cain9580

Is there a more current texture tutorial somewhere out there I am missing? I decided to give Origins another play through and noticed it has some decent shaders for how old it is. I scoured the net for a description of how the game uses each texture type but I havenât found one that has correct information. I extracted a few of the stock game textures and they look like they were designed for older generation shaders. The specular textures specifically work completely different from what I have read. For instance, the RGB component shouldnât be colored on dielectric materials like leather or cloth. Unless you are trying to make silk or something along those lines. Metals should have all there color information in the spec map and not the diffuse. The alpha channel gloss map works like a modern roughness/gloss map and not the old school spec intensity textures like Skyrim uses. This game could probably have some decent looking stuff. I played around with a sword for a few minutes and got vastly better results. No clue how the game handles cubemaps though. I am thinking about making a new set of textures for the Juggernaut armor just to see what I can come up with. I do know there is a lot of bad information out there in regards to texture contents.

All of the guides and how toâs I find online are pretty dated so I am hoping there is an easier solution to material editing. Mainly I am wanting to be able to see how the game reads the channels of the Specular texture and what functions are applied to them. Also, it would be nice to be able to change those functions and possibly add new ones without hex editing and playing number search. Do any of the newer versions of ME3Explorer, or possibly something else, have an editor that converts that into UDK script? Thanks,

I am quite surprised that very few people responded to this post on here and the Mods subreddit. Having a totally free database for reference images is a pretty big deal.

Not sure exactly what is going on and I would also need to know what texture program you are using. That being said the textures are told how to wrap around the mesh by a UV map. You can export this in Nifskope by right clicking on the mesh or TriShape, go to Texture, and then Export UV. Keep it the same resolution as what your finished product will be and then open it in your program duplicate the layer to the one you are working on. Obviously there are other ways to bring it in but that is a simple method. From there you have a wireframe image that shows you the boundaries of each UV island.

If you really want to get the most amount of control then you can make selections of the different sections that make up the image. Base shield material, the shield boss and any studs or rivets, and group them on a single layer by object materials. Then you can easily make any adjustments you want. Takes a bit of time but ultimately you get a better finished product. Especially if you are wanting to recreate the object as close as you can.

You can usually pull any extra light out of an image by duplicating it, invert, then set the blending for the layer to overlay or one that works best with the image. I usually desaturate it before or after inverting. You have to play around with that and the opacity of the blending layer but you can usually get most of the unwanted highlights out. If there is still more just make a copy of both layers and merge them, after that you can adjust the curves or levels until you have a flat image with equal lighting.

I have a large amount of katana part images stored on my computer. There are around 2000 of them in the database but I only grabbed the unique ones. European full plate armor made for the wealthy is definitely heavily decorated. I have spent more than one night just browsing the different things they have in there. Over 800,000 images of every aspect of human life from as early as we started making art and weapons. I spent have the night browsing polearm and spear weapons from around the world. They were much more decorated and engraved then I thought they would be.

There is likely more out there but the database is so extensive and the images can be up to 4-6k resolution with perfect lighting. I imagine the Museum has a top notch photography team with the best equipment the tax payers of NYC can afford. Plus it is all cataloged and documented. I spent hours searching for stupid high resolution photos of Japanese armor to get just a few decent shots I could work with. As soon as I got to the METâs site I had more than I would ever need.

It can be difficult at times to find good reference images for whatever you may be texturing or modeling. I am sure there are plenty of websites you can pay to get this stuff but I came across an absolutely massive repository a while back and figured I would share it. When I was working on some samurai armor textures I was having a terrible time trying to find good reference material. I remembered that the museums I went to when I lived in NYC had some exhibits so I started browsing their websites. Turns out the Metropolitan Museum of Art (or The Met If you like) has a searchable database of hundreds of thousands of images. The search tool is fairly intuitive and most of the items have high resolution lighting free images you can download. For instance there are over 250 items in the category of Arms found in Europe between 1400 thru 1600. They also had over 1000 items for Japanese swords and over 800 for the various types of armor. A good alternative to using google and the quality of the images is hard to beat anywhere. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/aa/original/04.3.91_002feb2015.jpg A item from Europe for anyone who wants to see the quality level. I just picked it at random but it appears to be the blade of a halberd or glaive. For anyone concerned about copyright issues the museum has an open access policy for the entire database. There are some items still under copyright by third parties (I have never run into one) but all the database images are considered copyright free. Here is the use policy that have posted. https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/policies-and-documents/image-resources

I posted a comment to another thread about how I was able to get metal textures to look as similar as PBR metals do in texture painting software and newer graphics rendering engines. I figured I would post it here for the people who may not visit the Skyrim Mods Reddit where I posted a write up on my personal method. When I first started making texture mods this was very frustrating to me especially when trying to make things like Gold, Brass, and other metals with a tinted reflection quality. So, I just posted this on the Nexus forums for a fellow mod maker and I thought I would share it here. When I first started making texture mods this was very frustrating to me especially when trying to make things like Gold, Brass, and other metals with a tinted reflection quality. This is the culmination of a bit of trial and error to come up with a method for making metal textures. It has worked for me with decent results and was an attempt to take some of the guess work out when trying to recreate life like objects. The process relies on cubemaps to provide the specular color of the metal. The diffuse map can stay black or you can split the difference between the the diffuse and the cubemap until you get a metal looking object. From there you take the specular quantity and that will be the base for your environment mask map. From there you can add any ambient occlusion, roughness, and extra details to it. The normal map should be as smooth as you can get it so the texture is a clean reflection. Specular highlights go in the Alpha channel of the Normal map but use them sparingly unless the object is separate from any non metals in the model. It takes some playing around with the textures and you will need the correct values from a PBR website to get the qualities of the particular metal you desire. For fine tuning use the specular color, glossiness, and specular level inside the Nif file. If you split the difference between the diffuse and the cubemap make sure to go light on the diffuse or you will get a very bright object. Some ambient occlusion goes a long way on the diffuse and for the process you will need slightly large than average cubemap files or the reflections will be pixelated. That is my method and it has worked very well for me in some of the later textures I have done. If you donât get the look you are going for initially just keep trying. With a dated engine like Skyrims expect more fails at the start of trying to get it exactly right but when you do the end product can look amazing. If anyone gives it a try let me know how it comes out and if you are having trouble download my Vidrinath sword from Nexus and feel free to scrutinize my textures. Enjoy!

After I commented on your post I decided to do a brief write up of how I came across this method. I will post it on this forum for anyone else that is having this issue and wants to try this method.

Best way to get metal to look like metal is through cubemaps. You have to really play around with it since the renderer is not set up for PBR. Use the same specular color for the cubemap and then set the metals glossiness onto the Env Mask Map. The diffuse color can be black or you can split the difference in whatever way you need between the cubemap and the diffuse. The end result is a metal that reflects the true color and look. Once you are satisfied with that then play around with the specular map for highlighting and the diffuse for ambient occlusion. It works best if you can isolate the object in question from the rest of the most. Then you can add Specular color and adjust the level of highlights and intensity inside the Nif. This is the only method I have been able to come up with and it really does create some create looking metals when you get it all right.

And if that does nothing then it may be something to do with how Plants and grass are normally tileable meshes. I know you donât need Vertex Colors checked and 50 as a multiple seems awfully high. Try those and worst comes to worst open the Nirnroot mesh and copy that.

Just noticed you have the settings in an image lol. Turn off ENV Map in the shader flags.

Without being able to see the Nif file it seems like you are using a glow map but may not have the ShaderProperty set up right. Simply setting the Emissive Multiple to any number greater than 0 will make the whole object glow. Either you need to have the Glow Map box checked in the Shader Flags section or you have the Glow Map in the wrong spot in the Texture Set section.