Model shrinkage and texture weirdness

[jimsippo]

Hello guys. I've not been around on this site for some time but now I'm back, this time because I'm addicted to Skyrim and I want to start making my own gear like I did for Fallout 3. I'm a bit stumped at the moment and I know this place is full of great modders who might be able to help me.

 

I wanted to make a new version of the Archmage robes based on the apprentice robes with a few colour changes and additional details. I sorted the texture out, made a duplicate of the robe nif with a new name and combined the two in NifSkope in the traditional fashion. When I tried the robes on in game I noticed a seam around my characters neck. The modded robe model is smaller by a tiny amount when compared to the base robe model. The only things I changed in NifSkope are the textures, what have I done wrong here?

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i68/jimsippo/Skyrim/ScreenShot3-1.jpg

 

The second problem I'm having is some texture weirdness caused by my normal map (I think). I used the vanilla normal map but stitched in my new additions by mapping them on a separate layer and then cutting and pasting them on, being careful to delete the area underneath them first. I'm getting marks and splotches on the texture in game. This is probably caused by my export settings in Gimp as the vanilla normal map works fine with the texture. Are you supposed to use mip-maps with the textures and normals? What sort of compression should I use, if any?

 

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i68/jimsippo/Skyrim/ScreenShot5.jpg

 

Thanks for reading.

Jim

[Perraine]

The seams sometimes occur because the position of the "body" inside the armor/clothing is different from one mesh to he next ... For instance the head and neck for the archmage robes will have certain x,y,z co-ordinates to line up perfectly when worn as a complete outfit, unfortunately there is usually a different set of x,y,z co-ordinates for the apprentice robes, so the two aren't perfectly compatible, so when you "mix n match" they don't line up properly ... Yay for the awesomeness of Bugthesda!

 

The texture issue may be due to the alpha channel in your normal map, you may need to play around a little with the alpha to get rid of them (black <-> grey <-> white, and also the transparency % of the alpha channel)

And yes you DO need the mips for all .dds files and you can just save them with the default DXT5 settings

[jimsippo]

Thanks for replying Perraine.

I'm not really too sure how to edit the alpha channel on its own without doing the RGB channels as well. I can adjust the whole layers transparency if that's what you mean?

I tried making a new normal map from scratch and it seems GIMP is ignoring my transparency settings when I export to .dds. I tried the new one in game and it was super glossy, when I loaded it up in gimp again to lower the opacity a bit more I noticed it was back on 100%. It didn't have all the splotches on it though so that's a step forward at least.

I'm going to try getting the older version of Gimp again as that one seemed to work fine for me in the past with fallout.

 

I'm still not sure about the neck seam issue. The robes are just a glorified recolour really of the apprentice robes, the only thing they have in common with the archmage robes is an enchantment in the creation kit.

There are three models in the bsa with the apprentice robes in though which is confusing. I'm going to try making a version of each and see if I've got the wrong one.

 

[Edit to post my findings:] The first one was too small as you saw earlier, the second was too big.

 

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i68/jimsippo/Skyrim/ScreenShot6.jpg

Unlike Goldilocks the last one was, unfortunately just.. wrong.

 

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i68/jimsippo/Skyrim/ScreenShot7.jpg

I'm guessing the model is supposed to scale with your character but something in Nifskope isn't set up for that yet. I can live with the neck issue from the very first model for now as the collar hides it pretty well.

 

Thanks for reading.

Jim

Edited October 1, 2012 by jimsippo