New guy on the block needs some with re-texturing

[LlamaXD]

(EDIT: Screwed title up, it's meant to be New guy on the block needs some help with re-texturing.)

Fairly new to the modding scene, I'm made a few personal mods for myself over the years, and I've decided to give Skyrim a go.

Problem is I don't really know where to start with re-texturing (which is what I'm primarily going to do until the CK comes out.)

Basically I'm just looking for some advice from some people who are experienced with re-texturing.

 

Specific Questions:

To increase the size of a texture can I simply double the size (then edit it to a higher quality)?

How exactly would I improve the skin textures?

As an example, I was editing the female dark elf head texture to remove the wrinkles, but all I could figure to do was to use the spot healing brush, is there a better way to do something like this?

Mipmaps, how do they work?

Is there a way to check if a texture matches up properly on it's model without launching Skyrim? Or is checking in Skyrim the fastest way?

 

Looking for general advice in the areas of:

 

Armour, weapon and skin re-texturing.

 

 

Thanks for all and any help. (I hope this is in the right sub-forum)

Edited December 16, 2011 by LlamaXD

[darthsloth74]

Enlarging textures as a rule is not a good idea. Scaling down you can get away with. The problem is that all the original textures are very low res so enlarged details are lost and the result is a pixellated, blocky and undesirable texture.

 

I only enlarge textures to serve as a reference for repainting not the texture itself. I can't write a full tutorial here because theres so much to cover.

 

Important to note is that you are working with images that have been compressed, painting over them and saving again further compresses them and makes them look nasty. I would suggest you try to paint them from scratch, there are a lot of useful reference textures on sites such as http://www.cgtextures.com/ which can be useful to any artist that wants to create improved textures and not simply enlarge stuff and run a sharpen filter on it, to me thats simply bad photomanipulation not texturing.

[LlamaXD]

This site looks great thanks for the link.

 

I don't plan on just sharpening textures, just seems really lazy.

I'm currently working on making the war paints a higher quality and improving facial textures (without making the characters look like dolls.)

 

 

My current method for improving war paint quality is doubling their current size then pen tooling them into a mask. From there I edit in the little details.

So once I'm done re-creating the texture I should scale the image back down to it's normal 512^2 size?

[darthsloth74]

This site looks great thanks for the link.

 

I don't plan on just sharpening textures, just seems really lazy.

I'm currently working on making the war paints a higher quality and improving facial textures (without making the characters look like dolls.)

 

 

My current method for improving war paint quality is doubling their current size then pen tooling them into a mask. From there I edit in the little details.

So once I'm done re-creating the texture I should scale the image back down to it's normal 512^2 size?

 

Good to hear. Masking is the best way to do most retexturing. It allows you more control if things go wrong and it helps to make easy adjustments. The real boring stage is doing all the masking for a full outfit/body etc but its worth the effort.

In regard to your war paint textures it depends if you want a higher resolution, obviously higher res means performance drain for some especially when a lot of textures are affected. Try one at 1024x1024 make sure you save the document for later editing and do one at 512x512. I guess you could upload both versions if you want to be more friendly for users with older PC's. Try it out and see you only learn by doing.

[aoikun]

Just want to say this, search for info on normal and specular maps, changing only the colormap wont work (warpaints are safe though).

 

I can't go into detail now (it's 3 in the morning and I'm kinda sick xD) but just in case you don't know anything, the normal maps are textures that "fakes" 3d like detail in the mesh surface, so, if you do a new texture and you don't do a new normal map, those details won't likely match your texture and the model will look weird. Specular maps on the other hand change the way light reflects on the mesh, so same thing.

 

Those characters that look like dolls are a good example of this, those mods probably have poor normals and even worse specular maps, wich results in faces that shine like plastic. As to how to make them, well for specular you can do them without much trouble in photoshop or whatever yo use, normal maps are more tricky, the best way is to bake them from high poly versions of the model, but you can use the nvidia's photoshop filter and do them with that too.

 

There are more types of maps but those are the basic and very very important, trust me, I can't stress enough how important this is, nail'em and your textures will look much better. I just assumed you didn't know anything about 3d texturing, if you knew this stuff, well, the advice is the same, good normals and specularity equals better quality.

 

PS: Please, excuse my grammar, as I said I'm sleepy, fever keeps rising and you might have noticed English is not my native language :psyduck:

Edited December 16, 2011 by aoikun