Texture Help

[vipermkii]

I've retextured the ancient Nord helmet but I am having trouble with a glossy affect in game on the gold inlay, any advice on how to fix it using GIMP?

 

I have included pic.

Edited June 9, 2012 by vipermkii

[vipermkii]

Another pic, this one in-world.

 

Also, this is my first time modding, I've never even used GIMP/Photoshop until last night. Let me know if the gold part actually looks gold; I've been looking at it for so long I can't tell anymore!!

Edited June 9, 2012 by vipermkii

[TheGreenLion]

The gloss comes from the specular map. Most of the time the specular ends up being the Alpha channel of the normal map that belongs to the ancient nord helmet, I usually make a copy and edit it seperately and then reapply it to the normal maps Alpha Channel.

 

The basic idea is that parts in the specular map that are white shine the brightest whereas complete black won't shine at all. Hopefully that helps, any file with _n.dds as a suffix is a normal map and should contain an Alpha channel that gives you the shine data.

[vipermkii]

Here is an update.

[tredmillion]

well first let me say, for a first effort, you've done a very good job on that! looks great :)

 

and yes a specular map (usually ends in _sm) is how shiny something is, so for a belt buckle would be white and leather would be dark grey

 

and a normal map is how light hits the object in the game engine, so you can use it to give the illusion of indents without actually making changes to the model of the object, so if you want to accentuate the gold parts, make them a very different colour before using a normal map plugin, something like pure white or black will make is stand out, i think black would be bumpy and white would be a dip, and then play with the values and make the normal map a little bit transparent.

 

a good way to make something look gold is to cut out the part you want gold on a duplicated layer, get rid of everything else, make that cut out part a solid colour, then colorize it to make it goldy, then use the layer styles to merge it into the layer below and then you can colorize it again to make it just right :)....then once your done just flatten the image and save it.....and its always good to do different stuff on different layers in ccase you wanna make any edits to anything, and also to save every few major steps, just a good habit to get into especially when your doing more complex retextures :)

 

at any rates you've done a great job on that and is just a question of little tweaks to the specular map and normal map, and maybe some small ones to the dif map, but on the whole it looks nice n goldy where it should and the rest of the helmet is almost a perfect fit to the plate armour you got :)

[vipermkii]

^^

 

Thanks for the help!

 

Yeah, making the color gold turned out to be harder than I thought. At first I was happy with the color I came up with, then I put it "in-country" and took some screen shots and realized it looked like digestive bi-product. I tried using an actual picture of a gold bar as a pattern and blending it, but I ended up using the gold/bass off of the armor as a pattern; the author gives permission in the readme and when I eventually upload it I'll be sure to give credit.

 

I don't know about other items, but this helmet has properties that don't render in NifSkope (like the raised appearance of the carvings) and it threw off my gold inlay. I ended up opening the original texture, overlaying mine and making it mostly transparent then pasting "steel" patterns from the helmet over my original inlay. After that I was able to trace the original carving with free draw then paste the gold from the armor into the selected area. I'm still going back and forth from the game, finding where the gold spills out of the inlay and making it neat; I am amazing at how much one tiny pixel renders in the game!

 

I am going to play around with it some more, try some blending and burning/dodging as well as the specular map then its off to do the female version, Yngvol helm, and add them to the game as custom items with custom crafting recipes (damn I'm ambitious).

 

 

Btw, I tweaked the horns (tried to make them look more fresh, don't know how noticeable it is), if I get good enough would like to edit the mesh and then make them look like mammoth tusk :) .

Edited June 10, 2012 by vipermkii

[tredmillion]

No worries at all my friend :)

 

heh texturing is harder than people think xD...as for the texture displaying oddly on the mesh, a great way to get everything aligned properly is to open nifskope, right click on the mesh, go to texture, then select export template, choose the right size that your working at, and drop it into the texture your working on and multiply it in, that way you can see which part of the canvas corresponds to which part of the mesh :)...its a very useful tip, in fact i'd say it was a vital piece of knowledge!....oh and it will render in nifskope, it may be that you need to tweak your settings in nifskope, i make sure all the lines of the mesh are bright blue and clash with everything just so i can see where everything is properly :)....its somewhere in the settings...changing the background can help too

 

heh yeh cutting stuff out can be a pain in the ass :P...i either use the lasso tool and go through outlining it as exact as is physically possible (usually pixel by pixel o.O) or i make a seperate white layer, make it fairly transparent, then use the eraser tool to get rid of everything except what i want (again usually i end up working to exact pixels :P) then i just restore the transparency to 100, blend the layer in and colorize to get the gold colour just so!....and using the original texture as a template is always a good idea, lets face it, we're more familiar with that than a brand new one, so its a perfect way of knowing exactly what and where your editing stuff, so thats almost always a good idea, that combined with the template makes life a lot easier!

 

oooh mammoth tusk you are ambitious :)....that would look awesome! if you get good at making models and textures then you can do a lot of cool stuff :)

 

heh its good to hear your a perfectionist too! if one pixel doesnt look right i get very annoyed with myself o.O

 

HAH! You get a kudos just for including the words "digestive bi-product" in normal conversation xDD

 

as for the crafting and stats and stuff, thats really easy, takes sod all time, the texturing is a lot harder :P...and more time consuming xD if you got the ck you'll have it in game nicely in no time (Y)....but hey its stuff like that that makes all the difference! plus its good to know how to do it ;D

 

anyways ill be around lingering so if you make more progress, or need any help just give us a shout, im always available by pm :)....happy modding! (trust me it can get addicitive xD)

Edited June 10, 2012 by tredmillion

[Perraine]

I'll just add one thing to tredmillion's excellent posts ... When using the UV Map as a "template layer" of where different parts fit on the mesh, always overlap by at least 1 pixel. If you don't, you end up with very faint but very noticeable "gaps" when you view the mesh, either black because there is no texture there or see through if the armor mesh has an alpha channel.

[tredmillion]

I'll just add one thing to tredmillion's excellent posts ... When using the UV Map as a "template layer" of where different parts fit on the mesh, always overlap by at least 1 pixel. If you don't, you end up with very faint but very noticeable "gaps" when you view the mesh, either black because there is no texture there or see through if the armor mesh has an alpha channel.

 

great advice there as well!...if you put the uv map over any of the vanilla textures you'll notice that they've overlapped by quite a lot! the uv map is a guide more than anything :) and as perraine said, its better to go over than do too little and have to redo it :) (which also reiterates the idea of regular saving and using multiple layers, i usually start with an initial file, then from there go v1,2,3.... helps me see my work through its progress, and if i make a mistake at step 5 i can always go back to step 4 or even earlier, which is also useful if you have a sudden change of heart or art direction :) )

[vipermkii]

Update! Two down one to go. . .