Custom Armor in game is too shiny

[StealthDick]

As the title says, my custom armor is very shiny.

 

It's white, but I learned to tweak its brightness by ~70% so now its greyish in the texture (still looks white in game). I even made the armor brown and now it looks like a polished turd.

 

I used gimp to generate the normals (because generating them is a pain). Lastly, I've been messing around with the "gloss" under the NiMaterialProperty tab in Nifskope to reduce this, but it's been no use.

 

I've just now heard about "alpha channels" for textures, but I'm scratching my head... what's an alpha channel? And how do I increase/reduce it? I'm really not sure how it all works.

I'm not even trying to do anything crazy, I just don't want the armor to reflect the rays of the sun. If anything, it shouldn't have any gloss at all.

 

Thanks.

[puddlepond]

generating normals in gimp is very weird. i've always had the same issue. maybe try lowering the opacity of your normal maps? if you try to export a .dds with lowered opacity it'll just reset to 100% so you'll need to export it as a .png or something first then export your .png as a .dds, but it might work. you'll notice most of the vanilla game's normal maps are very transparent and faint whereas the ones gimp generates have no transparency which is - i think - why they appear very shiny in game.