Customized Shields Flaming Fists and Waterdeep

rick7475

Good afternoon everyone. I hope to be able to learn how to make custom items to fit our new projects. My colleague is building Forgotten Realms Baldur's Gate and I am adding to my existing Forgotten Realms Daggerford module the entire city of Waterdeep. There is also another version of Watedeep (some of which I will use) that exists and anything I learn to make I will share with the team running that module.

We built Flaming Fist NPCs, but it would be nice for them to have the Flaming Fist logo on their shields (and eventually their surcoats). The same for Waterdeep for the city symbols on their shields. Tower shields and large shields. Alone with hopefully many other additional dieties than what is already available.

Now I have build modules before in NWN1 and NWN2 including scripting and DM'd for many years. I am a Java software engineer by trade. However I never done graphical enhancements and modifications for customization. I like to be as close to canon as possible.

I started playing around last night and downloaded NWNViewer and NewExplorer. I saw some .mdl files that appeared to be shields but not all the shields we have in our modules, I am still learning. However, I don't quite understand all the files and the structures. I have read about graphical tools such as Gimp.

So I appreciate help pointing me to the current correct threads or most current software as I know there have been many changes and many guides are obsolete. Please let me know the latest guides.

Our modules and project has been around for many years, after NWN2 the NWN1 began a revival. Our numbers are small, and our community very very close knit and like a family. If you are interested, our servers are:

ALFA - Waterdeep (standalone with homegrown content mostly following "Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3rd edition")

These 3 are all connected using a passport system.
ALFA - The Moonshae Isles (connected close canon to "Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3rd edition")
ALFA - Baldurs Gate (connected close canon to "Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3rd edition")
ALFA - Daggerdord (connected close canon to "Under Ilefarn" and "Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3rd edition")

We have discord channels.


Thank you for all your help for giving me guidence so I can add to this community!

Cheers,
Rick

TarotRedhand

We built Flaming Fist NPCs, but it would be nice for them to have the Flaming Fist logo on their shields

You may be able to find, with a little work on your part, what you want in my TR’s Custom Shield Designs (full instructions included). A kit of parts for making a very large number of different shield designs applied to large shields. Take a look. Even if there is nothing that suits your specific needs there are plenty of options for other factions in there.

TR

rick7475

Thank you very much. I took a look. Amazing work. Both the Flaming Fist and Waterdeep have unique designs. I think I need to graphically add them.

Proleric

Lisa made a template / tutorial for making custom surcoats with badges. The easiest way to get them into the game is probably to override the textures for her surcoat models in CEP 2. If you want to keep the existing textures, you can duplicate the models - a little more learning required for that.

If you take the textures for existing shields, you can photoshop a decent override, if you're not too picky.

To understand the files, checkout the Custom Content Guide from Neverwinter Vault.

NWN Crunch is a must-have tool for converting textures to and from the non-standard .dds used by NWN.