Retexturing Problem

[David Brasher]

I am retexturing one of the outfits. One of the suits of clothing that comes complete with multiple pieces such as blouse, skirt, and shoes. You equip the single outfit rather than three individual pieces of clothing.

 

The one I am working on is UpperShirt03, the vanilla Oblivion Blue Velvet Outfit. I retextured the top half just fine. Then when I apply the other new texture to the bottom half, nothing happens. The new mesh shows that it has the new texture that is not blue, but it shows up in the CS and game as being blue. I look at the UV map of the skirt part of the outfit in NifSkope and discover that the whole texture is transparent except for the gold belt. There is no blue anywhere on the whole texture! The points and lines on the portion of the UV map referring to the skirt are all on a blank black portion of the map.

 

How does this work? How can it be pointed to a texture that is just black (transparent) , but end up looking blue? How can it look blue after I remove that texture from the model and give it a texture of a different color? How can I fix my outfit?

[David Brasher]

Are there any textures that NifSkope cannot change? I was wondering if there is a way that textures are attached that cannot be seen or adjusted by NifSkope.

 

Is there a way that a texture can be parented to another texture? I cannot for the life of me figure out how a transparent texture can render as blue on the skirt in vanilla Oblivion UpperShirt03, female version. (It really does not seem to be related to material properties.)

 

Does anyone know of any good tutorials that talk about retexturing clothing that comes as a complete outfit rather than individual pieces?

[Isilmeriel]

Don't have my BSA unpacker around so cna't extract the vanilla file to check. The bottom part uses a different texture on its own right?

 

One possibility is that it uses vertex shading for colouring. but that only affects the colour so you should still see your new texture on there (though in a wrong colour). I haven't seen vertex colouring being used for clothes before but it's possible.

[David Brasher]

There are separate textures for the blouse and skirt.

 

The texture for the blouse is what you would expect and has all the parts for the blouse.

 

The texture for the skirt is incomprehensibly strange. It has the golden belt, but the whole rest of the texture is transparent. The UV map shows that the cloth portion of the skirt is supposed to draw its texture from the transparent part. It does not block out a patch of blue velvet, but a patch of black void. It seems like Voodoo or something.

 

I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I looked at things like material properties and emissive properties, and it did not seem like the skirt was being colored without a texture like some items are. It seems like those items are usually smooth or featureless kinds of items rather than things with detailed wrinkles and folds and a matte surface.

[ub3rman123]

In NifSkope, the UV editor only shows one iteration of the texture, but it really loops and repeats endlessly.

 

Did you include a normal map for your texture?

[wetblanket]

That's not what he means. If you have a look at the vanilla texture (\textures\clothes\upperclass\pants03f.dds) in an image viewer as opposed to NifSkope, you will understand. The question is where that data (the blue skirt texture) is coming from.

[ub3rman123]

Oh, I see.. Hmm. I can see the blue perfectly in Irfanview, but not in GIMP. Possibly because Irfanview doesn't display transparency. Is it possible the blue part is in the alpha channel?

[David Brasher]

The normal map I am using is a renamed but un-edited version of the vanilla Oblivion one. It is interesting, because the normal map shows both the skirt and the belt, not just the belt like the regular .dds file does.

 

EDIT: Fascinating. After ub3rman123 said he could see blue fabric in Irfanview, I saved the image as a .bmp so I could view it in Paint and Windows Photo Viewer. I can see the blue! I will be able to convert the .bmp into a .dds and continue on with my retexturing project.

 

Apparently GIMP has some severe limitations I did not know about. I wonder what Bethesda used to create Oblivion? Photoshop? Some high-powered professional program we haven't heard of?

 

Kudos to ub3rman123.

Edited June 22, 2011 by David Brasher

[ub3rman123]

I remember having this problem when I was recoloring a sword from Nexon's Armory. It only showed a small section of it in GIMP. I solved the problem by simply opening it in Irfanview, and copy-pasting it into GIMP instead of directly opening it.

[wetblanket]

...I can see the blue perfectly in Irfanview, but not in GIMP...

 

Curiouser and curiouser. In Irfanview (4.25) I see the belt only. Same in Paint.net. However, on activating one of the alpha tools (sorry for the vagueness, I'm still learning this stuff), the skirt popped into view.

 

edit. I duplicated the original layer and did some inverted alpha trick (beginner babble) and now have a blue skirt (if a bit washed out and missing some trim) as well as the gold belt so ub3rman123 would appear to be right about it being on the alpha channel.

 

edit2. found the right tool, for paint.net at any rate:

 

http://i.imgur.com/D333K.png

Edited June 22, 2011 by wetblanket