Tech heavy help needed with texture blending

[HoneyDestiny]

Hey there,

 

I am trying to use the Fitness Body Tex Blender from Skyrim to create a blended texture in Skyrim SSE.

 

I am using UNP & Mature Skin in SSE & so far the blender on its own is incompatible, even after editing the config file.

Previously, I copied over my old textures from Skyrim - that contained UNP, Mature Skin, & the blended Fitness Body textures - & it worked just fine. But I updated UNP to coincide with some new armors & the Fitness Body textures were lost.

 

So, I am trying to figure out how to get this to work. Using the Blender itself doesn't want to create new files to be used in game.

The best thing I can think of is to use Photoshop & blend the femalebody_1_msn.dds file manually, but every time I save it, the portions of the female body that aren't actually end up blended are completely black. I'm using .dds NVIDIA plugin to save the files as their original .dds file type, & there's a lot of options as well that are giving me trouble when I'm actually going in to save them.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, this is turning out to be quite a challenge.

 

[Algabar]

Never used this blender, but just had a look at the original mod. Did you try one of the pre-blended (i.e. ready for use) files? It's just normal map textures. I don't see, why they wouldn't work. UNP version should fit everything from the U(U)NP-family.

 

The other, hard way would be to use the assets of the full version in Photoshop. Be careful: Don't save to a compressed file format. You WILL get compression artifacts, since you're compressing an already compressed file (the original femalebody_1_n.dds) again. This is especially critical with normal maps. You might get away with saving a diffuse texture in BC-7, but not a normal map... So your only option is to save to an uncompressed file and live with the additional strain to the game engine...

 

I'm using the intel plugin, so formats might be named differently. What you need is uncompressed 32bbp. Before saving, reduce all visible layers to one (or whatever it is called in English, I'm using a german version of PS). Delete any additional layers, that may still be there..

 

EDIT: If you can't succeed with the fitness body, you might have a look at the latest version of "Leyenda skin". It comes with a variety of "sporty", muscular normal maps. Maybe one of them fits your taste?

Edited April 16, 2018 by Algabar

[HoneyDestiny]

Hey, thanks for your response. What I've tried so far is placing the .png files from the Tex Blender directly over top of the femalebody_1_n.dds file & then saved it again as a .dds. But from what you're telling me, that's not a good method. There's a ton of options to play with, but the original .dds files read as DXT1 ARBG. Here's what I'm looking at when I save → https://i.imgur.com/i5wErEK.png

 

The pre-blended .dds files work perfectly fine as you mentioned, but I'd really like to figure out where I'm going wrong with the blending part as there are some customizations I'd like to use myself.

[Algabar]

Hope I'm not repeating myself too much... The image you linked clearly shows what was to be expected: Normalmap saved in standard DXT-1 format. That's the format Skyrim uses for most textures. It is also used for body normal maps (normal maps of other objects are usually saved in DXT-5 and contain an extra layer, which is by the game interpreted as specular map).

 

In your case, the bad news is that DXT-1 is a compressed format with all the consequences I described above. Ideally, one would work in Photoshop with uncompressed files and only compress them once, when saving the final result for use in game. You will have to work with material, that isn't optimal from the beginning. That's why you need the export in an uncompressed format (i guess in Invidia's naming system this would be 8.8.8.8. ). You still can try, but as I said - it's working with material far from optimal for this purpose. Unfortunately, but also understanddable, only a few mod authors (e.g. Caliente/Ousnious) are kind enough to share their "source material"...

 

Nevertheless, it is possible to get something halfway decent with a .dds texture as source material. Basically it's just playing around with layers and blending methods (especially for normal maps don't be shy to experiment). I don't remember which layer blending methods I used myself, but it was something I'd never consider in "normal" PS work... You can also use the pencil / eraser or clone stamp tools to adjust thinsg or get rid of unwanted parts... Hope this helps at least a bit.

Edited April 17, 2018 by Algabar

[HoneyDestiny]

Yeah that helps a lot, I appreciate it. Sounds like I won't get very good results unless I'm able to work with the raw files. I could try to modify the preblended files instead, see what happens there.

 

Thank you!