Texture problems

[Callimachus33]

I've been working on a small mod inspired by Firinneach's "a little leg" mod - basically I wanted to create a new look for the male enchanter robes. I designed the mesh on blender, and the textures for them on Photoshop with the invidia add-on (basically I copy/pasted the body texture I wanted -"theseus" from "Realistic Look", and both the enchanter robes texture sets from the game onto a single file). On blender the robes look fine, but when I wanted to see them in the game I found out that the textures looked as if they were in the in low detail - while the rest of the game was in my regular detail setting.

Next, I decided to take the textures Firinneach made for his mod (I used the ones he made for the male apprentice robes) and copied/pasted on them the desired textures. This time the robes appeared in high detail, but for some reason the details of the original robes could be seen through the new textures (for example, the original apprentice sleeve details could be seen through the new sleeves, like faint unattractive tattoos).

I tried using the higher resolution textures on JBtextures' Mod but that didn't help at all.

So finally I tried mixing and matching the two sets of textures I made (the ones that I made from scratch, and the ones I based on Firinneach's textures), and I think the problem is in the 0n and 0s files, but I don't really know how to proceed.

 

This is the first time I'm making a mod, and I feel on very shaky ground. I the problem in the parameters I used to save the textures? Is it something else? Any ideas?

 

Here are screencaps from both texture sets:

 

First the one I made from scratch -

 

 

 

And next the one I copied/pasted on Firinneach's texture -

[DarkeWolf]

Heyas! Well, I'm afraid that I know VERY little about doing this kind of work. But... did you do TWO SETS of textures? One for low/medium resolution and one for High resolution?

I know that this game makes use of two sets of texture files. One that goes in a medium res folder, and one set that goes into a high res folder. It then makes use of these two different sets in distance. The closer views will use the high res, and the longer distance views will use medium.

 

I dont know if that will help you out or not, but its about all that I know :(

[Callimachus33]

I admit I don't know much about textures, but I'm not sure that's how it works, except in the toolset itself. As far as I know none of the builders who created similar mods made two sets of textures for their works...

[DarkeWolf]

No, not all of them do. But if you want to avoid issues of it shifting textures at distances then you need to have a medium and a high. The baseline is medium. That will work for folks that have their game set for low quality graphics. But, with the setting higher, it will shift to the higher rez textures the closer the camera is to the toon/item.

If you want confirmation of this, go into the install directory of DA itself.

\Dragon Age\packages\core\textures

Inside the textures folder, you'll find two folders. These contain the compressed texture files that came with the vanilla game. There's one labled High and one labled Medium.

 

If you want to check out some of the other folk's mods that have textures included with them, download one that has a .dazip in it. after extracting it from the .zip, .rar, or .7z file that it's in, rename it from .dazip to .zip and open it up.

Or

Go into either your documents/bioware/dragon age/addins folder and look in some of the installed mod files. Some mods install to there. Others are located in your documents/bioware/dragon age/packages/core/override folder.

 

I definitely dont wanna sound like I'm coming off as a know-it-all, cause yeah.... this isnt my field of knowledge, I wholly admit that. I DON'T know much about texturing or 3d work, in general. All I know is what I see in these folders, and when I read requests for the 2nd set of textures in mod's comments.

[Callimachus33]

I don't want to sound dismissive or rude in any way, and what you suggest may well be good for a continuation for this mod, but I don't think it is pertinent to what I was asking about. The problem isn't that the textures are shifting at a distance or that they don't appear properly in some graphic qualities.

They currently don't appear properly in any graphic detail. That is the problem I'm trying to solve first.

[nezroy]

Have you actually edited the normal (n) and specular (s) maps? You can't just edit the diffuse (d) map and copy over someone's n and s maps or else it'll look something like what you're seeing. The n and s maps have important data that affects the final appearance. Also you have to make sure the relevant MAO is pointing at the correct maps too for your variant (if you have a custom variant) or similar. If you aren't using a custom variant and are just doing straight texture replacement then you need to make sure your maps aren't being overridden by other custom maps of the same name from other mods/overrides.

[Asdjask]

Hello,I had nearly the same problem you're describing in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with my X1900XTX. No other games seemed to do it (Crysis wasn't out then). What I discovered was that it had to do with temperature. After playing about 10 minutes the card would get up to 70C and start to artifact, though it didn't lock up. Every other game I played didn't push the card hard enough to get that warm.

[Callimachus33]

Have you actually edited the normal (n) and specular (s) maps? You can't just edit the diffuse (d) map and copy over someone's n and s maps or else it'll look something like what you're seeing. The n and s maps have important data that affects the final appearance. Also you have to make sure the relevant MAO is pointing at the correct maps too for your variant (if you have a custom variant) or similar. If you aren't using a custom variant and are just doing straight texture replacement then you need to make sure your maps aren't being overridden by other custom maps of the same name from other mods/overrides.

 

 

Hmmm... no, I did not... I didn't even know I should, which, I guess shows how inexperienced I am... How do I go about it?

[nezroy]

Hmmm... no, I did not... I didn't even know I should, which, I guess shows how inexperienced I am... How do I go about it?

 

Might start reading on this page for more details: http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/Textureformats

 

But the gist is, the diffuse map is the color of the item, the normal map allows for "fake" geometry, and the specular map controls the appearance of lighting highlights. For a given diffuse map (something_0d) there will be a matching normal map (something_0n) and specular map (something_0s). There should also be a related MAO file (usually something.mao or something_0.mao: http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/MAO. The MAO file is what actually defines which DDS files are used for each map. Lastly, items that have LOD will also have _2* and _3* maps/MAOs that are lower resolution.

 

So if you want to modify something existing, you'd start by extracting ALL of the relevant maps -- 0d, 0n, 0s, 2d, 2n, 2s, 3d, 3n, 3s -- and then modify all of them as needed. Though typically the 2 and 3 LOD ones you just create by scaling down your modified 0* maps.

 

The specular map is easy enough; the color (RGB) channels are just the color of the lighting highlight and the alpha channel controls how intense the highlights are. So it's fairly easy to just copy over your diffuse map and then typically desaturate the color a bit for RGB and put a grayscale copy of the RGB data into the alpha channel and maybe bump the brightness of any metal bits to get some shininess.

 

If you are just recoloring or something, you can typically leave the normal map alone, but if your changes to the diffuse map make the apparent geometry change (which seems to be the case in your example... replacing lots of detail with completely different detail/skin), then you'll have to tweak the normal map. The simplest is to just flatten out the normal map to start (50% gray at 50% alpha), or at least the area you are changing. You can also "fake" a decent enough normal map by just messing around with the emboss tool and a copy of your diffuse map, which is what I do. Or you can literally hand-edit the normal map to create fake geometry for all of your new details to get the absolute best results, but that is a ton of work.

 

Also, not even mentioning tint maps, which add another layer of complexity to both the final color output and correct skin appearance.

[Callimachus33]

Thanks for the reply. I'll try to implement it and see how it goes.