dragonslayer2k12 Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 I wanna make my own ebony armor mod but I am having some trouble with the textures. I think ebony armor should look like a perfectly black surface like that obelisk thing from space 2001 movie or if anyone remembers that movie sphere. Basically a reflective surface completely black, ominous and unknown with no scratches or pits or marks of any kind that make it look like it can take damage. So I started to work on this idea today and noticed that I can't get the reflection to look right. No matter what I do, the reflective areas always look like plastic or rubber or pvc or some porno outfit lol. Also there is some kind of squares or what look more like tetris shaped things in the texture if I zoom in real close in game. I spotted some of this in the normal map and applied a blur filter to get rid of it but it didn't completely go away. There seems to be no way of making a perfectly smooth metallic surface in this game? Could this be the fault of the mesh or a setting on the mesh file that can be changed in nifskope? I have tried many ebony textures and just can't get used to them, I end up seeing all the faults at some point and want to upgrade to something better but there is nothing better or less faulty at some point. I tried blacking out the regular texture with a dark black color and using a greyscale version of a good regular texture same resolution for the m.dds file or evnironment map. I also tried that same texture as the alpha map for the normal map texture. I also tried blacking out everything completely except the environment map. That is where I can see those little squares and crap reflection quality. Oh sure the regular textures properly applied and normal map too will hide some of it but the reflection still looks like crap. It doesn't look like real metal just shiny plastic. I tried pumping up the numbers in nifskope like gloss and environment map strength too but that just made any regular textures look like shiny poo:-( At some point I will have to compromise I jut hate to do it and wondered if anyone else has run into this yet? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perraine Posted September 13, 2012 Share Posted September 13, 2012 Basically, Skyrim can't/won't/doesn't do black or white ... The game engine just can't handle it ... If you have a look at any vanilla Skyrim textures, not 1 of them has plain black or white on it, black is always "dark blue/green/brown" and dirty and white is always light "beige/tan/yellow" and dirty ... You can get a close effect by making the texture a really dark blue/green/red, then on the mesh file. make the emissive colour a really, really pale/pastel blue/pink/green (use numbers between 0.750 and 0.950 in the RGB scale) Then if your mesh has a _m.dds file (an environment 'mask' file) you can get a more reflective effect by making parts of it much brighter than others Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dragonslayer2k12 Posted October 3, 2012 Author Share Posted October 3, 2012 Well I did my best here is my ebont mod finally... took forever lol. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/24960 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ghosu Posted October 3, 2012 Share Posted October 3, 2012 107 screenshots...wtf :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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