Editing glossiness

[dbbolton]

How do you control how glossy some part of a texture is?

[ArekkusuStorm]

I think the Alpha Channel of the Normal Map will let you do that.

[Deleted2547005User]

That or the glossy setting on the shader node of the mesh. Both can work together, or against each other.

[dbbolton]

ArekkusuStorm: What exactly am I supposed to do with the alpha channel?

 

Kuroitsune: Are you talking about the "glossiness" entry under NiMaterialProperty in NifSkope? I tried playing with this and couldn't really tell any difference in game. I also have no idea what the scale of values is, i.e. what's considered a low or high value.

[ArekkusuStorm]

(In the Alpha Channel) For the areas where you want it to be more glossier, make it lighter, everything has to be in greyscale so white makes it very shiny where as black makes it dull. If you want the entire texture to have the same amount of glossiness then just fill the Alpha Channel with the same colour (Some shade of grey would be best)

Edited September 16, 2013 by ArekkusuStorm

[dbbolton]

Thanks for the clarification.

 

I tried this with the GIMP, but it doesn't seem possible (it looks like you can only remove parts of the alpha channel but you can't just use the paintbrush tool with arbitrary values). However, it worked in Photoshop. At first, I was confused on how to save the DDS file because there are a lot of options. I ended up choosing "explicit alpha" and that seemed to work.

 

When I launched the game, with my new _n.dds loaded into my mesh, I didn't really notice a difference. Then I edited the glossy value mentioned earlier and it seemed to work, so I believe it's a combination of both the normal map and the material property.