Tips on removing hand, feet and neck seams?

[jihadoftomorrow]

I'm fairly experienced with the program.

 

But more specifically, how do I make it so that both the feet, hand and head textures have all matching color tones?

[iansaltman]

If you are referring to the in-game seams it cannot be done, it has been discussed and nobody can fix it.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Are we talking about Vanilla bodies or body mods here?

 

Body mods mostly cover the whole body with 1 single texture file, making it unneccessary to get seperate files to align properly and match in color tone.

That's why they're called "seamless" bodies. There are no differences in material, only matching vertex normals, and no seams in texture between (most of) the individual body parts.

And with Robert's male and female bodies especially it's even hard to notice the wrapping-seams due to their clean and mirroring texture layout.

 

Vanilla textures, to an extent, can also be aligned in a way you can eliminate the seams. But there could be some areas where this will not be easy.

 

The mismatch between heads and bodies, known as the neck seams, unfortunately goes deeper than just textures though.

Even if you could get the border areas of the textures to match and align smoothly (and also the normalmaps, of course), which is just hard but not impossible, you would still have to match the material properties, the vertex normals, and also the coloration information inside the EGT files of both, as those, too, are not matching to begin with.

 

It is far from impossible. But it is a hell of a lot of complex tedious work, and depending on your fixes it can cause incompatibility to other things along the way as well.

Edited August 29, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon

[jihadoftomorrow]

Are we talking about Vanilla bodies or body mods here?

 

Body mods mostly cover the whole body with 1 single texture file, making it unneccessary to get seperate files to align properly and match in color tone.

That's why they're called "seamless" bodies. There are no differences in material, only matching vertex normals, and no seams in texture between (most of) the individual body parts.

And with Robert's male and female bodies especially it's even hard to notice the wrapping-seams due to their clean and mirroring texture layout.

 

Vanilla textures, to an extent, can also be aligned in a way you can eliminate the seams. But there could be some areas where this will not be easy.

 

The mismatch between heads and bodies, known as the neck seams, unfortunately goes deeper than just textures though.

Even if you could get the border areas of the textures to match and align smoothly (and also the normalmaps, of course), which is just hard but not impossible, you would still have to match the material properties, the vertex normals, and also the coloration information inside the EGT files of both, as those, too, are not matching to begin with.

 

It is far from impossible. But it is a hell of a lot of complex tedious work, and depending on your fixes it can cause incompatibility to other things along the way as well.

I see, neck seams seem out of my league.

 

Thanks for the info

[Caithe]

Use scanti's blank egt (search on google, and read how to use it) to disable the coloration of the face. If you use HGEC get Luchaire's body seam reducer.

Then If you can into Photoshop (or Gimp, or paint.net) get a dds plugin and fix them and make them match colors. If you use an uniform texture, such as skin, it is pretty easy. Make sure you rebuild the normal map and make the alpha channel the same tone. Make the body double the size of head. For example, my character have a body texture of 4096x4096, head of 2048x2048 and hands of 1024x512. Since I have a detailed, non uniform skin, it took me about 2 weeks to make them match, and it is still not perfect. But it is close enough that you have to actually pay good attention to see it.

Edited August 29, 2011 by Caithe

[LFact]

Note: Even with blank egt or disabling FaceGen texture(by editing Oblivion.ini), it's not possible to eliminate neck seam completely. Believe or not, it still can be seen depending on weather and lighting condition.

[Caithe]

^ true but still, it is usually not even noticeable. What I experience is that the shadow seems to appear on the head before the body, so just moving away, closer or to a different angle to the light source will usually fix it and you cannot see a seam in the neck anymore. I found it harder to do with Head06 than Ren head though. But then again, I never put as much effort with it.

 

If you really cannot hide it, use clothing that hide it or remove it with photoshop or what ever other image editing program afterward.

Edited August 29, 2011 by Caithe

[socko33]

dont know if someone will read this but..... i have the same issue but the hands and feet are white like really white i never noticed this on xbox version just pc oblivion and its bugging the sh17 outta me

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, quite the necro-post, and most likely completely unrelated, too, but link some screenshots and post your load order / the mods you use, and we might be able to figure out the source of your issues.

For what it's worth, white hands and feet doesn't sound like anything I've ever read or heard of so far in my 12 years of modding this game though. I know purple (missing textures), pitch black or invisible (missing normalmaps), but never heard anything of white. Though maybe it's something else than what your writing gives away, and we'll see it better in a screenshot for ourselves.