Why is my armor shimmery??

[Sweetcakes]

Hey everybody. I have a quick question for all you veteran modders out there.

 

I just created my first piece of custom armor and uploaded the piece to the CS. Everything looks great, except that under certain lighting the armor lights up like a Christmas Tree. It almost appears to "shimmer" like gold. I am assuming that I have something checked that isn't supposed to be checked in either the dds save options or the Normal Map filter options... but I have no idea what it is.

 

Can anyone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

[SavageArtistry]

Hey everybody. I have a quick question for all you veteran modders out there.

 

I just created my first piece of custom armor and uploaded the piece to the CS. Everything looks great, except that under certain lighting the armor lights up like a Christmas Tree. It almost appears to "shimmer" like gold. I am assuming that I have something checked that isn't supposed to be checked in either the dds save options or the Normal Map filter options... but I have no idea what it is.

 

Can anyone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

 

Two things you can check;

 

1. In NifSkope, if you click one of the shiny areas and then expand the section on the left that ends up highlighted, you'll see a little icon of a painter's palette. Click that and it brings up some options to adjust color. There are sliders for shininess. I'm not sure what they should be set for, but you can open a different armor by somebody else and see how they have it set.

 

2. Open your normal map (in Photoshop or Gimp) and check under the Channels tab. You'll see a list of RGB elements and an Alpha layer. If the Alpha layer is not black or dark gray it will cause shininess. Generally you want it to be black. The lighter it is the shinier the armor will be.

[Sweetcakes]

Thank you so much.

It was the Alpha channel. LOL

I feel like such a dork. I can't believe that I overlooked something so simple.

Thank you. Armor is fixed now. ^_^

[ub3rman123]

How do you change the color of the alpha channel? I've been trying for a while in GIMP and have yet to succeed.

[SavageArtistry]

How do you change the color of the alpha channel? I've been trying for a while in GIMP and have yet to succeed.

 

You're right that you can't use the hue/brightness sliders to adjust the Alpha channel (at least in Photoshop). You have to create something in some shade of white, gray or black and then paste it onto the Alpha layer.

 

Here's how I do it:

If I am creating a normal map from a texture, I desaturate the texture, then use the hue/lightness option to make it as black as I can while keeping some details. I select all of this and copy it to the clip board. I then undo the texture back to original and run the nvidia normal map filter to create a normal map.

 

I go to the Channels tab, select the Alpha channel, and paste in the black version.

 

If I just want to make it black, I set Photoshop's colors to black/white, and just hit alt+backspace with the Alpha channel selected to make it black or white.