Custom textures too bright

[Stemin]

So I'm trying to make my latest character build (pure mage) a little more fun by doing a few little changes that require minimal amounts of work for the most fun. One of these is doing a few custom textures. Basically I'm copying some existing .nif's and textures, retexturing them and then using the CK to add them as a new item. I'm not sure if there's a more efficient way to do this, but it works.

 

The problem I'm running into is all my new textures are very bright, even black. I'm using photoshop, cs5, and I took the mage hood .nif, desaturated it, and then turned the brightness down until I basically had a black hood. Small change, but fun to play an evil wizard. I later attempted to add some silver trim and runes. I'm not crazy about how they came out... Anyways... A black hood and yet in the game it shows up shiny, almost like a satin finish.

 

I could almost live with it except it doesn't match the stock black robes.

 

I think the problem is partially related to my file format. I've done a little bit of custom mesh work following Nightasay's tutorials and one thing I remember him saying was to pick a color darker than what you intend because they show up bright in game without an "alpha property". He went on to say that alpha maps were more advanced stuff he wasn't teaching at that point in the tutorial.

 

I've never used the .dds format before modding Skyrim and I'm using the NVidia tool plugin. I generate my normal maps using the provided filter and save them as a DX1 RGB, No alpha. It sounds like this might be one of my issues?

 

How can I start making my textures better. I don't really know what an alpha map is. I know what a specular map, normal map, and glow map are, if not exactly how they work, but I'm not sure about an alpha map or if that's really my problem.

[Blu02]

Yes, you need an alpha in your normalmap to control the "shinyness" of your textures, which is the specularmap. It's basically a black and white image of your colormap, where bright areas will be shiny and dark will not. You use the greyscale to control exactly how shiny the surfaces will be, so 50% grey for example is the middle value. Check original-textures for examples.

 

I know many cheat on this matter by simply making their colormap black and white, and just use that as a specularmap without further work. This is a terribly wrong way of doing it since you're not really defining anything correctly.

Instead, build your colormap with layers where you separate anything that you will need to make shiny in your specularmap later on, as well as any other details that will have different levels of brightness. So when you're about to generate a specularmap of your colormap, first make everything black and white, then simply adjust one layer at the time with a "brightness/contrast adjustment layer" for example. Dull cloth that shouldnt reflect much should be pretty dark, dirt-layers are most often even darker unless it's supposed to look wet, while decorative silverthread patterns quite brighter (Above 50% grey), and any real metal pieces like buckles or buttons is even brighter. When you feel you're done, you merge all layers (After saving a psd-file of course) and copy your specularmap to your normalmaps alpha channel, and save it as "DX5 Interpolated Alpha". If your specularmap only have 100% black or white details, you can use "DX1 1 bit alpha" to to keep your filesize down.

 

You will have to play around a little to see more exactly what effect this will have ingame, but you quickly get a hang of it :) I'm not sure however if you need to change values in your nif-file in order to use a specularmap ingame though. I havent worked with any custom objects in Skyrim yet, so someone else will have to answer that.

[Stemin]

Ok. I never worked with alpha channels before.... I loaded the normal map in PS and looked in the channels tab and it has 4 separate tabs. RGB, and then separately, red, green, blue. While the RGB shows the whole image, my normal map, the red and green channels are almost completely gray, while the blue channel is almost completely white with the exception of the silver trim on the edge of the hood which is gray.

 

So could you explain to me what I'm looking at and how I should separate the gray scales that you explained in your first post?

[Blu02]

Don't mix it up with the normalmap, that's a completely different story eventhough they share the same file in Skyrims case. The "four" channels you described are for the normalmap, and has nothing to do with the specularmap. RGB is not a channel of its own, but just all the red, green and blue channels together for overveiw. Here's a great tutorial on how to make normalmaps in Photoshop and some info about it (Too much for me to describe right now).

 

The alpha channel should be after your RGB channels, if not then you can create one yourself in the stack. That's where you paste your specularmap after you've made one (It's a lot easier to work with it in a separate psd-file. Same with normalmap).

 

Here's a picture of how it should look and what belongs to what;

 

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/Da__Tobb/spec1.jpg

 

 

Here's a resized example of a specularmap I've made for an axe. You see the wood at the bottom is pretty darkened, since it's not supposed to be very reflective. The metal head of the axe is brighter, but with a lot of noise in order to get a worn rusted effect on the surface. The edge of the axe is a lot more brighter because of sharpening and wearing, which will make it slightly more highlighted ingame. Scratches are also highlighted. All of these layers are modified versions of what I use in my colormap.

 

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/Da__Tobb/spec.jpg

[Stemin]

Ok, that worked good. I didn't think it was going to. Not because I doubt you, but I didn't think I was doing it right when I didn't make all the layers visible.

 

Now that the shininess is gone I just have to play around with it and get it to be roughly the same brightness/contrast as the stock robes I was gonna wear it with.

 

Pretty disappointed with the amount of clipping I'm getting considering this is a stock .nif.

 

One more question...

 

When I created a new channel (which took some playing around to figure out), I got a dialogue box which I'll attach an image of.

 

What settings should I use here? What do these settings mean?

Edited August 26, 2012 by Stemin

[Blu02]

I just keep the default settings. Not sure though if the channel has to be named "Alpha 1" for the game to recognize it, but that's how I always leave it anyway.

 

The color settings you have there are just for making your work easier when messing with the channel. If you mark your RGB channels and your alpha channel as visible at the same time, you will see a red overlay effect that will show you the alpha channels information on top of your RGB channels. This is great for more advanced work with alpha-channels and when you're dealing with actual masking for your RGB channels, as you might want to do with some colormaps where you want parts to be invisible or slightly transparent ingame, for example. But you don't have to care about it in this case. The color is just a photoshop effect which will not make any difference ingame.