Characters Glowmap

[ShadowboltWings]

Is it possible to give a custom race a glowmapped texture? If so, how can I do this?

 

Trying to create a custom race based on the Infernal Exalted from one of the RPGs.

 

EDIT: Actually, in the smae vein, is it possible to make a version of the headhuman mesh that has an actual modelled third eye? Naturally, it wouldn't take on the regular eye texture, but still, could it be done?

Edited January 25, 2013 by ShadowboltWings

[SariDecember]

I also thought of a glowmapped skin texture a while back but after doing some research I had to accept that it's not possible due to a conflict between the glow map and the skin shader that has to be applied to these parts of the mesh! :(

[ShadowboltWings]

Makes sense. Didn't think it possible, but ah well. Thus is life.

 

Still curious about the head mesh, though.

[DrakeTheDragon]

The settings for material "skin" are controlled and overridden by the game engine at all time. For glowmaps to work on meshes the "emissive" property of the material needs to be set to some non-black color (it must emit some light to shine through such a map). The game engine will undo this and the mesh won't emit any light anymore. Thus glowmaps on body parts won't work ever, due to the material being controlled by the game engine. Using a different material than "skin" will allow for this, but the body part won't be a body part anymore, won't switch texture depending on race and won't provide means for skin "tone".

 

Head and eye meshes are set up on a per-race basis. Every race can have its own head and eye meshes any time.

A 3rd eye for the head of a custom race is very well possible. And I fail to see why it won't be able to use the same texture as the others.

 

The difficult part is creating a still-morphable head mesh with a 3rd eye socket. If it's meant to be able to blink even, the TRI files for the head need to be recreated. (It's not the eyes that blink, the lid is part of the head mesh.)

It's far from impossible, but it's about the most tedious task in Oblivion modding still. One cannot import or export TRI files directly, and as they only contain offset information for individual vertex "indices" from the head mesh, it's incredibly easy to break the relation between the NIF and the TRI. The NIF Scripts resort the vertices on either import from or export to NIF already, so at this point the relation will already be broken and the files useless.

 

The only modder I know of who managed to do this full-scale so far is ThrottleKitty with the Head06 resource. There's some guides and tutorials from the same author about how it is done as well out there. But it involves a lot of import from and export to OBJ, to preserve vertex order, and hex-editing trickery, as well as Scanti's handy tools used to the extreme, for this to ever work out right.

 

My dragon head mesh was created from the Argonian head mesh by mere vertex shifting, so I could keep the EGM and TRI files and won't have to create everything from scratch. Yet, even this "cheap" solution cost me months of work until everything was working fine together in the end. The relation is so easy to break, one uncautious click and you're done for, if you don't notice it soon enough. And if you change the shape of the head mesh, you're bound to also change the shape of the corresponding other face parts, like eyes, ears, upper and lower teeth, inner mouth and tongue, all done the same way with the same precautions not to break the NIF<->EGM&TRI relation in the process. It's getting quite tedious quickly. And I for one am not intending to do it again so soon... luckily I currently can't anymore anyways.

[ShadowboltWings]

Huh, I see. So I guess the chance of a modder taking on the job is about as... well, as unlikely as a very earthy metaphor.