Speculars are non-optional

[Imrinfected]

From personal experience, I can confirm virtually everything Imrinfected has said. Nice to see I'm not the only one noticing all the awful seams and that nobody is bothering to edit the specular maps. I've had to fix all of those myself. I don't know why, but it seems that people in general don't understand the concept of specularity/shininess, even at the game development college I graduated from. I've also noticed that Skyrim has lots of seam issues to begin with (as many large-scale games seem to).

 

I don't know if it's possible to do so, but I think it might be better to change the topic of this thread to "common issues with texture mods", otherwise most people will probably miss the topic if they don't know what "specular" means.

 

Some important notes:

- The specular maps in Skyrim are not always stored in the alpha channel. Some are stored in separate DDS files with a _S suffix.

- The trick I used to fix the seams was to overlay the modified texture over the original, then use modify selection to feather-delete the edges of the modified texture, so that the texture uses the original seams.

- Regarding upscaling, it may become viable depending on how effective Adobe's new filter will be. As far as I know, it hasn't been released to the public yet.

 

Hope this information helps.

Some are stored in separate files with an _S suffix, you say?

 

I wonder why that is.

[Ghogiel]

Yeah they are for the skin shader. The object space normal map one. They went against putting the spec in those normal map alphas. for what ever reason that is I don't know. :unsure:

[arknor1050]

From personal experience, I can confirm virtually everything Imrinfected has said. Nice to see I'm not the only one noticing all the awful seams and that nobody is bothering to edit the specular maps. I've had to fix all of those myself. I don't know why, but it seems that people in general don't understand the concept of specularity/shininess, even at the game development college I graduated from. I've also noticed that Skyrim has lots of seam issues to begin with (as many large-scale games seem to).

 

I don't know if it's possible to do so, but I think it might be better to change the topic of this thread to "common issues with texture mods", otherwise most people will probably miss the topic if they don't know what "specular" means.

 

Some important notes:

- The specular maps in Skyrim are not always stored in the alpha channel. Some are stored in separate DDS files with a _S suffix.

- The trick I used to fix the seams was to overlay the modified texture over the original, then use modify selection to feather-delete the edges of the modified texture, so that the texture uses the original seams.

- Regarding upscaling, it may become viable depending on how effective Adobe's new filter will be. As far as I know, it hasn't been released to the public yet.

 

Hope this information helps.

easier to to overlay your new texture as a pattern and play with the overlay mode and the transparency then you get to keep all of the original lines

im a complete noob though and maybe thats just lazy.

 

http://i.imgur.com/nbkdj.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ZFgHQ.jpg

 

heres an example looks **** ingame though as my wood texture was far to detailed and just looked messy i should have changed the pattern scale to like 200%

[Ghogiel]

From personal experience, I can confirm virtually everything Imrinfected has said. Nice to see I'm not the only one noticing all the awful seams and that nobody is bothering to edit the specular maps. I've had to fix all of those myself. I don't know why, but it seems that people in general don't understand the concept of specularity/shininess, even at the game development college I graduated from. I've also noticed that Skyrim has lots of seam issues to begin with (as many large-scale games seem to).

 

I don't know if it's possible to do so, but I think it might be better to change the topic of this thread to "common issues with texture mods", otherwise most people will probably miss the topic if they don't know what "specular" means.

 

Some important notes:

- The specular maps in Skyrim are not always stored in the alpha channel. Some are stored in separate DDS files with a _S suffix.

- The trick I used to fix the seams was to overlay the modified texture over the original, then use modify selection to feather-delete the edges of the modified texture, so that the texture uses the original seams.

- Regarding upscaling, it may become viable depending on how effective Adobe's new filter will be. As far as I know, it hasn't been released to the public yet.

 

Hope this information helps.

easier to to overlay your new texture as a pattern and play with the overlay mode and the transparency then you get to keep all of the original lines

im a complete noob though and maybe thats just lazy.

 

http://i.imgur.com/nbkdj.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ZFgHQ.jpg

 

heres an example looks **** ingame though as my wood texture was far to detailed and just looked messy i should have changed the pattern scale to like 200%

As you realised the bark looks like ass. reason being is that noisy, over contrasted, over saturated textures hurt artists eyeballs. Once a texture becomes too busy there is no coherency to it, and you can't discern any feature, your eye isn't drawn in to wander from nice areas that it can rest on..then it flows to pick up interesting and aesthetically pleasing details at closer inspection, no, It's over loaded with junk. BAM take that in the eye sucka!

 

That said some noise and dirtying up is quite common in game textures, imo you don't need to add more s*** to them... done in a blanket fashion across the whole map. be strategic and think about your noise and grunge...

Edited November 21, 2011 by Ghogiel

[CampanaAliquanta]

As someone who is interested in learning how to do textures properly, this thread is full of useful info. Thanks.