Textures coming out pixelated and blocky

[Lateraliss]

I've been trying to replace some textures in skyrim using photoshop. I open the dds, and drop the new textures I want over the old. In photoshop it looks great. I save it using the nvidia plugin, and add it to my folders. Once in the game, I look at the item, and it is blocky, pixelated, and just plain ugly.

 

I'm new to this, so I've been watching and reading every tutorial I can find on how to modify textures. I'm doing everything the tutorials do to the letter, and my textures still seem to come out looking worse than the vanilla textures. I retextured a table, using a high resolution photo of wood, and it came out grainy and had a seam about 9/10ths of the way down the table.

 

Is there like an Idiots guide to retexturing? Cause apparently I'm just plain no good at it.

[Matth85]

Some pictures of the texture and in-game would be helpfull so we have an idea what we are up against.

 

and it came out grainy and had a seam about 9/10ths of the way down the table.

Probably because the model had an UV seam there and your texture is not tilable.

 

But we really need something visual to go from to help you fix this.

[ishmaeltheforsaken]

Definitely need some images.

[Lateraliss]

Here is a photo of a table I messed around with. I used a high res image of wood. Placed it in the exact perimeter of the texture I was replacing, and it still came out fuzzy and has a seam where the original texture didn't.

 

Bad Texture

 

Bad Texture 2

 

Second photo is the texture. I think my problem is the tutorials I've been reading assume the reader has some previous knowledge. And I surely don't.

Edited December 20, 2011 by Lateraliss

[Matth85]

Would also like a picture of your texture sheet, so I can see the different in quality.

So far I see a upscaled image used as a texture and it hits an UV seam rather harshly. Though I really do not know without the texture sheet.

 

I can't say much from this, other than it looks ... yeouch. More images for me, unless somebody else knows what's going on.

[Fisrion]

Hmm..honestly..it looks like you put a high res texture on top of the old texture but saved the texture in the same (low) resolution. This would lead to the textures being as pixelated as the original ones.

As for the seam..you could try to make the part of the texture which you edited tileable on the y-axis and see if that helps.