LE Ghost ship texture

[BigBizkit]

Hi,

 

I thought I might as well give it a shot and post this as a request.

 

I think many of you might be familiar with the cyrodilic ship resource: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/59426/?

 

I have no experience modeling/texturing so I wouldn't know how far out there the request is, but would it be possible to retexture markusliberty's cyrodilic ship in a fashion that would make it look more "ghost ship"-like? Meaning transparent with a blueish tint like the ghosts in Skyrim.

 

I've contemplated adding a ghost ship to my mod (see below) but wouldn't want to use a "normal" ship for it and the wreck models in the game are not suitable at all.

 

Thanks

[lordanestis]

Hehe i had the same idea friend ghost ship with skeletons or ghosts as a crew!

[crysthala]

Yep, this is perfectly possible, and should be pretty easy as far as mesh things go.

 

There are a lot of really good retexturing tutorials for beginners, which will let you make the ship look blue-ier. To make the ship translucent, you'll need to add alpha data to the actual nif. (Alpha is the fancy computer-speak word for how transparent vs. opaque something is.) Get yourself the latest NifSkope and Google something like "skyrim nifskope nialphaproperty tutorial." If you have trouble with either of these steps, you can try asking the inhabitants of the NifTools forum, as they're often more knowledgeable about models/retexturing than most people on the Nexus.

 

How good it ends up looking very much depends on how the original model is put together, so bear that in mind. There are two bits of really good news, though: it shouldn't take very long, and even if it doesn't look as good as you were expecting, you have learned some new skills. :p

[BigBizkit]

Thanks. I have been contemplating asking for info on how to acquire said skills anyway, as I think there are many possibilities for variation just by doing some minor edits. And. naturally, knowing how to do these myself would be the best outcome.

[crysthala]

Yeah, it's amazing what you can make with even the most basic NifSkope skills. You can hide bits of armor and change a few colors, and it completely changes how the armor looks and feels. And you can use texture sets for most things, too, so you can have a ton of variants on something using only a single model. It's so cool. I love modding.

[Mizati13]

I love this idea. I only downloaded your mod a couple days ago and am already loving it, and ghostship encounters would be amaaaaziiiiiing~~~

[BigBizkit]

I noticed the "SummersetBanner" texture set in the ck applied to the flag I use makes it so the flag has some holes, the preview of the Summerset.dds has no holes though. Since it also has no holes for the Northern Cardinal flag (texture set) I presume that there are "transparency" dots on the texture of the Summerset flag that make it look like that.

 

I am getting GIMP set up as I type this. If I can manage to "retexture" the flag, that is one more step closer to the ghost ship.

Edited February 28, 2015 by BigBizkit

[crysthala]

You're not far off. :p Transparency is expensive to calculate, so even if there's alpha data on a texture, the rendering will ignore it unless the model it's attached to is flagged to render it. That's one of the things the NIAlphaProperty does, in addition to being able to make the mesh itself transparent. The holes aren't showing on those other meshes because, unlike the original banner, they don't have that property. The transparency data is still there, but the engine isn't rendering it. You'll probably find the holes will reappear after the transparency stuff in NifSkope.

 

(Incidentally, if you want to have NIAlphaProperty data on a mesh and get rid of the holes, you can just remove the "alpha" channel from the texture in GIMP and re-save it as a DXT1 texture without transparency, then set that as the new texture path in NifSkope or use it as a texture set in the CK. Tada!)