LE Why do my normal maps look like garbage

[ZurinArctus85]

I have GIMP and I made some normal maps for some armor I'm working on, but when I put them ingame they look terrible. The diffuse map is 512x512 and the normal has been tested at 256, 512, and 1024 with the same trashy results. I also tried normal maps from Ebony 4K and they still looked like garbage. What am I doing wrong?

[FrankFamily]

can you post a screen on the specific "garbage" you are getting?, check you are saving as dxt5, does the normal look "normal" in gimp? something along this kind of blue and purple is the usual. Also note that skyrim expects +x-y and not +x+y which may be more common, so you may want to try inverting green channel and see if that improves the look. Wrongly inverted green channel will result in convex stuff looking concave and vice versa in some angles.

 

Also check the actual mesh, the problem could be aswell in the nif settings

 

http://www.fagurd.com/images/extra/MOGF/MOGF_Normal.png

Edited June 22, 2016 by FrankFamily

[ZurinArctus85]

can you post a screen on the specific "garbage" you are getting?, check you are saving as dxt5, does the normal look "normal" in gimp? something along this kind of blue and purple is the usual. Also note that skyrim expects +x-y and not +x+y which may be more common, so you may want to try inverting green channel and see if that improves the look. Wrongly inverted green channel will result in convex stuff looking concave and vice versa in some angles.

 

Also check the actual mesh, the problem could be aswell in the nif settings

I think I just needed to invert Y. I've been doing X+ and Y+ in the plugin. When I load it into skyrim it just looks very bubbly and pixellated. I've scrapped that mod, but thanks for letting me know Skyrim expects Y- for future reference.