I Need Help Getting Textures to Work

[LordNyron]

I've been at this for a few days and I'm about to lose it if I can't figure this out. I'm trying to get hair and clothing models from Skyrim mods in order to use them for personal projects. My goal is to get them into Blender and attach them a character model I built in Daz Studio. And while I can export the model NIF as an OBJ file and import that into Blender 2.78, I then run into the problem I've been having all week. The first thing I have to do is recalculate the normals to fix dark spots on the model. Then I set the texture to the one I want to use and set the material to the alpha texture. However, when I render the image to see if the hair model looks right, it doesn't. The texture I selected doesn't even show up on the model and the model now has dark patches on it and maybe a few lines here or there. I can barely see the alpha texture on it.

 

Full disclosure, I'm new to both textures and 3D modelling in general. So if I made some sort of rookie mistake then let me know, but my assumption has been that the alpha texture is supposed to make the polygon strips transparent and then the regular texture goes over top of that so that it actually looks like hair(or whatever you desire the object to be.). However, even if the alpha did its assumed job, the regular texture still isn't even appearing. If I load it up as a material it shows up, but the polygon strip underneath is still clearly visible.

 

I tried loading up a different model and I got the same problem. Except this time some of the model was a light lavender color instead of white.

 

Now, having said all that, there is one instance where I got it to work. If I go into the UV Editor, select Object Mode, then open up the texture in the left window, and select the texture viewer in the left window, it will actually appear. HOWEVER, only a small portion of the model is actually affected by it. The vast majority of the model is a pitch black. Like, I can see that the polygon strips have gone transparent, but it's only like the hair texture itself has turned black in those spots. And of course, rendering it still spots out a model that is completely gray with some dark fuzzy spots and lines with no texture whatsoever. Oddly enough that only occurs when I hit the render button. If I just select the Rendered View option, the model is just gray. That's it. No dark patches, but also no texture. I'm seriously getting confused by all of this.

 

And before anyone suggests trying Blender 2.49B, it doesn't work on my computer. I have no idea why, maybe because I'm using Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit, I don't know. It just crashes on startup. I even tried that Blender Portable that people seem to like that already has everything installed and it did not work. 2.49B ran once two days ago, but after I closed out of it, it has since refused to work and no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling has fixed it.

[Kaspar482]

You want to render some stuff in blender? Use the cycles render engine, the node setup is less confusing than blender render.

 

I recommend blenderguru.com or its youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewPPrice

 

Just posting a screenshot would help in these situations ..

 

Switch to cycles, and if you have a specific question, just ask again.

Edited May 21, 2017 by koiwe

[LordNyron]

You want to render some stuff in blender? Use the cycles render engine, the node setup is less confusing than blender render.

 

I recommend blenderguru.com or its youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewPPrice

 

Just posting a screenshot would help in these situations ..

 

Switch to cycles, and if you have a specific question, just ask again.

My main goal is to simply put together models in Blender and then export them to other programs for actual use, like Skyrim or Source. I may eventually use Blender for animations, so making sure the textures actually show up in render is also a good thing.

 

Since I originally posted this, I've narrowed down the problem I've been having and it's less related to the models themselves and more to the textures, specifically the textures that come with the hair models I exported from Skyrim, and even more specifically those from SG Hair Pack. The textures themselves work, but the alpha channel apparently does not. It refuses to turn transparent. Instead it turns the polygons a bright white(With the Shadeless setting checked. If unchecked it will be a duller white and the texture will looked darker as well and shiny.) except for where the color part of the diffuse texture is, that stays the same. This is what I mean:

 

http://i.imgur.com/mDZco3p.png

 

I need that bright white(the alpha channel) to go transparent, and I've doubled, no, triple checked that that "Use Alpha" and "Transparency" were turned on, so it should be working. I even tried going through Blender Cycles and using its Compositing window to use the nodes and it produced the same result. As can be seen here:

 

http://i.imgur.com/9SO2nAr.png

 

I haven't the faintest clue as to why the texture's alpha channel isn't working properly. I haven't done anything to the file itself and checking it in GIMP shows that it does in fact have an alpha channel, which oddly enough is how it gets its shape, otherwise it's just an endless texture that ends up looking like hair, but without pointed strands aka the polygon strips with a regular texture applied to it.

 

I also tried to apply the texture to the hair mesh in DAZ Studio, and it produced the exact same result. A white border around the texture. It's reading the alpha channel, but it isn't going transparent like its supposed too. It works perfectly fine in Skyrim though. The only change I made was converting the mesh from NIF to OBJ since Blender doesn't support NIF files without a plug-in, and that plug-in is recommended only for use with Blender 2.49B, a version of Blender that no matter how many different variations of I try, simply crashes on start-up while Blender 2.78 works perfectly fine.

Edited May 22, 2017 by LordNyron

[Kaspar482]

In Blender Render, those transparency settings are for rendering, not material mode. You are in material mode.

 

In cycles, the node setup is intended for rendering. You are in material mode. To see the transparency in material mode, you need to set the alpha blend mode in material settings to "alpha clip" or "alpha blend".

 

http://i.imgur.com/RAukNek.jpg

[LordNyron]

I appreciate the help. Got it to work now.

 

http://i.imgur.com/8eemIIu.png

 

When I set up like how you have it, I could still see the white outline, but adjusting the transparency color to black looks like it did the trick, but Blender won't let me zoom in any closer to the model. If there's a way to disable that so I can zoom in as close as possible, I would appreciate it if you could tell me. Other than that though, it's only in materials mode that it works. Don't suppose you can tell me how to get rid of that outline in Render mode so that if I use Blender for animations and stuff in the future it won't have a black outline when rendered out.

 

EDIT: I went into default editing mode and noticed that while some of the polygon strips have indeed gone transparent, others still look like they have a dark outline around them, almost like a blur.

Edited May 22, 2017 by LordNyron

[Kaspar482]

First of all, you use a Blender Render material in Cycles. Delete it, switch to cycles and THEN create a new material.

 

I dont exactly understand what you mean by "not letting you zoom in". Does it clip out? If yes, adjust your viewport lens angle to something like 60. Could also be that you have another object in zoom focus. To change that, select the "Hair object" in Object mode and press Numpad . (dot/Del) and try to zoom in.

 

Yes you can get rid of the white outline. For some reason, the alpha channel is premultiplied, resulting in an ugly white outline.

http://i.imgur.com/a7MXGUF.jpg

 

However, you can get rid of it by inserting a math node, set it to subtract. This way you can remove the white in render mode, but the Material view is now translucent. Not that important, since you can just switch it on when you need to render.

http://i.imgur.com/Pt7IeT6.jpg

 

 

EDIT: You might have noticed black faces on your mesh, this is the result of overlapping meshes on top of each other, and sometimes the backside of those meshes push trough. Those are either shoddy made meshes, or the result of inaccurate import export tools.

 

However, in material view you can get rid of those dark spots by turning on "Backface Culling" in the View properties or change the mesh to Double Sided.

 

In render mode it's a bit tricky, since those dark places are the result of transparent shadows and overlapping meshes. You can reduce the effect to a minimum by simply adding a subsurface modifier. Don't apply it though when exporting, this is just for rendering.

 

EDIT2: Scratch the above. It's probably a bug in the way it reads the .dds file. Save the the texture as PNG and the problems go away.

Edited May 23, 2017 by koiwe