How do I assign one normal map to multiple textures?

[chaospearl]

I'm making my first foray into the graphics end of modding, and I'm puzzled over this. I started out simply by doing some retextures of my favorite vanilla clothing; things I love the style and feel it ought to come in more colors. My efforts have been successful except for one snag. I can't figure out how to use the same normal map for all the different colors of an item. I know this is possible somehow because I looked in the texture folders of some mods that have the same item in multiple colors, and they'll have stuff like "purpleshirt.dds" and "orangeshirt.dds" and "blueshirt.dds" and then "shirt_n.dds" ... all those colors of shirt are using just the one normal map. Howinhell do I do that? I've just been making copies of the normal map file and renaming them to go with all my different colored textures. Oblivion seems to absolutely insist on having a normal map file with the exact same name as the texture only with _n on the end, and if that file is not there, the clothing displays as invisible when I wear it. So I end up with literally a dozen copies of the same identical map file in my texture folder, which seems like a bloaty waste. Help!

[razorpony]

I'm not sure about tacking things onto the beginning of the name, but I've seen things added to the end after the _. For instance, if you had Shirt_Black, Shirt_Blue, Shirt_Orange, etc. You could have Shirt_n as your normal map because Oblivion ignores the rest of the name after the _.

 

-Razorpony

[chaospearl]

I'm not sure about tacking things onto the beginning of the name, but I've seen things added to the end after the _. For instance, if you had Shirt_Black, Shirt_Blue, Shirt_Orange, etc. You could have Shirt_n as your normal map because Oblivion ignores the rest of the name after the _.

 

A-HA!! That's probably how the other mods are doing it... I didn't pay much attention to whether or not the file names had _'s or where the _'s were placed. I'll go take a look and I bet you're right. Thanks!

[LHammonds]

We first found this trick because the vanilla glass armor/weapons use this trick. Be warned though, make sure your texture names do not share the existing special names of "_n" which is for Normal Maps or "_g" for Glow Maps.

 

Example of a boo-boo

 

Color Maps

Shirt_red.dds

Shirt_neon.dds

Shirt_green.dds

Shirt_blue.dds

 

Normal Maps

Shirt_n.dds

 

Glow Maps

Shirt_g.dds

 

The game engine might just pull "Shirt_green.dds" as your glowmap because it sees "Shirt_g" and the same goes for "Shirt_neon.dds" for a normal map because the engine will find "Shirt_n"

 

To keep this from happening, simply name your Color maps with an extra character:

 

Color Maps

Shirt_xred.dds

Shirt_xneon.dds

Shirt_xgreen.dds

Shirt_xblue.dds

 

Normal Maps

Shirt_n.dds

 

Glow Maps

Shirt_g.dds

 

LHammonds

[chaospearl]

We first found this trick because the vanilla glass armor/weapons use this trick. Be warned though, make sure your texture names do not share the existing special names of "_n" which is for Normal Maps or "_g" for Glow Maps.

 

LHammonds

 

Whoa, thanks for the advice! I just went through all my recolored textures and thankfully none of them begin with G or N, but it was pure luck. Fortunately I haven't had much success in Paintshop creating a "gold" color I'm satisfied with, and as green is my favorite clothing color, I've got a lot of different shades of it so I tend to name them "forest" or "apple" or "jade" rather than simply green. But I'm sure it'd only have been a matter of time before I named something velvetshirt_grassgreen and then couldn't figure out why every shirt I'd made suddenly glowed in the dark, lol. Much obliged to you both; everything works in-game as it's supposed to and my textures folder is now half the size. Brilliant.

[LHammonds]

The thing with gold is that it has to be shiny to "pull it off" from my experience. That is where the Reflective Metal technique really comes in handy. If you have a model that has mixed materials, it is best to physically separate the model and assign different materials to each and configure the gold component like the tutorial describes.

 

Gold and Silver have a different "look" to the metal when lighting is applied so having a solid color is very hard to emulate the "gold" look. If the Reflective Metal technique is not desired, you will have to create a "fake" look which won't look quite right with dynamic lighting but will be better than not faking it.

 

Examples:

 

Here is a gold-colored gun with a faked painting making it look like there is dynamic lighting. Looks good when static but if dynamically moving around, it might look a bit odd (shadows being in the wrong place, etc.)

http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/Conan_Lon/Oblivion/WIP/ZatGun_Model.jpg

 

Here is the same model with a solid gold color but with dynamic lighting. Looks good in static position as well as when the lighting is dynamic. (right-hand pic)

http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/Conan_Lon/Oblivion/WIP/ZatGun.jpg

 

I don't have an example of the gun without the texture AND without dynamic lighting but you can easily imagine the gun looking extremely bland (solid color with no variance).

LHammonds