[LE] FYI: How to ELIMINATE the appearance of "seams" on custom body

[FavoredSoul]

How to ELIMINATE "seams" on custom body mods

 

Since Oblivion and Fallout there have been visible seams on all of our favorite body mods, whether its around the neck, wrists or feet. Over the years attempts to remove these seams by mod authors have continuously failed, somehow resulting in the false belief that seams are an inevitable side effect of these kinds of manipulations. So much amazing work is being done on facial and bodily textures and it's a shame that this kind of thing is still happening when its so easily fixed. So i've decided to write this short article to prove to everybody that seams CAN BE ELIMINATED.

 

Please examine the following table carefully. Taking a mesh and applying the Normal Map, Diffuse Map and Specular Map to it will reveal seams just like in the pictures below. Loading the erroneous maps in game showed what each seam type generally looks like. Painting out all of the seams resulted in flawless skin:

 

http://www.favoredsoul.com/images/TESV_2011_12_20_15_09_39.jpg

 

If ANY of the Diffuse, Normal or Specular Maps have seams on them you're going to have visible seams on your body. In order to stop seams from appearing you have to paint them out until smooth or continuous. Unfortunately, trying to do this in a 2d Painting Program like Gimp or Photoshop is very, very difficult, unless you want cheap results. The best and easiest way to eliminate seams is by painting them out with a 3d Painting Program such as Mudbox or zBrush. A 3d Painting Program lets you paint directly on the mesh itself. Some clone tool here, a bit of blur there, or a touch of airbrush, and the seams are gone.

 

I've used Better Males by Chris57 to illustrate the common problems experienced with seams on body mods. I'm surprised that I haven't seen any body modification for any of these games that didn't have seams on them, considering how easy they are to fix. Fixing these textures only took about 30 minutes.

 

Only when ALL three maps are perfect can you achieve flawless skin.

 

So:

• If you alter the color of any of the head, torso, hand and feet textures, and don't apply the same changes to ALL of the others, you will create seams.
  
• If you smooth, median, blur, paint, add noise, texture or apply any other aesthetic modification to one of the body textures up to and/or over the boundaries, you will create seams
  
• If you alter the normal map up to or over the boundaries you will create seams.
  
• If you alter the specular map up to or over the boundaries you will create seams
  

 

Don't know where the UV Boundaries are?

 

Why not export a template of your UVs? They generally look like the image below. If you're using Photoshop you can paste it as a new layer and set it to Linear Dodge (Add) mode. Paint within the lines and you won't have problems with seams, otherwise, fix them if you mess them.

 

http://www.favoredsoul.com/images/TESV_2011_12_20_16_14_50.jpg

 

Obviously not everyone has access to a 3D Painting Program. Don't forget that if your college is part of the Autodesk Education Community, you can get Mudbox for free. Otherwise, contact me when I'm feeling charitable and I may help you out.

 

Please Note: A number of Body Mod authors are still saving Alpha Channels on their Normal Maps, and sometimes just by accident. Don't do this! Specifically for body textures the Specular Map is not contained within the Alpha Channel anymore. Alpha Channels on these skin maps don't do anything but double the file size which is a terrible waste of memory.

Edited December 20, 2011 by FavoredSoul

[Ghogiel]

Ghogiel approves of this message :yes:

 

Photoshop actually has 3d projection painting. And then both max and blender have viewport painting tools. There are options, even could use the old ass way with a separate UV channel and bake it :dry: ,

If you are making textures, especially body textures, you need to be able to fix a seam :confused:

[FavoredSoul]

both max and blender have viewport painting tools.

Even better! No excuses for seams on your body textures then :)

[MrDave]

Don't forget unifying the normals on the mesh itself where it may be split apart, such as neck, wrist and ankle pieces.

[dagobaking]

I hate to revive such an ancient post. However, it perfectly frames my question.

 

I would like to work on fixing seams and the OP gives the "right" way to do it. However, it's easier said than done (for me).

 

For example, in a 3D painting program (I have access to Photoshop or Mudbox), how do I get the Skyrim (or Fallout 4) body into the program WITH the head at the same time so that they are sized and aligned properly WITH their textures applied to them?

 

Once that is done, I can handle how to do the painting and matching along seams. I just can't get the workspace set up with assets in place.

 

If anyone can give steps on how to do this or link to a tutorial that covers it I would really appreciate it.

 

Thank you!

[Pineappletree]

All playable species in Skyrim have separate meshes for head, hands, feet and body. So what you have to do is to get all of them into the same scene in your 3D painting program.

How you do that exactly depends on the capabilities of your painter of choice.

 

I don't know if there are any NIF import plugins for 3D painters, personally I have never seen one. So your best bet is probably to use a 3D package like 3dsMax or Blender to import all meshes into a single scene (and if the importer does a proper job they'll be correctly aligned and scaled automatically), then export the meshes into a single file your 3D painter can read (OBJ is usually a safe bet). While you do this, you have to make sure the UV information of the meshes stays intact and gets exported with them!

 

Once you have the meshes in your 3D painter you'll have to tell it which textures to use for which mesh. How you do that exactly once again depends on the program. It might not be able to work with DDS textures for example. Or it might not be able to work on several types of textures (diffuse, specular, normal / bump, etc.) at the same time.

In any case, make sure you only work on copies of the textures you want to use as a base, not on the originals in your Skyrim folder. So if anything doesn't work as planned, the textures you have in your game stay intact and can easily be copied back into the painter.

 

With the proper textures loaded you should then have complete body model ready for painting.

[dagobaking]

All playable species in Skyrim have separate meshes for head, hands, feet and body. So what you have to do is to get all of them into the same scene in your 3D painting program.

How you do that exactly depends on the capabilities of your painter of choice.

 

I don't know if there are any NIF import plugins for 3D painters, personally I have never seen one. So your best bet is probably to use a 3D package like 3dsMax or Blender to import all meshes into a single scene (and if the importer does a proper job they'll be correctly aligned and scaled automatically), then export the meshes into a single file your 3D painter can read (OBJ is usually a safe bet). While you do this, you have to make sure the UV information of the meshes stays intact and gets exported with them!

 

Once you have the meshes in your 3D painter you'll have to tell it which textures to use for which mesh. How you do that exactly once again depends on the program. It might not be able to work with DDS textures for example. Or it might not be able to work on several types of textures (diffuse, specular, normal / bump, etc.) at the same time.

In any case, make sure you only work on copies of the textures you want to use as a base, not on the originals in your Skyrim folder. So if anything doesn't work as planned, the textures you have in your game stay intact and can easily be copied back into the painter.

 

With the proper textures loaded you should then have complete body model ready for painting.

 

Thank you.

 

I did get part of this same process completed. Putting all of the parts into one scene and export as .obj worked to then get into Mudbox. And, as you noted, it does not work with dds. So, you have to use other formats. However, I couldn't figure out how to apply separate images for each part in Mudbox (I need to spend more time with it and can probably figure that out). It kept wanting to apply one image file to all parts.

 

Also, there is another significant problem (at least in Mudbox). The lighting/shader that it uses by default is way off from the game. So, the textures look so dark it may not end up being possible to really work on them and have an idea of what the in-game result will be.

 

Do you or anyone else know if there are certain settings that can be changed to make the lighting/shader work like Skyrim or Fallout 4? Maybe someone has a config file for this or something?