Another highly specific modeling problem...

[SickleYield]

Howdy again. I've been lurking in between arduously teaching myself to model. I now have a functional brand new cuirass, kilt, and sandals for both sexes, on their way to becoming the Crimson Nightshade light armor set. However, I have a problem with them: I can't get them to show any color.

 

It's bizarre. I put on a texture I know is reliable (tried this two or three times), the color shows up in nifskope, and it shows up in the CS. Then I test it ingame and I get black. Not flat black, like you get when the texture path is wrong - all the lines are there, the normalmap bumpiness is there (I like my bumpy normalmaps), but it's all shades of black and gray. I made the models in Blender. There's not much point in making the shield and helmet if all I can get is black and gray.

 

Anybody got a clue?

[Peregrine]

Ok, it's just a random guess, as I haven't looked at import/export for Oblivion...

 

The fact that the normal/specular maps are showing up shouldn't mean anything. If you're doing it like most people, there will be separate images for each, and an error in one map won't cause problems with any of the others.

 

But here's my random guess: 95% of normal/specular/etc maps (anything other than the color map) are done in black and white only (if nothing else, to save file size). But... the software can still work with them if they are in color, it just uses the brightness value of each pixel and ignores the rest. So you might have just switched a few map names, and the game is applying your normal map as a texture, and your color texture as a normal map?

[SickleYield]

But here's my random guess: 95% of normal/specular/etc maps (anything other than the color map) are done in black and white only (if nothing else, to save file size). But... the software can still work with them if they are in color, it just uses the brightness value of each pixel and ignores the rest. So you might have just switched a few map names, and the game is applying your normal map as a texture, and your color texture as a normal map?

 

Thanks, but no banana. The textures I've tried are not renamed, and they're fully functional in my other mod without this sort of problem. I tried three different ones that all work elsewhere, one in bright red, one green, and one shiny black, and none of them work except the one that was black already.

[Vagrant0]

But here's my random guess: 95% of normal/specular/etc maps (anything other than the color map) are done in black and white only (if nothing else, to save file size). But... the software can still work with them if they are in color, it just uses the brightness value of each pixel and ignores the rest. So you might have just switched a few map names, and the game is applying your normal map as a texture, and your color texture as a normal map?

 

Thanks, but no banana. The textures I've tried are not renamed, and they're fully functional in my other mod without this sort of problem. I tried three different ones that all work elsewhere, one in bright red, one green, and one shiny black, and none of them work except the one that was black already.

 

I'm thinking this might have something to do with how the textures themselves are setup. Do both the texture and the normal map have an alpha channel? Or were they exported to DDS unusually? Have you tried applying some standard Oblivion texture to the model, just to see how it shows up in game? If the standard texture doesn't show, then it is something with the model. Either it didn't export right, or there's some setting that needs to be changed somewhere.

[SickleYield]

It's not the textures. I've checked them in every way I know. I also added a default game texture to the mesh and tested it that way, but I still got nothing but a matte surface with the lumps from the normal map. I now conclude that it's a mesh problem. I made a simple decahedral shape from Blender, textured it, and popped it into a collision from an urn, and it worked fine in every possible way with the default texture on it. (I've accidentally made a working soccer ball, natch.) I also opened the default game .dds in Gimp and re-saved it, to eliminate that as a possible screwup. Nope. It still works fine on the object. So the problem seems restricted to the garment meshes.

 

I went back to Blender and reexported my female cuirass. I have "mipmap" and "interpol" selected under texture, I have texface checked in Materials, and I have the texture loaded in both the texture area and in the UV screen. I have the UV checked and set to "tube". I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Now when I export I get the nude parts of the mesh fully visible, but the new cuirass invisible, meaning there's a topless woman running around.

 

I might try a new and simple cuirass-mesh-from-scratch and play with the settings, see if I can figure out where I went wrong before I mess up my other meshes even further.

 

Once again, I appreciate everyone's willingness to help.

[SickleYield]

HA HA HA HAAAAAA! FIXED! Whew. The problem is FIXED.

 

And, as I thought, it was NOT a texture problem. It was a Blender/Nifskope problem. When you expand the NiSourceTexture branch in Nifskope there are a set of numbers going down vertically (they have names too, but I forgot them). The sequence has to be 6,1,3,1,1 for the mesh to show textures ingame. Blender tends to export with them set to something like 5,3,2,1,0. This screws everything up and leads to the nasty black textures that I was getting in Oblivion, even though it still shows the right colors in Nifskope and the CS.

 

I am now in the process of fixing up the texture and the UV maps, which is another time-consuming thing, since tutorials never cover it. This is one of those things that sort of takes art skill, but mostly it takes computer savvy with Blender and the GIMP. (Photoshop is for people with money. :) )

 

The bitter truth is that tutorials like n00b to pro and the CS wiki generally take you just far enough to mess everything up to the point of no return. 90% of my time is being spent on things no one tutorial covers, but

I got this particular bit of info from throttlekitty's rigging thread over on the ES forums, which I've also linked to on the niftools and Psychodog forums:

 

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...0guide&st=0

 

I'm spreading this link around wherever I can, in hopes that new modelers will find it and not give up in frustration. Still clinging to the hope that I'm not just a lone voice crying in the night among all the people going "omg somebody make me this!!!"