The first thing you have to understand is that when you make mods available to the public, even just showing them in screenshots you open yourself to criticism. We've all had our share of it. I've been criticized for this and that, Smartek sure has and I know everyone else has gone through the same. So I wouldn't let it get to you. If you want to be a better modder you might want to listen to some of it.
Some of my reworks of Smartek's mods or variants of his, are me seeing criticisms against his mods. So I know he gets it like I do. Like me I'm sure he makes most of them for himself primarily but he shares them so that others can enjoy the game with greater fidelity than we ever could with the stock textures. Likewise the same is true for me. I want people to like my work but it's not the driving force behind what I do. I try to appease people as best as I can and a lot of the variants of his work and my work I've been involved with were aimed at that.
All that said, I have to agree with a lot of the above. There are somethings that you make the choice on skipping or not in the interest of saving time. You have to figure out what works and what doesn't. Sometimes making changes to something may be a monumental under taking which may prove almost useless to alter. I've completely recreated parts of textures by hand in order to produce a better result and while it may have, often times you can't even tell. When I actually look at the texture in Photoshop the difference is amazing. In-game some details just aren't visible.
As far as I know none of us are professional texture artists. I know I have had to learn to do this through trial and error. I knew virtually nothing about Photoshop when I started and as I learned more functions in the software, more techniques I began having to update mods again just so I could have a product that I could be happy with. Even then sometimes the effort for specific parts of a texture just aren't worth messing with as I've learned the hardway.
I didn't do the body glove parts of the Kasa Fabrication Armor for two reasons.
1.) Smartek didn't bother with it on the Default N7 Armor so doing so would cause pieces to mismatch.
2.) I couldn't find any resources that could duplicate the look well enough to actually improve the texture.
I even caught some criticisms from a few posters over the above decision. And if I ever find a suitable texture I can use to redo those parts of the textures you can rest assured I will. Just as I've gone back and updated most of my mods as my abilities to retexture improved. I disagree with 2048x2048 being enough. But that's his personal choice.
As for the carbon fiber debate, let's end that now. The carbon fiber is in a lot of the stock textures. It's all over the place in fact. Blame BioWare for this. Not us. The default armor pieces all have it somewhere. Sometimes there is carbon fiber in places you don't see unless you pull the texture and look at it in Photoshop. The Collector Armor's knees and colar area come to mind as an example of that.
The pattern that Smartek uses on the shoulders of the default N7 armor is actually a carbon fiber. There is lighting applied to the texture he uses which throws things off when you create light map and normal maps for it. That's why it doesn't look like carbon fiber anymore in some places. But if you look at the stock texture it's virtually everywhere. Sometimes in high resolution your seeing the carbon fiber for the first time, but it was always there. There are only two mods where I added carbon fiber where there was none. That's the shoulders of Liara's and Ashley's armors. This was done to make them more like the FemShep ME2 armor and more like Shepard's ME3 armors. It also offset the plain look of the armor. That was a creative decision on my part and one of the few times you'll catch me using artistic license where it isn't necessarily needed.
As modders we all have our own style. Some people don't make high resolution models and drastically change how things look. Smartek and myself rarely do that but we've got a few examples of pure creativity out there. Other people have lower end machines and can't do as many high resolution textures. You can scale our mods down if you wish and I know some people have. But we don't do that and have both commented that we wouldn't. The above poster has his own style. Some people prefer one style or another. That's why you'll sometimes see me make something that Smartek already did and vice versa. If you don't like the style of something download a mod by another author or learn to do it yourself. That's how we did it.
Modifié par Dead_Meat357, 04 décembre 2012 - 02:17 .
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