Why no Scabbard for the LOTR Swords?
MetalSunde94
Posts: 92
in The Commons
I do wonder a little why the "The Highland Folk Armoury for Genesis 9, 8, and 8.1 and The Shire Folk Armoury for Genesis 9, 8, and 8.1" and their "Add-Ons" doesn't have scabbards...
Feels it's very unfortunate that it don't includ scabbards.
I have some of Censored's weapons and they also got no scabbard either...
Anyway hope to see more LOTR inspired stuff like clothing and Armor also!
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I completly agree and was wondering the same thing myself. Even if the PA can't rig a belt with the scabbards, would be nice to still have just the 3D scabbard models
If the creator made sure that the origin was at the top inner of the scabbard you could parent it to any belt you wanted.
Exactly, I do that all the time
I haven't done an exhaustive study, but I feel like swords that come with scabbards are in the minority around here.
I did a semi-exhaustive one trying to arm two of my characters. They are far, FAR in the minority.
TBH, this drives me up a wall more than the toilet seats with lids that don't work: weapons with no scabbards, and armor with the promo pics showing a person holding a weapon... and no place to put the weapon once you're done laying waste. Some of them even have a belt! ...with no place to put the weapon. Or there are a few that do, but it's placed such that pretty much any movement is going to have the hilt jabbing you in the breast. Seriously, nobody can functionally use a sword with the end up to your armpit. How do you draw that?? Anything that big's going to get a back holster.
There is a wonderful selection of weapons in the Daz3D store, from fantastical to historical, ancient to futuristic, and so few options to have a character carry them on their person. I have said it before and sadly I will probably say it again, I would love to see some sword belt scabbard sets in the store. It is the same story with gun holsters.
I have had some success kit bashing scabbards with cylinders and texture work.
I have just recently done a sword freebie, so possibly can offer a view from the other side of the process.
The sword I modelled was a curved Shamshir (Persian scimitar). The model took about 4 hours including the minimal decoration I included while the hand poses, wearable presets and tip images for the 6 different base figures another 4 hours.
So that's the sword. Scabbards are much more decorative, the Shamshir in particular with tooled leather between metal banding. So, modelling that and the textures and so on.. possibly 8-10 hours, then another 4 for wearable presets and tip images. Then the hangar belt, rigging. Even if I could do it, not sure I could, another 8-10 hours possibly. Morphs for the hangar to fit better over clothing. Hours more. Each. So possibly 24 hours for the scabbard and associated bits. But only 8 for the sword, the thing most people are interested in.
And how often would the scabbard even be used? 20% of the time, maybe? Not really an effective use of my time - and I don't even charge for my time. So, no I didn't do one.
Regards,
Richard.
ETA a notional 'cost' of the equipment in terms of hours making vs usage percentage. Lower = more effective use of time.
Sword = 8hrs/100% usage. Thus cost = 8. Scabbard = 24hrs/20% usage. Thus cost = 120
This shows the scabbard is a much less cost effective use of time.
It's not that the scabbard getting used all the time but when DAZ get the chance or chooses to create something like LOTR swords/daggers it should include scabbards.
When I render a knight or a ranger with a sword in his hand his scabbard hanging on his belt OR on his back...like a witcher
Not to be against this PA, but I rather have a PA like Porsimo that also creates scabbard to many of the swords they make,like this one:
https://www.daz3d.com/fantasy-weapons-collection-3
I found one example from my renders, made 2 years ago:
Aragorn in the pancing Pony with his sword in the background in scabbard:
And Gondorian Soldier with sword and dagger hanging on belt:
The Strider sword is a custom and might not be hundred procent accurate but atleast it does have scabbard, and I rigged it in Daz so it can be moved out and in,
I do have the Anduril and a broken Narsil from a freebie found at Sketchfab but when comparing the Daz version loooks to be accurate.
I thought that swords were meant to be held high, naked, in a temple, pointing to the sky, waiting for a lightning bolt to strike to begin the magic.
And besides, when held by Victoria, her scanty armor is useless and she needs the protection of an always ready, unsheathed sword.
Thank you, artists, for the perspective from the other side of things.
Oddly enough by the time I saw this post last night, I'd spent several hours finally sitting down and kitbashing together a sword/scabbard/belt combo for one of my people, who has it on her pretty much any time she's not at home, so all my "in public" renders of her were [ticking] me off because she didn't look right without it. I wound up retexturing and resizing scabbard that came with a G3 costume to go with one of the Viking Warriors swords, although it was hard to get a match because those swords don't have zones for retexturing. So it wound up looking like they don't quite go together, which fits her, but might not work for others.
The belt was hard, though. That same G3 costume came with a sword belt that had the scabbard attached (why I got it actually) but it was shaped to fit over the costume's corset, not around a regular person's waist. All the other sword belt looking things I had were permanently attached to their shirts. I wound up swiping the belt from the Strictly Business G8 outfit I got free over the holidays and that worked... okayish, I guess. It doesn't have the lower-hanging side loop over the hip, which is what I was hoping for, because she also kinda lives in her hoodie, and having it on the waist belt isn't compatible with that.
Really, I would adore it if somebody released a pack of just sword belts with the hip loop.
(Edited my mod)
You can create surfaces yourself, with the Geometry tool. Most properly made props should be relatively easy to 're-surface' using the Geometry Tool 'Select Connected' function even if they only have one map because they are usually made of various 'geometry' objects glued together (but some are just one big 'geometry' object and with them, you'll have to look for another prop
or do a finely tuned manual selection).
To give you an example, the European Bike had two surfaces, among them one for the flowers in the basket. The rest of the bike is just one surface, and one texture map file by surface. From an optimization point of view, I suppose it's brilliant, but when I wanted to have shinier paint, not so much, especially at a time when I didn't even know about something called the Geometry tool
But after learning about it, it was easy to resurface it, because, as an example, the seat geometry is not linked to the geometry of its metal support, so Select Connected worked fine to create a surface just for the leather part of the seat.
In my Velotafing with style render, I created a lots of new surfaces for the bike, more than I needed (I changed the paint color to use one the car paint shader included with Daz Studio, the seat and handles to use a Leather shader I bought, and I think the bell is also using a car paint shader).
All other surfaces I created are still using the original textures. The easiest way is to keep the original surfaces, go to the Surfaces pane, select the one you want, right click on its name and chose 'Copy Selected Surface(s)', then select your new surface and paste the surface on it -- just be sure the two surfaces are using the same shader and everything should be fine).
A video on the subject by someone who will explain it better than I did:
You may already have some of these products:
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-iron-lady-outfit-for-genesis-9-female
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-the-defender-outfit-for-genesis-9
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-marida-gown-outfit-for-genesis-8-females
The first two are simple belt, the third, the belt included every belts going around her waist so if you only need a simple belt, you will have to hide some part and either delete the two buckles on the upper part of the belt or create a new surface just for them, setting the cutout opacity for this new surface to 0. Or use a conditionnal geograft, following this tutorial by @Mada (that's how I hide the flowers on the bike on the render linked before, after @crosswind shared the video in an answer to one of my question):
If you are autofitting this belt to a different generations, you will have to transfer the scabbard manually: they are not part of the belt geometry and are linked to it using a rigid follow node, and you can learn about them in other tutorials by Mada:
Wow, thank you so much for those tutorials! Looks like I have a project for today!
i did see the three belts you linked... the Merida one is too "dangly", and the Defender one looked like the belt might only hang right over the armor. The Iron Lady one I've gone back and forth on for a while for a variety of reasons... it seems a little clunky, but maybe it's the best option if I can't get the tricks you mentioned to turn out well. (I also had the thought while walking my kid after I wrote that last post that maybe I could use the dForce Strings utility I have to attach something to the belt I currently have, and just hide the belt when it's under her hoodie so I don't get poke through.
But again, Thanks! Whether or not it works out for this project, those are going to be some useful skills to have!
I finally got a chance to sit down and watch these, and... wow. Game changer. Thank you so much. They were very easy to follow & understand, and didn't drag on endlessly, which has been a difficult thing for me to find in tutorials. (Also, not even knowing what to put in the search box because I'm still learning the terminology probably doesn't help.)
Hope I can pay it forward someday to some future confused rookie. :)
You're awesome Elor! Thanks for this post. I subscribed to your YouTube page. Gonna check out more of your videos.
Oops. Just realized that those apparently are not your videos. But still, thanks for posting the links.
I used the stuff I learned in those and got my sword just how I wanted it, and I know how to fix a couple other issues I was having. Now I'm strutting around like a queen.
(Hey, take the wins where you can get them, right?)