throttlekitty

I think all the meshes right now are pretty much done semi-manually via scripting if you have the chops for it (unlike myself). I had mine done for me since the code was partly there on Caliente's end for Outfit Studio, and it wasn't exactly a quick process. Tools are being worked on to get models in-game.

1) A suggestion for normal/spec: You're probably going for an oil painting look? For normals, you can paint in some relief and run a normal map filter in GIMP. Start with a middle grey (127,127,127 RGB), use darker colors for valleys and lighter for peaks. You could probably trace over the image in a new layer to simulate thick strokes with a 'brush-y' looking brush, and discard the color image when you're done. The spec and gloss map won't vary much at all across a painting unless there's dust on it. I'd stick with a middle-lowish tone for the gloss map and middle-high for specular. I don't have any tutorials for you, sorry! (there's a 2d/3d section at the bottom of the nexus forums, might wanna look there) Now that I read your post again, I should mention that _s has two textures: Specular and Gloss packed into the red (spec) and green (gloss) channels. However, not all dds decompressors are working properly for the format used (.dds BC5), so they're getting swapped and/or broken. Personally i don't use GIMP, but i should really check to see how it handles these, but others have said it works no problem. 2) I don't think we can repack BA2 files yet? (i'm a little out of the loop) But either way, you can leave them "loose" in the game folders, using the same path and filename as the original. If your mod has a lot of new textures, it would be preferable to pack them in your own .ba2 file*, named something appropriate for your mod, or matching the .esp if applicable. (I believe we will need to make entries for each mod's .ba2 files as we did with skyrim) *This is because of the way textures are stored now, they are much more memory friendly than having just loose .dds files.

You shouldn't need to be flipping images or having misaligned textures, you seem to have a problem with however you're converting the textures. The gloss/spec maps are packed into the _s files. In PBR you generally don't put AO into the textures unless you're wanting to use it as a mask. We won't get Bethesda's high poly models, so just make do without, you can always bake a self-ao from the lowpoly. ID mask you can sometimes get with material assignment in a 3d app, but again, probably need to do some manual masking. Not having a clean normal map to work with kind of sucks for retextures, so yeah, it's either break it trying to paint out detail or remodel the high.

the nVidia dds plugin doesn't handle BC5 format, use the Intel one instead, still in beta but it works fine for now. Not sure why you're getting the strange color artifacts however.

I only took a quick look at some of the cloth data, but no, it's not quite like you'd see in a typical 3d suite. I'm not really certain it will be a job that NifTools can or will handle, so I haven't looked that close; which might be a huge letdown for blender users if we don't come up with a good solution. There is a lot of vertex data and all the cloth bones, so a weight system at the very least. The game doesn't fly OMG CLOOOOOTH up in your face, it's pretty subtle and nice. I keep forgetting to watch to see if it ever breaks, I've never seen a characters' legs break it and have the cloth freak out. I'm curious if the cloth system/data also has collider shapes built into it.

It never says where exactly to go to give the feedback. Not one clue. I need to know exactly where to go, and if it's the Bethesda forums, fine, but I need to know exactly where my feedback is gonna get listened to. See also: "Profit"

Do your shader properties in the nif reference at least one .bgsm file? And do the json variants work as-is without swapping? (I'm still not convinced those are a good idea)

Something definitely wrong there, either in how you're saving you dds files (_n/_s should be BC5), and/or you're not matching the shader defines in the bgsm. (as if you were trying to use an invalid path for an enivronment map or something, hard to say what's breaking here)

lol you are drunk, but thanks all the same. (did i even release any mods for skyrim? i did nifskope and some tutorial stuff to the best of my knowledge.)

preach! I actually had trouble picking out a good example while I was making this post because of the strange inconsistencies. It's definitely a good feature, it's just odd in many places. In speaking elsewhere, it was suggested they might animate within each block. Or possibly that it can react a little different to different light/image spaces. I also forgot that DDS uses 4x4 compression, so you'd want each strip at least that tall without distorting the colors from other blocks.

I wouldn't say that. I'd love to do some new hair that works with the cloth sim, but we've some hurdles to overcome first. :)

The UVs for that power armor frame are in 0-1 space, i just checked. (if you look in blender, nothing goes outisde that 'box') Except like two stray verts in the upper right stick out a little way. I don't know if SP just refuses or if that's a best practice kind of thing. You can use NifSkope to export as obj by the way, but currently only for all objects in the nif. You may be better off deleting the hands and inner suit and then exporting the frame. I just read a couple threads that SP doesn't support multi materials, which is the situation with your fbx that has the three meshes in it. I don't have SP, so I can't say if that's old news or not, the thread was a year old. hope this helps.

Bethesda has a pretty nice option for recoloring now: Palette textures, aka Gradient maps or Lookup tables. The concept is simple here, the base color map is done in grayscale (usually), and the Palette texture modifies the colors. This works exactly like the Gradient Map adjustment in Photoshop. The .bgsm files have a "Grayscale to Palette Scale" number that offsets which gradient to use. So if you want 10 different colors of the same shirt, this is really easy to do. Plus it shaves down filesizes and memory use bigtime; If you were going to just hue adjust anyway, there's no need for a whole new texture now. (the only downside is that we may need a tool to merge these for end users if we end up with multiple mods recoloring the 10mm pistol this way, for example, but that's minor) However, I keep getting confused by this, because some of the maps are straight horizontal bars like 10mm pistol and the baseball bat. And then I get to bricks. http://i.imgur.com/WyIAubo.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/fCujbBT.jpg Here's the greyscale for the bricks, which is actually kind of purple but that doesn't matter, just the dark/light values. And the LUT is blown up here. There are numerous brick recolors in Materials\Architecture\Buildings\Brick*.bgsm, but I don't quite see how one gets "red" out of these, except the lower two if you only use the bottom pixel row. Definitely needs a bit more poking around, but I wanted to get some word out about the basic idea here. Hopefully we can see a bit more easy customization to weapons without totally bloating things up, eh?

of course i did! I was merely testing you!!!!!!!

I only just now checked, it regenered itself to have only those entries. I really don't know what I did to get a big one like I had before.