Light reflect weird out of mesh saved in DAI ModMaker

[SAWAK]

Hi there.

Im workin on mod to scale down greatswords to somewhat realistic proportions, but stumbled on some lighting reflection issue:

 

I did even tried to export and import without any edits and repeat process in older versions of daimm, but result the same.

Any Guru's here who know how to solve it , if thats even possible?

[Dmitrias]

Yes, this is a known issue in both frosty and da:i mod maker. The tangent space normals are flipped when a model is imported over. For models edited with da:i mod maker, you can circumvent the issue by inverting both the red and green channel on the normal map texture for the weapon.

 

For models edited with frosty mod maker, the issue can be circumvented by flipping just the red channel of the normal map.

[SAWAK]

Thank you for the reply. I did try this method - looks better but still not as the original:

I have a guess that not whole normal map must be inverted, but selective part of it. Gonna try it.

I did the same method with specular map, but it appears overbrighted or awkward, depending on channel inverted.

Edited March 7, 2022 by SAWAK

[Dmitrias]

I don't think you neccesarily need to touch the specular map for this issue, since it's due to the normals.

 

What program were you using to save and open the normal map with? Some programs aren't used to DA:I's native normal map format - ATI2N - and as such they don't open them correctly, so this can mess up the lighting of the model further, so needs to be corrected before you make the additional changes you'd want to do on top of that to fix the altered shading caused by editing the mesh, with the inverting of the channels.

 

Ottemis has a guide on correcting normal maps that don't load properly in photo editing programs. Follow that and then do your inversions on top of that and see if it helps.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Dmitrias

[SAWAK]

I did follow the guide you link me to, completely and partially. It's just ends up with different kind of mess.

I have quite fresh photoshop and plugins (nvidia.intel), I have tried both. Normal map looks like combined red and green channels in PH and blue channel is blank black.

I guess its loaded correctly, because I have not find any difference between preview in Mod Maker and in PH, exept in PH its gold instead of blue.

So I tried different settings in plugins, amongt them - I did even add blue color through Nvidia plugin save screen, so it look like the one on the preview in Mod Maker.

Another thing is that Mod Maker does not accept it's genuvine format BC5(ati2n). I was able to import only BC3 and BC1.

[Dmitrias]

Oh, you don't need to follow that guide if you're using the intel plugin - the tutorial was moreso for the nvidia plugin, which has those issues.

 

The intel plugin does have it's own quirk when reading colour channels of normal maps, though - and that is that it blacks out the blue channel, which causes the normal map to look green. This can be fixed by inversing the blue channel. But honestly, considering that you already need to invert the red and green channel for your mesh, I would probably just invert the whole image in one go in this case, rather than doing each channel individually.

 

I don't think the mod maker is all too fussy about the normal map format having to be saved with ATI2N - it does allow you to import DXT5/BC3 compressed images as you noted, and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. So I wouldn't worry about that part.

 

Last bit I would mention is to remember to generate mip-maps if you do not want your mesh to have a sort of fuzzy effect when zooming out, not generating mip-maps on the normal map can do that.

Edited March 9, 2022 by Dmitrias

[SAWAK]

Well, I've inverted whole image and besides normal map look like casual normal map now(blue) , it made no difference, so it still like on last picture posted.

 

Then I tried different variation with a channels like - invert red and then invert whole image, same with green and vise versa.

I did even tried to flip image lol, but that was just desperate trial. Iooks like promblem is deeper than just invert ,but it looks better than without it anyway.

I feel shame to upload work in that kinda state, but still gonna use it for myself (cause can't stand oversized weapons).

 

Thank you for involvment, it still helped somehow.