How to make Texutres less reflective?

[LargeStyle]

Hi all,

 

I'm retexturing Skyrim, and upon using non-Skyrim textures I've found some textures to be far too reflective - so how can I reduce this effect?

 

I know very little about texture editing, and I'm trying to learn required techniques as quick as possible, but I still don't fully understand why textures have the base image and a matching multicoloured version of the image (I've figured it's something to do with how light reacts to textures, but I don't know how to change or create these physcodelic textures)!

 

I have googled a lot about this, but all the guides I've come across don't cover what I need, and they're all based at an advanced level so a lot of it goes over my head (I've just been looking for a simple explanation of the basics).

 

Thanks in advance.

[Matth85]

Change the specularity map, which will most likely be located in the normal map's alpha channel. Simply make it overall darker.

Change the _e or _em map. Again, make it darker.

 

The specularity controlls the value of reflection to be calculated. The _e/_em, not sure which, but one is the environment map. Which is a reflection map, of sort. A map which tells what to shine.

[Perraine]

Hi all,

 

I'm retexturing Skyrim, and upon using non-Skyrim textures I've found some textures to be far too reflective - so how can I reduce this effect?

 

I know very little about texture editing, and I'm trying to learn required techniques as quick as possible, but I still don't fully understand why textures have the base image and a matching multicoloured version of the image (I've figured it's something to do with how light reacts to textures, but I don't know how to change or create these physcodelic textures)!

 

I have googled a lot about this, but all the guides I've come across don't cover what I need, and they're all based at an advanced level so a lot of it goes over my head (I've just been looking for a simple explanation of the basics).

 

Thanks in advance.

 

The psychedelic textures you've seen are most likely the "normal maps" or "bump maps". These usually look like an embossed version of the main texture in various hues of blue, pink and purple and generally have a name like <armor-type>_n.dds".

 

What they actually do is make 2D (flat) images "appear" 3 dimensional (kind of like sidewalk chalk art) they tell the game to make it look like the light from different areas is coming from slightly different directions and our eyes and brain interpret that as a "bump" ...

 

Hidden inside this file is an extra bit called an "alpha channel" which is usually a black and white or "greyscale" version of the main texture file with a few differences ...

 

What it's used for by the game is to decide how much light each part of the texture will 'reflect' and the colour scheme is basically Black = dull or non reflective - White = shiny or highly reflective - and Grey = Glossy but not to shiny and you can basically have many shades of grey in between to get various effects.

 

So it's not just a simple matter of making a grey version of the texture, because you may want some parts to be more reflective than others, like belt buckles for instance, and if you just make a grey copy of the image they may not be "white" enough to shine and the cloth parts may be to bright and they will be shiny too.

 

Sometimes you have to manually edit this "alpha channel" to get the various parts just right.

 

One note of warning - Skyrim has a very strange lighting system, so you need to make textures and the alpha channel of your normal map a little bit darker than you'd think would be right, you'll need to experiment a bit, but if you get the texture looking "just right" you'll probably need to go a fraction darker, almost, but not quite, to the point of saying "meh, that's too dark!" I can't really explain it better than that, it's a bit of trial and error really..

[LargeStyle]

Thanks Matth85, but your description was still to "advanced" for my understanding (I'm a noob at texturing).

 

The textures I'm editing are based over 2 files - the "normal" image, and the physcodelic coloured image (whatever it's called).

 

I couldn't find any specularity maps, so I reduced the brightness of the coloured image and it seems to have reduced the reflectiveness of the texture a bit, but it still looks literally wet / shiny. However I can now see that the coloured image has some kind of pattern on it that's not consistent with the normal texture, so I need to make a new multicoloured image.

 

So how can I create this multi-coloured texture file from the original texture?

[Matth85]

Okay. Is this the situation:

You got 2 images. One is the color map, containing the colors of the texture, and the other is a blue/purple texture, which is the detail/normal map. Not actually a texture, but I won't get into that.

There is too much reflection, and you want to reduce it.

 

Now. Open up the crazy bluish map, which is the normal map.

Go to the alpha channel. If you got photoshop you go under "channels" and look at the bottom channel there.

The alpha channel is the specularity map. A map that sets the value of reflection. It is most likely grayscaled, where white means full reflection and black means none.

Now, you can do a few things:

1) If there is a specularity map there allready, simply tone it down with any kind of value-tools. In Potoshop you got CTRL + L, or "levels".

2) If there is none, make your own. Do this by taking your color map/difuse map, make it grayscaled and manually add the values you want. Remember that white means shine, and black means no shine.

3) Save it as a DXT5 as a *TextureName*_n.dds map.

[LargeStyle]

Thanks again Matth85, and Perraine (your description was right on my level) :biggrin: You've both been very helpful and I appreciate this very much.

 

Imbetween my last post and this one I found out about these normal maps and have installed and used the normal mapping GIMP plugin. The result looks seriously better than the original normal map, even though I didn't really change / experiment with much.

 

The map initially came out more accurate to the texture image, but was seriously too reflective, so I reduced the normal maps "lightness" and "brightness" by a fair amount and now there's far too little reflection!! Agreed with the trial and error stuff then....!

 

Also, yeah I'd noticed the weird way in which Skyrim lights stuff - last week I retextured half of Riften and I had to set it much darker than I wanted in GIMP so it looked right in-game.

 

Thank-you both again - it's great to have support from others such as yourselves.

[Perraine]

Rather than 'darkening' the normal map which, as you've noticed, doesn't really give the right result, you'll need to play around with the 'alpha channel' of the normal map, here's a

I found, which does a pretty good job of explaining how to do it.

Also Skyrim can be a little "picky" about normal maps, as sometimes if you make it 'too detailed' the game starts displaying all sorts of weird 'artifacts' and black shadows and stuff ... Trial and error is the only way I'm afraid, so like the rest of us, you'll get used to opening and closing Skyrim many hundreds of times ...