need help understanding eyes and environmental maps

[Dlesang]

So I'm trying to make a custom head for a custom race. However, I need to make custom eyes to fit that head.

 

I've found that I can successfully export a mesh Oblivion will accept as an eye, but it does not animate or shine like the default eyes. I've inspected a vanilla eye in nifskope, and as far as I see, my model and their model are identical. My test model is a vanilla eye with some parts removed.

 

I am using Blender 2.49b for this.

 

My custom race head will be slightly cartoony, so the perfectly round default eyes don't fit.

 

I'm fine with them never animating, but I very much want to learn how to handle glassy/wet shininess. I believe it requires an environmental map, but I'm unable to find any help using the google machine.

[DrakeTheDragon]

The Glossiness of the material isn't the only deciding factor.

Did you also compare its material property's "name"? For environment mapping there are hardcoded material names, like "ENVMAP2" for example.

Also there's the texture blend mode, I don't recall the exact name, of the NiTexture property, usually stating "APPLY_MODULATE". Many shiny meshes use "APPLY_HIGHLIGHT" here for a sort of plastic wrap effect.

 

Then there's the overall deciding factor of the specular map, that is the alpha channel of the normalmap. This serves as some sort of localized filter for all of the above mentioned settings. The more black it is the less they apply (or other way round?).

 

And for those eye meshes to animate, they need their EGM (shape morphs) and TRI (facial animation morphs) files with matching names, matching vertex count and -order.

Likely, if you imported and exported those eye meshes, this order, and especially the count, if you removed some, is now destroyed, and they will need new EGM and TRI files now. Those are pretty hard to create from scratch though, and editing them is also not an easy task. The FaceGen morph properties are very touchy and complex to create without the licensed Singular Inversion FaceGen Modeler.

[Dlesang]

I'm already well aware of how specular maps work. I also said the properties of the two eyes were identical as far as I could see. I checked every block. This includes apply_modulate and glossiness. I did not change the specular map, so that shouldn't have any differing effect. Also, the name of the material in BOTH eyes is "right eye." This is the material for eyes in Oblivion, far as I see. There are only two sets of eyes, Imperial and Argonian. All the races use the Imperial eyes, except for Argonians. I just looked through the BSA for the vanilla meshes, and these eyes all have "right eye" as their material name.

 

As for animation, I did realize last night I did not also change the egm and tri files. I'll try that and see what happens.