Skyrim Texture editing

[Maicol8708]

Hi, guys I would like to have a tutorial of how to edit your own texture, and make them realistic, in Skyrim. I what to fix a mod with the dragonscale armor but don't know how to make it look realistic.

 

Please help me understand these things.

 

Thanks in advance, gentlemen.

[cojaca2]

Making textures realistic is accomplished mainly in one of two ways. The first is to use a photgraph and turn it into a texture, which is pretty easy. Since dragon's are not real, however, that won't quite work for dragonscale armour, which means that you would probably have to either try to find some sort of lizard skin that looks how you envision dragon scales, or paint it yourself.

 

If you need to paint it yourself, the realism is dependent on your artistic ability - there's no real 'easy' way to go about it if you haven't had practice doing that sort of thing.

 

In order to edit a Skyrim texture, you need to first extract it from the textures.bsa using a program like the fallout mod manager (And a few others, but fomm is the one I use). This will give you .dds files, which you need a plugin for your image editor to open. (There are free ones for all the common image editors - If you're looking for an editor I would recommend GIMP, mainly because it is free.)

 

Once you open the texture you can start editing it.

 

That's the basics, I don't know if you need anything else, but feel free to ask if you do.

[Maicol8708]

But how do I find fitting pictures/photos to make the texture and I can't understand the logics with the texture editing. I mean how they look like, what is a blade, what is a handle and wha tis a cloth part. So if I can't understand this, is texture modding not for me then?

[Matth85]

You find fitting pictures by having a camera, buying a library of pictures and having some creativity.

The blade of a sword? Metal texture, clean. Could also make your own with filters inside photoshop.

Handle of a sword? Most likely leather or hard rubber. Both very common. Can be made yoursself.

Cloth? ... eh.. cloth?

 

You need to know what material certai parts are. You make an armor, you need to ask yourseld: What is metal? What kind of metal? What is leather? What is cloth? What kind of cloth? etc.

It is not really hard. You want a 3d model to get a texture, a color. You want metal texture? You make a metal texture by filters or by a photo.

[Arriere]

There are two different things: one is making the texture and the other is mapping the texture to the mesh.

 

Creating the texture:

To make the texture you need a paint program. PhotoShop is probably the best but expensive. Paint Shop Pro is only $50 but it is pretty good. Gimp is free but not entirely intuitive. I use Gimp and Paint Shop Pro. Things to do are cop, paste, rotate, layers (very important), etc. You just have to learn to use the tool. I cheat and start with photos from the internet. Sometimes they are not even of the object in question - for instance, I might take a photo of a sheet of steel as a starting point. Then I edit and layer until I get what I want. There is no single "right way" to do it.

 

Mapping to the mesh:

If you are just editing an existing texture then don't worry about it, the mapping has already been done for you. Just keep things in the same place and you're good. For your own meshes you are going to have to use a 3d modeling tool to do UV mapping. Again, a learning curve and different with each tool. I use Blender.

[jsnider193]

If you want to get a start on textures might consider a search on the web for something like Free Textures .. Free Stock Textures ... and so on. There are many sites out there that have royalty free use textures that can give you an idea of what might be available. Oh and cameras at a museum work fine also. Edited December 21, 2011 by jsnider193

[Matth85]

If you want to get a start on textures might consider a search on the web for something like Free Textures .. Free Stock Textures ... and so on. There are many sites out there that have royalty free use textures that can give you an idea of what might be available. Oh and cameras at a museum work fine also.

 

I would not recommend a new texture artist to go right into photos. That wil rend him/her useless when a problem hit, like a fantasy material pops up. I recommend learning how to paint textures and use filters to gain some. The I recommend going to CGTextures.com and grab whatever texture you need.

[TemporaryJunk]

I opened a sword texture in GIMP and added runes to it, now I'm looking for a way to make those runes glow in the dark in game. Any advice?

[Matth85]

I opened a sword texture in GIMP and added runes to it, now I'm looking for a way to make those runes glow in the dark in game. Any advice?

You would need a glow map, or something similar, to do so. It is usually a texture ending with _g or something like _em. Most used it _g though.

Then all you need to do is paint what you want to glow, and pain which color you want it to glow.

Lastly you fix it up in Nifskope by editting values to make it glow right.