Make textures that dont reflect any light?

[hopecandecieve]

Well, the title should be pretty self-explanatory, but I'll give the summary anyway. I need to know how to make a texture not reflect any light or glare. I am assuming it has to do something with the _n or _g files coupled with the items texture. The reason I want to know this is because I have made a basement armory with all the weapons (both custom and vanilla) hung on the wall. I enlarged the surgical tray and placed it just over the wall so the wall itslef would appear to be a neutral color. Because with only the weapons on the wall with the surgical tray underneath them, the wall texture makes it difficult to see any of the definition or clarity of the weapons. The problem that I am having is that the surgical trays I am using to cover the wall texture is reflecting light really brightly and causing a glare that bogs down the focus of the details of the weapon textures/models. Any help would be greatly appreciated. All I want to know is how to retex the surgical tray so that it doesnt glare... similar to a matte finish, simple as that. And thanks again for taking the time to read this post.

[shaikujin]

I would say play with the diffuse map. The *_n.dds ones. I used gaussian blur to smooth out the metal parts that should not have hair on my dogmeat armour mod.

 

I'm guessing you can add an solid black overlay to darken everything, or even just fill everything with black.

[bekru]

i think you can adjust the alpha channel in the _n between all black/all white for various amounts of reflection. Or copy paste your color map to the alphachannel to make a grayscale copy and then lighten and darken that. Try it out, im still new so i wouldnt take my word for it.

 

how did you 'hang' the weapons on the wall? Can you lock items in place somehow?

[The SH0CKER]

I found if you copy your diffuse map and paste it onto the alpha channel of your normal map, you won't see any reflections.

[hopecandecieve]

The way I hung my weapons on the wall is that I added everything I wanted static into the static category in the GECK item list. No alteration needed :). All of the vanilla weapons are already there actually, the only ones I added were ones I got from the nexus. And I wish I could understand you guys about the texture alterations jargon lol. I feel like a dufus here... Could one of you maybe explain what you posted in lamens terms possibly? If any1 feels REALLY generous lol, sum1 could make a non reflective matte retexture for the surgical tray for me... :yes: Please? lol Well, hopefully someone will give me an explanation for a stupid person at least. And thanks guys for replying at least.

[shaikujin]

Alpha channels/gaussian blur etc are functions commonly found in graphic editing software like photoshop.

 

Adjusting alpha channels will adjust how dark or white the picture is. Gaussian blur is used to blur/even out the details of a picture.

 

If you don't have grahics editors, try checking the stickies for opensource/freeware. Give it a go, it brings another dimension of enjoyment to make your own mods :D

[SickleYield]

Yes, you will need Photoshop, GIMP or another program. (I haven't tried paint.net but a few people use that.) You will need the .dds and normal map plugins which are readily accessible via Google search.

 

Here is the simplest way in GIMP.

 

Once you have the program and its bits installed, open the normal map.

 

Press E for the eraser tool. Set it to 90% using the slider on the main GIMP screen (or by typing in the little box beside the slider). You can scale the cursor size and so on here too - make it very large and turn off the "fade out" option.

 

Now erase the entire normal map with this 90% eraser.

 

It retains its level of detail but is now very matte in game.

 

If you get a little more advanced we can move on to spec mapping, which is a bit more difficult (copying the diffuse over will not always work). You do that by choosing layer--add layer mask and the "transfer layer's alpha channel" option. Then you can alt-click between the layer and its spec map. If you copy the diffuse, which means the regular texture, into this (copy and paste), you will get a grayscale copy of it as your spec map.

 

Sometimes that works well. Sometimes not. If you've got a light-colored surgical tray the spec map you would get as a result would be too pale and thus too shiny. (In this case the color tools -- brightness/contrast tool is your friend, or the color--invert.)

 

Either way, when you're done choose layer--apply layer mask before you save.

[hopecandecieve]

Actually Im using Photoshop CS3. Could someone possibly give me a run down on how to do it using that? And I already have the .DDS plug-in installed on it.

[Deleted1084753User]

Extract the surgical tray from the meshes BSA file, as well as its normal map (surgicalequipment01_n.dds) from the textures BSA. Open up the normal map in photoshop and go to the Channels tab on the right of the screen, same location as the Layers. You'll see a black & white image called Alpha1, this is what makes the tray all shiny. If you literally want to make it completely matt, simply select the alpha layer, then use the brightness and contrast tool to darken it until it's basically just black (you could also just flood fill with black), then save the normal map using DXT5 compression using the dds tools plugin, putting it in the Textures folder, doesn't matter where, though if you use the same folder as the original make sure to rename it to something new so you don't have ALL medical trays becoming matt.

 

Next you'll need nifskope if you don't have it already (Here). Open up the tray mesh you extracted and expand the tree on the left like this:

 

http://narcess.net/nif/nifskope1.png

 

Select BSShaderTextureSet as shown in the piccy, then down in the lower pane of the program, expand the Textures option. You'll see a bunch of tex applied to the tray, all you need to do is right click on the second one (which is the _n normal map), select Texture then Choose, and then find and apply your new normal map. Then save the mesh (with a new name, surgicaltraymatt.nif or something), this time in the Meshes folder, again it doesn't matter where.

Now open up GECK and filter All down to SurgicalTray01. Open it up and rename it to SurgicalTray01Matt (or whatever you want), change the nif to your new custom one, then hit ok and click Yes to create a new form. Job done, you now have a custom tray with a totally matt finish :)

 

Original Tray:

http://narcess.net/nif/original.png

 

Matt version:

http://narcess.net/nif/matt.png

 

Final note: if you don't want to do all the extra work to make your own custom tray and just want to make all trays matt, just do the photoshop part and then save the normal map with the same location as the original (textures\clutter\surgicalequipment01_n.dds). I assume you already have archive invalidation set up (either with ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated! or Fallout Mod Manager), since that'll probably be necessary for this to work.

 

Hope that helps :)

[KloHunt3r]

What .dds file settings should I use for saving normal maps? Whenever I save a file as a DXT1 the model comes out completely matte. But when I save it as a DXT5 the model reflects too much light.