. Making the Normal map is a significant challenge because there is no standard tool available to all users (the nVidia tool is for Windows users of PS and my license is on the Mac for example so I had to use Crazybump).
The catch too is that I have not played Skyrim since February because I have been working on the book covers. I am barely a quarter of the way through the Journals and I still have all the Notes to do. Tutorials will be low priority until I have had a break.
If you want to learn more about Photoshop by the way, I can recommend the courses at Lynda.com by Deke McClelland. Yes they are a monthly subscription but you could probably cover the whole lot for your version of PS in one or possibly two months. Every time I reinstall PS, Adobe keep throwing a 1-month free sub for Lynda.com at me.
I will be glad just to have an easier way to download the content of your mod-description page, so uploading it as a separate file to the readme tab will be fine. But if you ever get around to a full-blown tutorial, I will be delighted.
I doubt the Lynda.com tutorials will do me much good, however, as I've been a Paintshop Pro user since the days when it was one of the greatest shareware programs around. I'm currently on Corel PSP X5, since I found that X6 breaks the nVidia plugin. And nVidia is in no hurry to look into that, since they only officially support PS. Perhaps if Adobe's latest Creative Cloud nonsense drives enough PS users over to Corel, things will change a little.
This is reaaly cool stuff! Instead of hiding your work you give the community members the opportunity to translate all that great covers into their own laguages. Thanks alot.
If anyone is serious about translating the text on the covers of all 426 books into their own language, let me know and I will make the original covers available with all the fonts and non-commercial resources intact.
I estimate that about 95% of the books have some form of text on them. Of those, I think that about 80% have it as real text layers that are easily edited but the rest were flattened Oblivion covers where the text was in the correct place already. Those would need careful clone stamp editing to remove the text so that it could be recreated as a proper text layer.
Once you had translated the text, resizing it as necessary or editing the layout, you would still need to export it as PNG and then translate it to DDS. Fortunately GIMP can easily batch convert the PNG to reduce the saturation for the Desaturated Textures version of the mod.
The Normal Maps would need to be re-created too and this would be the biggest part of the exercise. Every book with text has a Height Map associated with it which is sensitive to the text colour and indentation. I would say that about 50% of the books with text have a Normal Map that needs manual effort to get the appearance of the text right.
Once new Height Maps had been generated, they would have to be passed through CrazyBump and manually adjusted (CrazyBump doesn't store profiles of settings so each one has to be done by hand). The resulting Specular and Displacement maps then have to be merged in Photoshop into a single PNG Normal Map. GIMP can then be used to individually convert the PNG to DDS. I am unsure if there are batch converters that will do this for both the texture and normal maps.
If you really do want to translate the covers to your language, I would estimate 6-8 weeks of work for each language.
If you need any specific help integrating this with the Better Book Mesh resource, let me know. You can also have a look at the ESP for Book Covers Skyrim to see how these books were set up with regards to OBND Object Bounds and so on.
13 comments
Thank you for all your resources <3
Thank you again for these fabulous works.
About the tutorial idea - I can actually upload a readme to the Nexus and it will be displayed on a tab on the mod page. If I embed it inside the mod I will have to re-upload a new version of the mod so I will investigate the facilities here on the Nexus first
I think I will pick one cover that represents a technique clearly and then do a start to finish on that cover. Subjects would include gold lettering and its height map. I would probably have to cover decorative brushes, dirt and stains and possibly one for dings, divots and scratches. Making the Normal map is a significant challenge because there is no standard tool available to all users (the nVidia tool is for Windows users of PS and my license is on the Mac for example so I had to use Crazybump).
The catch too is that I have not played Skyrim since February because I have been working on the book covers. I am barely a quarter of the way through the Journals and I still have all the Notes to do. Tutorials will be low priority until I have had a break.
If you want to learn more about Photoshop by the way, I can recommend the courses at Lynda.com by Deke McClelland. Yes they are a monthly subscription but you could probably cover the whole lot for your version of PS in one or possibly two months. Every time I reinstall PS, Adobe keep throwing a 1-month free sub for Lynda.com at me.
I doubt the Lynda.com tutorials will do me much good, however, as I've been a Paintshop Pro user since the days when it was one of the greatest shareware programs around. I'm currently on Corel PSP X5, since I found that X6 breaks the nVidia plugin. And nVidia is in no hurry to look into that, since they only officially support PS. Perhaps if Adobe's latest Creative Cloud nonsense drives enough PS users over to Corel, things will change a little.
I estimate that about 95% of the books have some form of text on them. Of those, I think that about 80% have it as real text layers that are easily edited but the rest were flattened Oblivion covers where the text was in the correct place already. Those would need careful clone stamp editing to remove the text so that it could be recreated as a proper text layer.
Once you had translated the text, resizing it as necessary or editing the layout, you would still need to export it as PNG and then translate it to DDS. Fortunately GIMP can easily batch convert the PNG to reduce the saturation for the Desaturated Textures version of the mod.
The Normal Maps would need to be re-created too and this would be the biggest part of the exercise. Every book with text has a Height Map associated with it which is sensitive to the text colour and indentation. I would say that about 50% of the books with text have a Normal Map that needs manual effort to get the appearance of the text right.
Once new Height Maps had been generated, they would have to be passed through CrazyBump and manually adjusted (CrazyBump doesn't store profiles of settings so each one has to be done by hand). The resulting Specular and Displacement maps then have to be merged in Photoshop into a single PNG Normal Map. GIMP can then be used to individually convert the PNG to DDS. I am unsure if there are batch converters that will do this for both the texture and normal maps.
If you really do want to translate the covers to your language, I would estimate 6-8 weeks of work for each language.
If you need any specific help integrating this with the Better Book Mesh resource, let me know. You can also have a look at the ESP for Book Covers Skyrim to see how these books were set up with regards to OBND Object Bounds and so on.