Adding "leather effect" to clothing mod, Need Help

[Heiligenia]

Having only recently become addicted to the mod possibilities of Fallout 3, I am finding myself completely mystified by what seems to be a simple problem. Perhaps its a basic question for the more experienced members of the mod community, I don't really know. Hopefully someone can guide me in the right direction.

 

I am crafting some new clothing types and have been having some trouble adding specular variation, or the "shine" effect. In particular, I painstakingly assembled a Brahmin-hide patchwork-style leather skirt and jacket for a female character, and while I can easily manipulate the textures on the "Diffuse" portion of Geck texture set, or shadow effects within the "Normal/Gloss" portion of the texture set, I am unable to create the needed reflective quality to make the in-game clothing into believable leather. I have downloaded various other files to compare and have found that some of those articles have a reflective component in the "Normal/Gloss" file on the texture set, or "_n" file on the textures folder. I am modifying with Photoshop CS3 with .dds plugin, and whenever I change the file, I lose any reflective components available. In reading other mod descriptions I find that others have modified the specular map for their clothing articles, but no matter how I experiment I am unable to reproduce the effect.

 

To summarize, I am looking for someone to help me create the reflective leather effect for a set of clothing, preferably within the "Normal/Gloss" texture set for the GECK, or the "_n" file in the texture folder.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Ghogiel]

Open the normal map. Add an alpha channel. Paste in your specular map- to create your specular map, if you know of model and texture with the right kind of specular properties you want to achieve- mimic the material properties and specular/diffuse map textures. Once you have your normal and the spec map is in the Alpha channel, save the normal map using a dds compression that retains alpha information, ie dxt5

[Heiligenia]

Dear Mr. Ghogiel,

 

My gratious thanks to you for the quick responce. I realize now that the new images I was making were saving the specular qualities OUT of the map. Even though everything seemed proper, the save type (DXT1, no alpha) was even stopping other people's mods from displaying proper specular qualities. A simple unknown parameter on my part, which has caused three days of fruitless experimentation and unsatisfying web searches, has been exposed in a short paragraph.

 

Cheers, and thanks much for the assistance.

 

**PROBLEM RESOLVED**