[LE] Little help with armor development, please

[lucazoid]

Hey guys, I'm not experienced with 3d softwares and all the stuff + I'm quite new in the mod community and this is probably something stupid thing that I didn't notice but, here's the thing: I'm having some issues with an armor that I'm modding to Skyrim. The armor is fine, is totally hooked to the bones, the textures are decent... But, as you can see in the shots, when I use some self buff spell like heal or armor flesh, it bugs the texture of this spells. Plus, it has no light reflection when I aproach into to a light source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did I do something wrong with the meshes? Is something with the textures? Do I need to do any extra config in nifskope? I'm quite lost right now so, any tip will be very useful.

 

 

• Note: Instead of Enhanced Lights, there is no mod that affect the visual fx installed.
• Note²: I'm using 3ds max 2018 to make the models.
• Note³: Since the textures and the meshes was already made, I just adapted and ported from The Witcher game

Edited October 25, 2019 by lucazoid

[Pineappletree]

There are a lot of differences in how different 3d (game) engines intrepret textures, so if you really did just convert W3's textures for Skyrim without any further modifications it's quiite likely that's the (or at least one) source of your problems. That you don't observe any reflections in the armor is certainly an indicator for this.

 

So here's a quick overview of what information goes into which texture channels for armors in Skyrim, You always need a diffuse and a normal map, other maps are optional.

 

Diffuse (no suffix)

R, G, B channels: Color information

Alpha channel: transparency information, black is opaque, white is fully transparent (needs further setup in the NIF to work; if you don't need transparency, save the texture without alpha channel)

 

Normal (suffix "_n")

R, G: normal information

B: not used, remains plain white

Alpha: specular information, black is not reflective at all, white is fully reflective (for simple highlight reflections, further adjustments can be made in the NIF)

 

Environment mask (suffix "_em"):

R, G, B: reflection information, monochrome (all three channels contain the same information), black is no reflection, white is full reflection (for highly reflective surfaces mirroring their environment; environment to be reflected comes from another texture; "environment map" shader needs to be set up in the NIF for this to work)

No alpha

 

Environment map / cube map (suffix "_e"):

R, G, B: color information of the enviroment to be reflected (asymmetrical texture consisting of six square "inside views", needs to be saved as cube map DDS to work)

No alpha

 

 

If your textures are correctly set up and you still experience issues the problem is in your meshes / NIFs.

If you need further help in troubleshooting those, please give further information about your export process and / or access to the files, as a diagonse from afar is always difficult.

Edited October 25, 2019 by Pineappletree

[lucazoid]

I used the ModKitchen to "uncook" the W3 files, then I converted the .mesh into .obj and the .xbm to .dds; modified the armor to fit skyrim body mesh and assembled the .nif with the textures on nifskope. Everything was fine until I cast the spells :sweat:

 

This armor has no metal parts that need to be "reflective" so the environment map isn't needed.

 

I have the diffuse map and the normal map set witch I believe is the right place in nifskope (see here)

 

The diffuse map looks fine to me (see here) and the normal map has the alpha channel (see here and here)

 

I'm using the Nvidia plugin for photoshop and it has tons of formats (see here)

 

Here is what the armor looks like in the game close to a light source. But even with the alpha channel, it doesn't reflect the light

Edited October 25, 2019 by lucazoid

[lucazoid]

Here's the link to all files: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KNJtxEmtbrpbq1yUC516AAy29qDdWgC7

Edited October 26, 2019 by lucazoid

[Pineappletree]

Thanks for the screens. From what I can see you have all kinds of problems to deal with here.

 

For one, what you have in your normal map's alpha is definetely not a correct specular map that will give you good results in Skyrim.

It is much too bright overall (which, technically, you could correct with the specular multiplier in the NIF), but much more importantly it assigns bogus values to the various parts of the armor. E.g. it assigns what should be dull leather the same amount of shinyness as the metal belt buckles.

I'm not familiar with W3's engine and what this map in the normal's alpha is used for. But a regular specular map you could just use in Skyrim it is certainly not.

 

And that last screenshot tells me your NIFs have some major issues as well. Could be missing tangent data or flipped polygon normals. As I said, it's very difficult to from afar.

 

In both cases I highly recommend you take a look at the NIFs and textures of other (properly working) Skyirm armors and check your own files against them.

It's important that you get a feel for what a Skyrim specular map should look like (and how it works) and that the many flags inside your NIFs are set correctly.

 

Also, if you need further help you could make your armor NIFs available for download somewhere and maybe I'll find the time to take a look at them over the weekend.

 

€dit

Never mind my last sentence. I'll take a look at the files and report back when possible.

Edited October 26, 2019 by Pineappletree

[lucazoid]

Now that you've said, there's a lot of diferences between bsLightningshaderproperty setup of this armor and one that I've compared to.

 

I'll try to tweak this and work in the alpha channel and see what happens. When you got time, if you could look up on my files and discover what am I doing wrong, I'll be very grateful. The files are now on GDrive. Thanks for the help

 

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Here's the link to all files: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KNJtxEmtbrpbq1yUC516AAy29qDdWgC7

Edited October 26, 2019 by lucazoid

[lucazoid]

Here's the bslightningshaderproperty tab as I exported from 3DS:

 

 

Didn't touch anything yet

[Pineappletree]

So I had a quick look at the main armor in your files (EskTorso_X.nf).

 

Your BSShaderLightingProperties all looked good, however the BSShaderTextureSets were all over the place with many texture links leading to nowehere.

 

I examined the mesh in the NITriShapeData and found it was indeed lacking all tangent data (BS Vector Flag has to have the Has Tangents flag and a >Tangents node has to be present in the NITriShapeData), which is why your mesh didn't react correctly to light sources. You have to make sure you this data gets generated when exporting your meshes from 3dsMax..

(Also, we had another user with the same problem in the forum here recently and they reported setting the Consistency Flag to CT_MUTABLE (which you always should do for armor meshes anyway) was enough to fix the issue. However I was not able to reproduce this.)

 

I proceeded with importing the EskTorso_1.nif into 3dsMax and found another issue in that all Polygons of all meshes were seperated from each other (which could be both an import (from W3) or export (to Skyrim) problem), which lead to an unecessarily high vertex count (and therefore performance impact in the game).

By welding all vertecies with a very low falloff I was able to reduce their count from ~40000 to ~8000 and half the file size of the resulting NIF. Keeping your meshes as tidy as possible is important for both performance and workflow reasons.

 

By exporting the mesh back into a NIF I was then able to restore the afromentioned tangent data and got the armor to work correctly in Skyrim.

 

I also had a quick peek at the armor's specular map and everything I said above about it applies. I'm not sure what this map was used for in W3 but I doubt it was as a specular (certainly not of the "regular" type anyway).

If there isn't a "proper" specular texture to be found in the W3 files for this armor, you'll have to do the work to convert the current one into a specular that will look good in Skyrim. Inverting and darkening it is a big step into the right direction but still leaves many issues with parts being too shiny or not shiny enough.

 

I uploaded the files I worked on here so you can have a look at them, but keep in mind theses are for reference only, not finished products.

(You'll find I also combined all armor parts into a single mesh, which isn't strictily necessary. Just something I did to speed up the workflow.)

 

Hope this helps, GLHF

[lucazoid]

Hey man. I'll download your file, study it and try to find where and how did I go wrong. Perhaps redo the whole thing will be better than try to fix it.

Thanks for the help dude <3

Edited October 28, 2019 by lucazoid

[Pineappletree]

NP

 

And if you have problems with the NIF export from MAX, here are the export settings I used to get the mesh working. Maybe they'll be of help.

(Keep in mind though, that I still use MAX 2014 and NifTools 3.8 for Skyrim, so the menu might look slightly different for you.)