help :creating custom textures in gimp and or blender

[wastlander]

Hi

I am looking to begin creating a few custom replacements for the various paintings in Fallout 4. I would like to create some normal maps and specular maps to make a FO4 dds texture files that modifies the various Bethesda originals textures files from the Cabot house,specifically the portraits of the family to look like more like old oil 19th century paintings.

 

 

I have managed to locate and extract a couple textures via the B.A.E. I have also found appropriate image resources to layer onto the original in order make painting surfaces look aged and varnished.

 

I have installed Gimp 2.8 with normal map and .dds plug- ins and Blender installed.

I have found a few tutorials on youtube that were ok but they could be more precise as to how to mod all three dds files

 

Question 1-Can any one suggest any really good absolute beginner guides, or make any detailed suggestions as to how to create normal and specular maps in Gimp 2.8 or Blender and covert it back to dds.

 

Question 2-: the texture files for all the paintings appear throughout various texture BSA.

When modding/replacing the texture of specific in game images for example the paintings of kittens, or other in game framed pictures do the 3 moded replacement textures ( _d_dds ,_ n_dds and s_dds ) files need to be put back in the exact same file for example Textures6 .BSA/ Textures/ SetDressing /PaintingsGeneric? Or can these replacement files just be put back in to the DATA folder and marked only with their Original file name in a textures folder?

 

 

 

many thanks

wastlander

[throttlekitty]

1) A suggestion for normal/spec: You're probably going for an oil painting look? For normals, you can paint in some relief and run a normal map filter in GIMP. Start with a middle grey (127,127,127 RGB), use darker colors for valleys and lighter for peaks. You could probably trace over the image in a new layer to simulate thick strokes with a 'brush-y' looking brush, and discard the color image when you're done. The spec and gloss map won't vary much at all across a painting unless there's dust on it. I'd stick with a middle-lowish tone for the gloss map and middle-high for specular. I don't have any tutorials for you, sorry! (there's a 2d/3d section at the bottom of the nexus forums, might wanna look there)

 

Now that I read your post again, I should mention that _s has two textures: Specular and Gloss packed into the red (spec) and green (gloss) channels. However, not all dds decompressors are working properly for the format used (.dds BC5), so they're getting swapped and/or broken. Personally i don't use GIMP, but i should really check to see how it handles these, but others have said it works no problem.

 

2) I don't think we can repack BA2 files yet? (i'm a little out of the loop) But either way, you can leave them "loose" in the game folders, using the same path and filename as the original. If your mod has a lot of new textures, it would be preferable to pack them in your own .ba2 file*, named something appropriate for your mod, or matching the .esp if applicable. (I believe we will need to make entries for each mod's .ba2 files as we did with skyrim)

 

*This is because of the way textures are stored now, they are much more memory friendly than having just loose .dds files.