This may be the first time I've posted in this thread. I'm sure it counts.
Anyhow, this is a pretty big project which involved hours of work in PhotoShop using layer masks, clone stamping and other shit, and a bit of work in Gimp.
I've mentioned my Fallout: New Vegas modding many times and
I've been fiddling with 3D models for a bit now. It's not until recently I have started making changes to textures.
Classic Fallout Weapons is a mod which injects all Fallout 1/2/Tactics weapons into Fallout: New Vegas and it naturally includes the
DKS-501 Sniper Rifle from Fallout 1 and 2. Technically, it appears in Fallout 3 and New Vegas which, according to Fallout lore, is the original version of the DKS rifle chambered in the .308 Winchester round. The weapon which appears in Fallout 1/2 is a rechambered version and CFW adds it exactly as it appears in game i.e. chambered in the .223/5.56mm NATO round, complete with an appearance to match:
- DKS-Before.jpg (201.35 KiB) Viewed 21645 times
As viewed in the Garden of Eden Creation KitCFW lets you apply all three vanilla sniper rifle mods - a suppressor, extended magazines and carbon fibre parts. Unfortunately, the weapon doesn't appear with carbon fibre parts when the mod is applied and since it halves the weight of the weapon, I think it should look as if at least SOME of the components have been replaced.
So I made a copy of the DirectDraw Surface file and edited it in PhotoShop. I painstakingly painted over the components with a carbon fibre and dark metal texture I borrowed from another DDS file. The texture I borrowed from is an improved high-res version of the vanilla .308 sniper rifle texture made by the talented 3D artist Millenia (his New Vegas Nexus Profile can be found
here). The improved sniper rifle textures are also part of the
Weapon Retexture Project which I wholly recommend. *
After a lot of trial and error (which I'd need even if I knew a way of seeing how exactly the DDS file wraps around the 3D mesh) and going back and forth between PhotoShop and NifSkope, I had to create a normal map too. I didn't want to use the normal map for the original texture as it accentuates the huge blemishes and just looks weird with the new texture, so I created my own. nVidia's PhotoShop plugin yielded an unsatisfactory result as the weapon looked too shiny so I tried Gimp instead. I got much better results by converting the image into a bump map BEFORE converting it into a normal map and then applying gaussian blur on some areas. The end result is this:
- DKS-After.jpg (191.85 KiB) Viewed 21645 times
As viewed in the Garden of Eden Creation KitIt's not perfect and I imagine other people would have different ideas about how the weapon should appear with carbon fiber parts, but I'm happy with how it's turned out.
Here are a few screen dumps taken from Nifskope:
* Although this is for my own use and don't even plan on uploading anything to the New Vegas Nexus, I want to make sure the original artist is properly credited. Additionally, I might include some of my projects as part of my online portfolio (which is still barely in the works) and I won't do this without explicit permission from Millenia himself. I'd credit the artist for the original DKS-501 texture but I'll need to do some digging to find out who made it. Millenia gave me the go-ahead to do what I please with my own game.