LE Help with naming a mod and several Qs regarding textures.

[Fatalmasterpiece]

Hi folks. I am working on a retexture of all of Skyrim's hair by hand painting them in PS. I want to stay away from this annoying trend of "Detailed" this and "Realistic" that or "Better" etc... What is a good way to name a mod so it get's the point across, grabs someone's attention and doesn't look like yet another "I put this texture in photoshop and increased the contrast" mod?

 

Also, usually in my texture work I use the same image size but I would like to increase the ppi and attributes. Can I just scale up the image, work from there and Skyrim will still apply them correctly?

 

Finally, I"ve got several plug ins for Normal maps but they are usually poor quality or grainy. Can anyone suggest something that would work better for hair?

 

Thanks.

[MrDave]

Hi folks. I am working on a retexture of all of Skyrim's hair by hand painting them in PS. I want to stay away from this annoying trend of "Detailed" this and "Realistic" that or "Better" etc... What is a good way to name a mod so it get's the point across, grabs someone's attention and doesn't look like yet another "I put this texture in photoshop and increased the contrast" mod?

 

Also, usually in my texture work I use the same image size but I would like to increase the ppi and attributes. Can I just scale up the image, work from there and Skyrim will still apply them correctly?

 

Finally, I've got several plug ins for Normal maps but they are usually poor quality or grainy. Can anyone suggest something that would work better for hair?

 

Thanks.

Howdy,

For a mod name, just keep it simple, like Hair, or Hair, Skyrim. People will check it regardless of the name. :)

Okay now on to the business of textures...

As long as you are keeping them 8x power of 2 you will be fine for size. I haven't looked at them to see what their default sizes are, so if you want to get a good amount of detail, go ahead and just double them. You can leave the DPI at 72. That's how it's gonna get read anyway. Even 1200 DPI will look identical to 72 in game... except for Flash games, where DPI actually changes what you see (i.e. 1200DPI becomes 1 pixel in size).

 

Make sure you are working with a transparent background if you intend to make your own alpha channels. This way after you have the whole thing done you can save it out directly from layered PSD file to DXT5ARGB .dds file. After you save it, open that new file along side your PSD file. Then on the PSD file, slip in a black background under the texture and copy merged (CTRL A, CTRL SHIFT C) and paste that to your .dds file to remove any artifacts. Merge the layer down and re save. The DXT format will automatically make you an alpha channel based on the opacity of your PSD image, so the first .dds you make will have a correct alpha channel, but will most likely have a white background. If it has a black background, disregard the additional steps to making one.

 

For normal maps: bump, normal, AO, glow, specular all work on the same principal of values. The brighter the area is, the higher/shinier the texture will be in game. The darker the area is, the more dull (matte)/lower the texture will be.

If you want to just make your normal map from your hair texture using its own contrasts, this is fine. Just remember that the alpha channel of the normal map is your specular map. So if you paste in a copy of the hair texture with a black background into the normal map's alpha channel you will just need to do a contrast/brightness adjustment to get it to where you think it should be in game. This may take some testing to get correct.

 

When you go to apply the nVidia normal map filter, make SURE the texture is flattened first. In the normal map tools, a scale of 4 is usually good for hair, but you can take it up to 6 if needed. Once applied, you may see some noise on it while zoomed in. If so, just hit it with Filter-> Blur-> Blur once. That will clean it up a lot. :)

 

I'll bookmark this thread in case you have any more questions. Oh yeah... and make SURE to save the normal map as DXT5ARGB. You can save it as DXT3 but the size difference doesn't warrant the loss of quality for something so detailed as hair.

 

EDIT: OOPS I forgot to mention... for the normal map, if you use the hair texture, sample the darkest color of the hair and use that for the background color, so the edge of the hair isn't a drastic jump.

Edited December 1, 2011 by Mr. Dave

[Fatalmasterpiece]

Thank you so much. I am guessing you use that black backround trick to avoid the white outlines that sometime creep up?

 

It's going to take me a while but I haven't seen anyone really retexture all the vanilla hair before and it really needs it. Luckily digipainting hair is a talent of mine. I may possibly go back over the entire normal with the smudge tool to "fix" it if need be but that will take a lot of time. Hopefully the blur will fix it where it needs it.

 

Thank you again.

[MrDave]

Thank you so much. I am guessing you use that black backround trick to avoid the white outlines that sometime creep up?

 

It's going to take me a while but I haven't seen anyone really retexture all the vanilla hair before and it really needs it. Luckily digipainting hair is a talent of mine. I may possibly go back over the entire normal with the smudge tool to "fix" it if need be but that will take a lot of time. Hopefully the blur will fix it where it needs it.

 

Thank you again.

Yup! The black background makes sure that no halo is seen... it is still there, but the eye regards it as a shadow, therefore telling the brain "yeah, that's supposed to be there" lol.

If you need to do smudging to clean it up (time consuming yes, but it is still, even after a decade in the industry, my favorite method of fine tuning) do so on the texture that is to become the normal map and not on the normal map after the filter has been applied. Get the texture nice and smooth, then when you apply the normal map filter it will come out already fixed. The reason you don't want to smudge the normal map if it can be avoided is due to the alterations of the R and G it does. This can cause the normal map to give false readings, making it work improperly.

The blur after applying usually works. Using blur on the before image can cause problems. Keep an eye out if using blur on the texture to be normal mapped if it is in layers still, that you don't get a white halo around your outside edges. It's a bug in PS that's been there forever. If you do end up with any kind of white halo, you can either erase it with a soft brush, or try Layers-> Matting-> Defringe and just leave it at 1 pixel. This cleans up any kind of artifacts around the edges, but hardens them up some.