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cain9580

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Everything posted by cain9580

  1. 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.
  2. 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,
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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
  10. 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!
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Just noticed you have the settings in an image lol. Turn off ENV Map in the shader flags.
  15. 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.
  16. I definitely do my best. I have autism so I can get a little obsessive about certain aspects of my work at times. I did a straight katana texture a while back that I ended up scrapping because it dawned on me that a straight blade would not have the trademark differential heat treatment a regular katana would. That changes a lot of the dynamics of the metal and overall look. Sort of the reason why there is always a little time between mods and usually a marked increase in quality. I spent quite a while learning the physics of how metals like gold donât reflect light they emit photons when the outer layer of valance electrons in the lattice are excited by light. When Elder Scrolls 6 comes out I hope they use a PBR rendering engine because I will be able to make mods much easier Unfortunately I have pretty severe OCD and when you are trying to teach yourself 3D modeling it can get frustrating. I chose to do samurai armor because I know the basic elements are simple geometric shapes. At this point I am mainly doing lore research and working through designs that I feel would be worthy of the Last Dragonborn. There is some disparity between Akatosh and Talos and what the overall goal was for creating the Dragonborn. I am trying to find an acceptable compromise in my mind between those elements and releasing something that players can be proud to wear no matter their character backstory.
  17. A mod like this would be easy for anyone that wanted to have it. You will need an archive extraction tool which can easily be found online, Nifskope, and a texture modification tool like Gimp or Photoshop. You will need the appropriate DDS plugin for whichever texture editing software you have as well. Extract the mesh and texture files for the gloves you want to modify and extract them to your Skyrim Data directory. Open the diffuse map texture file and select the portion that covers which ever side you want to remove. Add a new Alpha channel and fill it with white color. Then, using the selection you made fill that section of the map with black and save the file in the diffuse with Alpha format. After that you need to add a NiAlphaProperty to the Nif mesh file for the gloves. You can just copy the settings from another mesh with fur or hair or google it to find the proper settings. If the mesh texture only has one section devoted to the gloves then you will need to edit the UV map island that covers the hand. It may look daunting when you open the UV map in Nifskope but all you need to do it select a corner vertex, right click and select All Connected, then move the Island to a section you can fill in with black safely. For any parts you want to be transparent you can resize the UV map sections and stack them so you only need a small black area in the Alpha later. Sounds like a lot but after you have done it once it is simple enough.
  18. Have to give them credit for anatomy sculpting.
  19. Thank you. For the most part I have been limited to sticking to the UV maps that tells the game how to wrap the textures. Take the Reiko armor for example. The chest portion has a seam right in the middle so there ends up being a bubble when the light shines on it. More room was allocated for the stupid belt than the chest and back which are core sections. The Genji armor UV is a nightmare. When I first wanted to do a texture for that I worked myself into a stupor trying to reorganize the shoulder armor so the textures would come out better. All of this plus trying some new stuff with my weapon retexture mods led me to wanting to learn how to make the UV maps and models for myself. It has been a rough road but I honestly think the end product will be something really special. Check out my last weapon mod I did on the Nightingale sword. I was reading the most recent Drizzt book and the idea came to me to make the sword Vidrinath and it turned out beautiful in my opinion. Now I get to put all that experience together. I will most likely be making a replacement armor for the Blades set and the Dragonbane sword. It will be very tied into the lore of the Dragonguard and the Prophecy of Anduin.
  20. A little update for anyone who is vaguely interested. My ambition often outways my current skill level but I was able to finally get the armor to the shape I wanted. The Reiko armor is nice but it is missing a few details that the Genji armor had. Now that I have conquered that I can finally get the weight slider versions complete and then get it all rigged, weighted, and exported into a Nif. I was worried about the vertex count but after checking out a few of the custom armors on the Nexus that people seem to love I am still way under that amount. The goal in the beginning was to make a base model that could be easily textured and given minor mesh alterations to change the dynamics of the armor. This will eventually give me the ability to make sets for different smithing levels and beyond. The first released armor will be my own personal artistic adaptation and all of them will fit within the lore of the overall game.
  21. I donât do recolor mods because they end up looking crappy. I have been working on a replacement for the armor but I am also modifying the actual model. No clue when it will be finished but I donât normally put out bad stuff if I can help it.
  22. Good. After looking at the fixed version and the retarded version it just looked like the texture was off a little. You can usually fix those by either moving the UV island that wraps around the foot or just line up the texture right. Hard to tell without opening the Nif
  23. So I did a retexure mod of the Reiko armor a while back and it sparked a bug in me that I have not been able to squash. I could do all the texture work but the modeling portion I was completely lost on. I have spent the last few months playing around with Blender and I am nearing the finish line for the model. I will post an image after work but I used the Genji armor mod from Oblivion and the Reiko armor as a base to sculpt. With all the research I did for my first texture I know what needs to be on the different styles and evolutions of the armor. The finished model will be similar to the Genji armor but more accurate period wise. Sort of a Do Maru in hon kozane. I have no issues with the textures once I get the model finished and ready to be put in the game for testing. What I am posting here for is to see if anyone wants to jump on board with this. I have quite a few ideas for different period armors and after scouring the game mesh files most of them can be done easily by borrowing elements from game models. The best part is that they are already UV mapped and just need to be added to the base model. Samurai armor is surprisingly simple shapes mesh wise but the textures are what bring it to life. If anyone wants to participate then I can send them the mesh files. Ideally I would like to get someone who can do a better job Blender wise so I can get cracking with the texture work. I have a massive amount of reference material so the textures should go fast. If you look at my mods on the Nexus I am a decent texture artist and have been thinking about this project for a while now.
  24. What did you end up doing? The link doesnât bring anything up for me.
  25. Haha. Best thing to do would be to put some socks on. You will never get good looking feet on a block shape like that. Just texture some moccasins
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