[LE] Is this issue with materials avoidable?

[CaptainFool123]

When texturing sword blade meshes (made in blender exported to 3ds file), I was unhappy with the detail I could apply when the uv map stored the sword blade as a single shape (the entire blade projected from view on to the map as a single shape).

So naturally I split the blade's UV Map net into 4 different pieces (as this allowed for more space effeciency in the texture dds file (2048x2048pxls)), which had the desired effect. However, it also added an undesired effect in which the blade appeared segmented when looked at from a certain angle, or with some shaders applied.

 

 

At first I assumed this was one of those common seam problems where the applied texture does not go far enough out of the UV texture mesh net in the UV file, resulting in lines appearing. But i'm not sure about this now, as this problem apparently occurs with or without textures (which are aligned pixel to pixel) as the lighting wierdness occurs in nif skope as well with textures disabled.

Strangely, increasing the number of vertices in the mesh in blender via subdivision surface helped reduce this issue by a margin, though it is still somewhat visible.

 

 

I noticed that the vanilla dwarvern greatsword, which also splits its blade mesh into two, also suffers this problem though to a much lesser degree, only ever showing presence when some type of enchant shader effect is applied to the weapon, and not showing at all in nifskope. (something possibly of note is that it uses an obj file format, unlike the 3ds file format I used)

 

Which brings me to my question, is this an inherent flaw with the skyrim engine in general regarding lighting, or is there some super secret technique of avoiding this i'm not aware of which helps to prevent this problem?

 

Edited July 9, 2017 by CaptainFool123

[Di0nysys]

I'm not sure exactly what's happening with ur mesh. In the past i've been able to get around weirdness by reusing vanilla Environment Mapping enabled BSLightingShaders and swapping in my own diffuse, normal and em maps, then copy pasting into the mesh.

This could be a simple case of the wrong flags flipped on or off by the exporter. Blender's Skyrim plugin is notoriously bad.

[CaptainFool123]

I'm not sure exactly what's happening with ur mesh. In the past i've been able to get around weirdness by reusing vanilla Environment Mapping enabled BSLightingShaders and swapping in my own diffuse, normal and em maps, then copy pasting into the mesh.

This could be a simple case of the wrong flags flipped on or off by the exporter. Blender's Skyrim plugin is notoriously bad.

 

Hi, and thanks for the suggestions, though none of them proved to be the problem it did give me more ideas (by ideas I mean clicking on nifskope options until something changes XD) and I have found the issue.

As it turns out it was an option in nifskope in the mesh section called "smooth normals".

You would have thought with such an obvious name I would have already tried this a while ago, and I thought I did, but I guess not. Regardless, This worked, and the mesh looks much nicer.

as an amateur doing this for a minor hobby I'm not well versed enough in 3d modelling to know why "smoothing normals" would be needed to prevent this issue, but oh well.