[LE] Two possibly-complicated dds texture questions - experienced texture editors please?

[SmedleyDButler]

UPDATE: Question #2 is SOLVED.

Two questions, one cup thread, because they might be related and they're for the same mesh anyway. I have a fair bit of texture-editing experience, so it's not basic tutorials I need here but some more advanced help.

1) Cannot match cubemap shading - what am I missing?

The main problem I've been having is that for the life of me, I cannot get the colour and shade of the environment mapping to match up properly between the armour plate on most of my meshes and a the greaves on pair of boots I'm using for this armour set. Some of you can probably recognize most of the assets from this particular project.

(yeah this is the male 100 weight version, but there'll be sets for all genders and sizes when I'm done).



I have gone through all the textures and done as much as I can (as far as I know) to harmonize them:

- I'm using the same cubemap (duh)
- I'm using identical settings in the BSLightingShaderProperty settings of the mesh, including lighting types, numeric values, etc. I've gone over these and compared them line by line several times and while it's still possible I might have a setting off, I don't think this is the issue?
- I've done my best to make sure the saturation, shading and tone of the diffuse (base colour) map, specular map, and the environment map have been made as close as possible. Yes, this includes the alpha channel of the normal map

- Now that question 2 has been solved, I've also made sure the normal maps are fairly close in terms of texture. Not a perfect match but enough that it's clear that the normal map isn't causing the problem.

I've done this many times with other armours I've worked on with good results, but this time It's just off enough that a small adjustment somewhere isn't the problem. I must be missing a setting or texture formatting detail somewhere.

2) Normal Map light orientation changed when saving? What settings to fix this?

(Question 2 has been solved so I've spoilered it. Not deleting it entirely in case someone else ever needs this info)

Earlier today I was also trying to manually fix the normal map for the metallic parts of the boots. I don't have a lot of experience with this, but I've worked with normal maps occasionally and there's one or two good tutorials out there for using the NVidia plugin for photoshop if messing with normal maps (I use this one: http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps12.shtml)

Here's the boots again:



You can see that the surface of the metalic parts has a very crappy scaly/scratched texture to it, and in the image in the first question, you can see hat rougher texture doesn't match the other armour pieces I'm going to use it with.

So I smoothed out the normal map by hand, applied the "normalize" NVidia filter per the steps listed in the tutorial above, and the new normal map was nice and tidy with no artifacts or issues. Except one kind of big one:



While the normal texture is perfect now, the direction of the light seems to have changed completely (hard to tell, but I think it might be reversed). I have tried inverting the X axis (as the tutorial suggests), the Y axis (in the plugin settings), and both at once, but no matter how I save the normal map, it generally comes out matching the second image pretty closely when applied to the mesh. I should also mention that, yes, I'm saving these in the exact same compression format (DTX5) as the original normal map.

You can see it in the output quite easily if you look at the normal map itself. The colours are technically the same, but...

(Original is on the left, probably obviously, every version saved after editing comes out like the one on the right)



So it must be something else I need to do when saving or filtering... but what?

 

Edited October 8, 2021 by SmedleyDButler

[SmedleyDButler]

Hilarious update.

 

The normal map issue is solved. The edits work perfectly... as long as the only thing I do is apply the NVidia normalization filter, and then save the normal map as a regular diffuse texture, instead of as normal map.

 

NVidia! :psyduck: