custom textures

[Sebo85]

So I got those textures from the internet in diffuse, ao, metallic, normal and roughness as pngs. Since I have no experiences in texturing I wanted to use these for my custom meshes. I heard that our dear bethesda uses some kind of other 'settings' for certain types of textures (something with channels I remember) but I don't know what belongs where and what how to format/save it with the nvidia texture plugin (which I use in my photoshop cs2)

 

Of course I was searching the internet for answers and found some but I couldn't get them into my head.

 

If someone could help me with that, I'd be very thankful :)

 

Sebo

[Fraym]

Hey there,

 

These materials are for the different kind of material channels that are used for displaying texture on a 3d model. Diffuse textures can be seen as some kind of "base" texture, more about these channels can be found online.

 

In order to use them in meshes for Fallout 4, you would need to UV map the textures on a mesh, and convert the textures to the DDS-format as it seems like that is the only supported texture extension.

 

Hopefully you can get on your way~

[DiodeLadder]

Hello Sebo85,

 

Those are PBR based textures, and not directly compatible with Spec/Gloss shader used in Fallout 4 engine. Those need to be converted to 3 maps, Diffuse, Normal, Spec/Gloss to work in Fallout 4. Here's a very good article to read :

 

https://marmoset.co/posts/pbr-texture-conversion/

 

The part you need to look at in the article is "Texture conversion : Metalness -> Specular", but you would probably need to read the whole thing to understand what's going on.

 

AO (Ambient Occlusion) can be blended with Diffuse (converted albedo) using "multiply" as the blending option to darken the recessed areas. Roughness needs to be inverted to function as Gloss map, I think.

 

The normal map needs to be in DirectX format to render correctly in Fallout 4 engine. If you picked up the textures made for OpenGL, they probably would not look as intended. You could try inverting the green channel in the OpenGL normal map to convert it to DirectX, but it may or may not look correct.

 

Texture format for Fallout 4 would be :

 

_d.DDS = diffuse RGB /alpha A, BC1/BC3/BC7

 

_n.DDS = normal map, BC5/BC7

 

_s.DDS = spec R / gloss G, BC5/BC7

 

...so the converted spec and gloss maps need to be packed together into _s using those 2 channels.

 

I actually do not recommend using the Nvidia plugin for working with DDS. This plugin destroys Fallout 4 normal maps on import, and in general it lightens the color during DDS import. I recommend using .TGA as the export format from Photoshop, and then using Elric utility by Bethesda for DDS conversion. (DDS is a part of DirectX, and Bethesda's Elric actually uses Microsoft's TexConv.exe in the background for encoding.)

 

I use Affinity Photo instead of the old Photoshop now. It's cheap, but very good IMO. It supports .TGA export now as well.

 

I hope this made sense at all? Good luck! :smile:

[Zorkaz]

Or use GIMP for altering and exporting

[niston]

Paint.NET can work with all sorts of DDS textures (plus a whole slew of other gfx file formats) and is free to use.

[Sebo85]

Okay this article is for intermdiate user, what I am not :D don't understand everything but I do my best :D

So diffuse map is kinda easy, but normal, specular and gloss maps are really hard for me..

Aren't there easy words for an old non english person? :D

[Sebo85]

do I understand right that I have to put the metallic texture into the red channel of the spec map and the roughness map into the green one? DiodeLadder mentioned it :D How do put these into the channels?

Edited March 9, 2020 by Sebo85

[DiodeLadder]

do I understand right that I have to put the metallic texture into the red channel of the spec map and the roughness map into the green one? DiodeLadder mentioned it :D How do put these into the channels?

 

You need to convert Albedo and Metalness into diffuse and specular, as it's explained in the article I've posted (albedo is not the same as diffuse). Jump to the section I've mentioned.

 

Diffuse Map

1. Load your albedo map into Photoshop

2. Create a new fill layer that is black (#000000)

3. Paste your metalness map into the layer mask of your fill layer

 

Specular Map

1. Make a duplicate of the original albedo map and move it above the fill layer

2. Create another fill layer with a value of #383838

3. Paste your metalness map into the layer mask of your fill layer

4. Invert the layer mask

 

Roughness needs to be inverted.

 

You need to learn about pasting greyscale into RGB channels in Photoshop. Click on the channels tab.

 

Does that help?

[SKKmods]

For folks in the cheaper seats with zero talent and Paint.Net, NormalMapPlus.dll works great.

 

But creating specular is beyond me and I cant find any guidance anywhere ever.

 

Anyone ?

[DiodeLadder]

For folks in the cheaper seats with zero talent and Paint.Net, NormalMapPlus.dll works great.

 

But creating specular is beyond me and I cant find any guidance anywhere ever.

 

Anyone ?

 

Hello SKK,

 

The specular defines the metal-ish look of the surface. In Fallout 4, it's used in a way the edges are more emphasized. For example, if you can imagine the T-60 power armor shoulder piece, the entire thing is supposed to be uniformly metal, but if you look at the specular map, the edges have more specular values than the rest. This creates more defined and accentuated look of the object on screen.

 

A good way to do this these days is to use something like Substance Painter, and bake the curvature map to create a mask that can be used to paint edges automatically. Hand painting it is time consuming, but is a good option also.

 

(If you are asking about how to pack specular/gloss into _s, you have to create greyscale maps for those 2 and paste into Red and G channels separately.)

 

I highly recommend getting Substance Painter during sale periods (I think it comes down to 80 euros or so) :

 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1194110/Substance_Painter_2020/

 

It's what all AAA game devs use, and you can pretty much get that sort of quality right off the bat (of course there's much more to texturing than what you can learn in first hours, but even as a beginner you can do good work). It costs you money, but it's money well spent in my opinion, because you can create professional quality textures in very short period of time. Personally, I'd never be able to work on textures without it.

 

Anyway, if you need help with textures, just let me know. :smile: