Super shiny textures?!

[HejFilly]

First off, let me state that I don't know if this is the right place to post my issue, in which case, apologies in advance. Secondly, I'm still very new to modding and I have a sinking feeling I'm overlooking something so simple, it's bound to make me facepalm when I realize it.

I am currently in the process of retexturing some architecture, simply by modifying already existing textures and then applying them to the meshes of my choosing. But one is... well, malfunctioning, for some bizarre reason.

 

 

 

The left beam is the standard, vanilla mesh and texture and the right beam is the same mesh but with my own texture. The only thing I did with it was to decrease brightness/increase contrast and add a little bit of color. I used the same normal map as the vanilla beam, and yet, there's this insane shine on my modded texture. What's even more confusing is I added the very same texture directly into the creation kit (instead of applying it in Nifskope, and before I applied the texture on the mesh in the program) and the shine was not there.

 

No idea what to do, but I'm pretty sure I just overlooked something. My question is, what?

 

Help please!

[GreyFox77]

So do you have this retextured beam in its own NIF? Or is it simply a Texture Set in the Creation Kit, applied to a clone of the original Static?

 

For me usually this type of glossiness resulted from either:

Texture problem

- a wrong or missing alpha channel (look under Channels in Photoshop, its the 4th) in the normal map DDS

 

But if you used the exact same normal map as the original, then I would say:

NIF problem

- some numbers in the NIF's BSLightningShaderProperty are wrong and are causing this, copy over the BSLightningShaderProperty from the original beam's NIF and only change the Texture Paths.

[volnaiskra]

I'm almost certain that it's the first problem greyfox mentioned. Basically, you need an alpha channel in your normal map. This alpha channel doesn't affect transparency, as you might think, but actually tells the game how to use specularity on your texture. White areas in the alpha channel will make things ridiculously reflective, while black areas will make them matte (and greys will be in between). If you save your normal map without an alpha channel, the game will make it shiny by default.

 

For something like wood, you want it pretty matte, so I'd suggest just making the alpha channel entirely black, or very dark grey. The key is to save the texture in a format that supports alpha channels (eg. DXT3, DXT5, 8.8.8.8 )

[GreyFox77]

I'm almost certain that it's the first problem greyfox mentioned. Basically, you need an alpha channel in your normal map. This alpha channel doesn't affect transparency, as you might think, but actually tells the game how to use specularity on your texture. White areas in the alpha channel will make things ridiculously reflective, while black areas will make them matte (and greys will be in between). If you save your normal map without an alpha channel, the game will make it shiny by default.

 

For something like wood, you want it pretty matte, so I'd suggest just making the alpha channel entirely black, or very dark grey. The key is to save the texture in a format that supports alpha channels (eg. DXT3, DXT5, 8.8.8.8 )

 

Couldn't have said it better myself! One small trick I might add:

 

Sometimes if you're looking to make a quick normal map alpha channel (the so called specular map), you can open the texture (not the _n.dds, but just the .dds) in Photoshop, Desaturate it to remove colour, and then play with brightness and contrast to make it (in the case of wood) very dark with only a few small slightly brighter lines visible.

 

Then you copy and paste this into the normal map's Alpha channel, and save it in the right format as volnaiskra mentioned

Edited October 11, 2014 by GreyFox77

[HejFilly]

Thank you so much, guys, I really do appreciate it. Will try it out immediately!

[HejFilly]

I finally managed to get it to work. Big thanks to both of you, much appreciated!

[volnaiskra]

excellent :)