Natterforme Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 I am making some custom meshes in Blender and I wanted to know when to use Alpha properties. Since I dont know what they are used for, I dont know if my meshes will require them or not. Can anyone tell me what they are used for and what types of items/armor/weapons/equipment uses them well? I would also like to know how to make a glow map to make parts of my new meshes glow different colors. -Natterforme Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SariDecember Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 I can tell you just what I know from Fallout nif files. There the alpha property decides if the alpha channel of the attached texture is being respected by the render process. The alpha channel of the diffuse map can give the mesh transparency effects while the alpha channel of the normal map controls light reflection (Glossiness). I've done a tutorial about the last one, you can watch it here: Basic Texturing Video Tutorial - Glossy skin I also learned that glow maps in Skyrim work a bit different than they did back in Fallout. I neither play nor mod skyrim but someone else asked for help about Skrim glow maps here -> http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/617407-weapon-ignoring-glow-map/page__p__4874315__fromsearch__1#entry4874315 maybe you can find something that helps you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Natterforme Posted March 18, 2012 Author Share Posted March 18, 2012 (edited) That was a very informative tutorial^^. Do you know what we need to do in order to add lighting properties and texture sets to completely new, non vanilla meshes? Also, do you know what settings the default dds files use in regards to alpha property set ups( so we dont lose alpha property settings while we edit texture files)? Which are the best settings( in PSCS5)? -Natterforme Edited March 18, 2012 by Natterforme Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SariDecember Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 Always depends on what you are trying to achieve. The majority of the alpha properties is controlled in nifskope. As you may have noticed, the alpha channel of the dds file itself contains only some grayscale information. In the next couple of days I'm gonna release a new video tutorial about transparency effects where I'm gonna go a bit deeper into the alphaproperties settings in nifskope. I just hope that these techniques can also be applied to skyrim meshes!?!? I've also noticed that you're the guy that has all these awesome looking armors in stock, I'm peeking on Skyrim Nexus every once in a while and noticed the one screenshot of one of your armors who made it to the top images. Pretty impressive, I hope you get them ingame soon. I'll drop you a pm once the tutorial is out and hope that it'll help you in the process! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Natterforme Posted March 18, 2012 Author Share Posted March 18, 2012 (edited) Thank you, both for the tutorials and the praise^^. The real roadblock in getting things ingame right now is mesh weighting and nifskope. Manipulating meshes is pretty straightfoward but when you find problems with your bone weights ingame you have to change them and then reset all of the properties for every item in your mesh file before you can try again. :/ In Oblivion, if I found a problem with my meshes, I could try different fixes every ten minutes or so but with Skyrim and the program incompatibilties that we are experiencing right now I am lucky to try only once every couple of hours. It doesnt help that my computer is not the greatest in the world either. But that is just a personal issue^^. Thats why Omesean's Einherjar armor is such an achievement. He spent a lot of time figuring out what I have been working on for the last two months and we have been talking back and forth on how to stream line the process and figuring out the problems. Im still waiting for that magic button to click in blender that will export my meshes to be Skyrim ready by default :D. Thanks for the help so far! -Natterforme Edited March 18, 2012 by Natterforme Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghogiel Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 (edited) while the alpha channel of the normal map controls light reflection (Glossiness). i think you will find that is not a gloss/specular exponent/ roughness/ specular power map at all, and is in fact a specular strength map. It controls the strength of the specular highlight not the specular highlights exponent, ie not how tight or diffuse the highlight is, but the actual brightness of the specular highlight. calling it gloss is misleading. BGS shaders have never had a gloss map input, and gloss/shininess/roughness can not be controlled on the per pixel level but only a global value per material. Edited March 18, 2012 by Ghogiel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SariDecember Posted March 18, 2012 Share Posted March 18, 2012 (edited) Thanks for putting this right with some more professional words Goghiel! :thumbsup: You know about a year ago I've seen the file extension .nif for the first time and since then it's been a lot of experimenting and trail and error. I can make things/alter things/make them look better by now but therefor I lack of some sort of global understanding/the correct terms in some manners! ;) Edited March 18, 2012 by SariDecember Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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