Charlotte -Simple Companion- 2K and 4K textures

[aurreth]

Charlotte -Simple Companion- is a popular, simple companion mod (she doesn't get in the way, doesn't interrupt quest dialogue with her personal problems, etc.). Problem is it suffers from the brown face bug, where the face textures are lower resolution than body textures.

 

Someone fixed this by upscaling the textures... somehow. Of course they didn't say how they did it, what files they fixed, or the formats those files should be saved in, 'cause apparently "I fixed it for myself" counts as contributing to the community.

 

Here's what I know: the face diffuse and normal textures are 1k, with the specular being 512. I tried resampling all of these to 2k to match my body textures, and the best I could manage was to turn her face green (I'm guessing that was the specular texture not being, well, specular.) I'm not a graphics guru. Googling is useless, you end up with a bunch of diatribes about DDS without anyone actually saying which format FO4 uses where, which textures get mipmaps and which don't, etc.

 

What I'd like is 2k (for me) and 4k (for other people) textures for the mod, cause the brownish face and white hand mismatch (I keep her in armor, you pervs) really bug me. Guess I'm a bit OCD that way. I'm willing to do it myself if I can get an explanation of the best way to upscale the textures and which sizes and formats to use.

[RoNin1971]

BC1/DXT1 - a four-bit compressed color format that allows for opaque, and one-bit alpha textures;

that is, textures with no transparency at all, and textures with a single transparent color.

DXT1 is not suitable for gradients, and will result in banding, DXT1 should not be used for glass or props.

 

BC2/DXT3 - adds support for a four-bit explicit alpha channel, on top of DXT1's color compression.

Four-bit explicit alpha allows for sixteen distinct alpha values, making it good for textures with sharply contrasting translucent/opaque areas.

 

BC3/DXT5 - support a four-bit interpolated alpha channel.

Three bits are used to determine explicit alpha values, and two eight-bit values are used to interpolate gradually between them.
This makes the format especially suited for soft gradients and other textures where the alpha areas vary less wildly.

https://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Texture_formats_overview

 

Some consider BC3/DXT5 to be the most flexible general purpose compression codec. (and I do too, it keeps things simple with just 1 compression method)

I've been using it for pretty much all my textures (diffuse, normal, specular, with or without alpha) without any problem (yet)

 

...but you could use BC1/DXT1 for non-alpha diffuse maps.

& BC2/DXT3 in cases where there is only 1 transparent-color (sharp alpha)

 

In general, the FO4 textures are in the DDS format, using BC1/DXT1 compression for non-alpha diffuse maps only.

BC3/DXT5 is used for all normal & specular maps.

 

I have yet to find a vanilla texture without mipmaps, so always generate those.

 

edit:

For upscaling there are several ways. The old way is to enlarge the image x 2 (each pixel is duplicated) & use one of many filters to get the best result. after that you would usually use a shapen filter.)

The new, better, way would be to use an AI for the upscaling. There are many websites and programs to do it for free.

 

The size of the image should be dividable by 8. Most common are 256, 512, 1024 (1K), 2048 (2K), 4096 (4K) & 8192 (8K)

Edited July 20, 2021 by RoNin1971

[aurreth]

 

 

<Snip: technical diatribe I already said I could find, that doesn't help>

 

 

<Useful information that answers part of my question>

 

Some consider BC3/DXT5 to be the most flexible general purpose compression codec. (and I do too, it keeps things simple with just 1 compression method)

I've been using it for pretty much all my textures (diffuse, normal, specular, with or without alpha) without any problem (yet)

 

...but you could use BC1/DXT1 for non-alpha diffuse maps.

& BC2/DXT3 in cases where there is only 1 transparent-color (sharp alpha)

 

In general, the FO4 textures are in the DDS format, using BC1/DXT1 compression for non-alpha diffuse maps only.

BC3/DXT5 is used for all normal & specular maps.

 

I have yet to find a vanilla texture without mipmaps, so always generate those.

 

Yes yes, as I said, I can find the list explaining what all the different ones are. What I have trouble finding is just a simple "use BC3/DXT5 for everything, it's easiest."

 

Which you eventually did, thank you for that, that makes things easier.

 

I can upscale the images, paint.net has a number of different methods for resampling. What is throwing me is that in the original the specular is half the size of the diffuse and normal maps. Seems to me that is wrong. And like I said just making those three images 2k didn't fix the problem, it just made the face green.

Edited July 20, 2021 by aurreth

[aurreth]

Ok, I've tried a number of things, replacing the textures with 2k ones from my skin mod, using the CK to try and point towards different skin textures, etc. I'm beginning to think the damn skin is hardcoded in the NIF or something. Oh well, just have to find some gloves that cover her hands so I don't see the mismatched textures.