Glass Armor... isn't really glass?!

[Luna_Natsume]

So as I have been playing elderscrolls since the morrowind days, I find it really strange that 'Glass' armor looks NOTHING like glass, and isn't remotely transparent.

 

Awhile back, I stumbled upon this AWESOME DMRA conversion:

http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=41601

 

Now THIS is glass armor, I am just surprised that no one has done this for Skyrim yet... or something similar. I would LOVE to do it... but I haven't even been able to import complete .nif files into blender yet. Still figuring out what the hell I did wrong. LOL Not to mention I haven't even gotten halfway through the basic 'convert armor' tutorial on the wiki. It's really freakin complicated!

[Siouliusn]

If you just want to get that look it's still doable for Skyrim, just look at the texture of this armor, recolor the glass texture of Skyrim in a similar way and add an alpha property to the mesh.

(Gimp+nifskope will be the perfect combo to do that)

[ghostjam]

It still doesn't look like the armor referenced, but this is available on the nexus; http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5537

[ExecutorBill]

Well, if you really want to be technical, "glass" armor is really forged from meteoric stone or something.

 

The finished product looks real shiny and smooth, like green opaque glass. In a sense, it is glass since they're essentially melting meteoric fragments to make something. So everyone started calling it glass armor.

[Luna_Natsume]

According to the wiki:

 

The Dunmer (Dark elves) are the original creators of 'glass armor'. It comes from volcanic glass, from the huge volcano in the center of morrowind. It glows green at night, a unique property of the volcanic minerals.

 

Blah... green glass. I want to wear magical GLASS armor that I can see through. Not armor made out of old 7-up bottles. LOL

[wvh]

That screenshot actually looks like more than just transparency has been added. It actually shows some signs of reflection with environment maps or even ray-tracing o.O

[Siouliusn]

In oblivion it's just a mix of alpha channel+ applyhilight to get that effect, no idea how it works for Sky

[thatTESguy]

The closest analog to "glass" in the ES games is probably a mixture of malachite, obsidian, and moldavite (depending on the series). Unfortunately while some (obsidian in particular) make for excellent cutting tools (i.e. surgical scalpels), they don't make good armors primarily due to brittleness. This was actually discussed at length on the Nexus forums, though I seemed to have lost that post.

 

There, that's your 15 minutes of geology for today.

[Zazemel]

I think the idea of glass in Elder scrolls is;

 

It's not sand made glass but a type of clay/crystal/metal composite that is very durable as well as light. Conventional Glass is not light!

 

The reason it's called glass is because it has some transparency like amethyst. But it is metallic at the same time.

 

 

Anyways interesting mod but not my kind of thing.