Creating new texture need help with file selection?

[MikeMoss]

Hi

 

I'm experienced in making 3D textures I've been making Poser models and textures for years.

I work by using photos of real people and create the textures from them.

 

So naturally I want to make some textures of my own for Skyrim.

 

I would like to start by making a new face texture for Lydia my companion at this time.

 

I have extracted all the textures and I can open them in Photoshop.

 

The problem is that I can't tell which texture to redo to change Lydia's face, there is no list of characters she must share her face with a zillion other characters.

 

Can anyone tell me which .dds file I need to work on to create a new Lydia?

I'm not even sure what race Lydia is.

 

Do I just change the femalehead.dds file?

 

Is there a list any place that explains the file name format?

I.E. femalehead_msn.dds seems to be a contour map, femalehead.dds is the texture map, so what is femalehead_sk.dds and femalehead_s.dds?

 

 

I would also like to know if there is a constraint on the size of the final texture, in Poser I work at 4,000 pixels width by what ever the depth for a particular item is.

 

I would assume that these have to be smaller but I'd like to make the resolution as high as possible.

I don't think a few high res. texture for faces etc, will affect game performance too much.

 

Mike

Edited December 3, 2011 by MikeMoss

[Ghogiel]

She is a nord. I think that makes her just the regular female face texture

 

_s - specular

_msn - model space normal/object space normal, it's swizzled: G&B channels as swapped, Regular +X&Y orientation,

_sk- skin. You'll have to play with that one, it's not straightforward what it does, I personally would say SSS subdermal layer for various reasons. But the effect is pretty weak if it is.

 

Texture dimensions are required to be 2n. power of 2. ie 2,4,8,16,32...512 ect. Max size will rpobably be 4096, there is often an engine specific ceiling, iirc usual is depending on shader model version. but that'll be you max limit anyway you look at it imo.

 

there are textures in actors\characters\facemods\ that are probably complextion maps tied to every single character in the game, by way of one of their ID hex numbers...

[Galacticat42]

What Ghogiel just said... However if you want to change JUST Lydia then you'll have to wait for the SCK to come out January to change her specific looks.

[MikeMoss]

Hi

 

Thanks guys.

 

Just to check I put a red disk on the forehead of the femaleface.dds and sure enough every female in the game that I saw had a red disk on her forehead.

 

Even the ones on the loading screen.

 

I'll play around with it and when the Creation Kit becomes available I'll try individual characters.

 

I want to try making some custom companions, I had a lot of fun with that in Morrowind.

 

If I can make some good ones that work, I'll post them.

 

Thanks again.

 

Mike

Edited December 3, 2011 by MikeMoss

[MikeMoss]

Hi

 

I might add that it's nice that once you have it done you don't have to reintegrate it into the game files, I just dropped the changed textures into the Data folder and it replaced the default texture without messing with the original files.

 

Mike