Resource Query, part 2

[BlueSteelRanger]

@Pellape: I'm afraid I've never made a .dds. My experience ends with .gifs and .jpegs. I can only find the right paths for textures from other meshes I've acquired.
Hence my slight confusion with the crowns at the moment.
As for making custom books, I think I should clarify: I wish to write one (or a few if necessary) to add some new lore in for the palace. Is that possible?

 

@DrakeTheDragon: I've heard of W.I.N.E. Isn't that a compatibility program?
Hmm. The good news is all but those "crown jewel" resources are vanilla.

[Pellape]

Yes it is possible as everything is possible.

 

Books

The books are written in a simple form of HTML so if you do not want all text to end up in a big single lump, you must add a <p>

 

...to get a spaced row like this. Here is a list of the complete format. But what you need to do to look fancy is to start with Font type 1 and use font type 3 for text. But to start with, go to the book section in CS, Right click and add new and start typing.

 

I will add a simple example.

<div align="center"><font face=1>Book of Wonders<br>
Author: Some annoying writer
<p>
<div align="left"><font face=3>
You will find an...   bla bla bla...   
<p>
It sometimes fails to do its work... bla bla and much more bla
<p>

Well this is the formatting you need to make a book to look good.

 

DDS

You must install a dds exporter to PS to be able to export dds files as I do not think it can export it by default, gimp doesn't. But the principe is the same as for any gif, jpg or psd. psd is able to store stuff and info that is only needed for you when you edit a picture, and it is therefor I added PSD in my tutorials as it contains helplines to make it easier to paste in new layers. Such stuff cannot be stored in a gif nor jpg.

 

Here's the announcement for NVDIAS new DDS tools for Photoshop

 

As a base for a texture, you can use any size but the end DDS file that you export cannot be in any size as it must be either: 1, 2, 4, 8 up to 4096 in height or wide. Most used are 256x256, 512x512 and 1024x1024 but also 512x256 and 1024x512. If the dds would be saved as 511x1024, it will not work nor load so it must be in the size of x²

[BlueSteelRanger]

@Pellape: HTML? Hey, something I'm intimately familiar with! Woo-hoo! Hehe. Bloody awesome. Thanks for that.

 

I will definitely take a peek at those. My house is done at this point, other than the crown issue and the introduction of a lore book or two. Everything else is working flawlessly.

The crown issue is a strange one for me. The corresponding swords came out perfectly meshed, matching textures and all. I'm not sure why the crowns won't display their textures on the ground models and I'm still wrestling with the icon thing. I shall note here that the crowns are marked on the TAIL body slot. I tried putting them on the HEAD body slot but wearing them made the character's head completely vanish.

 

Also, my apologies for slow responses. The pandemic threw my schedule completely off and I'm in a weird time zone.

Edited January 30, 2021 by BlueSteelRanger

[Pellape]

Well take your time. This is not a job after all and I guess we do not go anywhere, not for a while at least. ;)

 

The Icon is best to save as a plain DDS, 64 x 64, without mip-maps and the easiest way to make it is to put the sword out in CS, on a gray area Without anything behind it, Take a distance screenshot of the hilt, handle and a bit of the blade. Take the screenshot to Photoshop and use the wand selection and mark the gray area and delete it and you get that part invisible, Last thing you do is resize it to 64 x 64 and export it. I do not know if Photoshop have a wand selector, but it should have it. or similar. It is done within a second in Gimp for sure.

 

Do compare the ground mesh with the weapon mesh, make sure they point at the same textures in Nifskope. If the texture work on one mesh, it will work on all meshes.

 

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Some bla bla about free software ;)

So why do I use Gimp when it is so easy to get Photoshop really? Well Gimp is free and when I started to use it, I was a bit Linux freak during a period in the 90's. Unix was so damn expensive so when Linus Thorwald made a free version, we where some that started to use Linux and Gimp came just a little bit later for Unix, so I used it from v0.96 if I recall it right and later on it got ported to Windows somewhere after 2000. It is the same with the 3D software Blender, that where made for Unix first. I am so amazed of all those enthusiasts that make such a nice software's for free under the Gnu Licenses and both Linux, Gimp and Blender hold such a high standard so if they where made for making money, they would have been expensive I guess. 3D Max as one example is not cheap for sure. There are more good free software's for sure. :)

 

I think a lot of modder's do use Gimp but a lot might have both. Well I do not know really as it is just a wild guess...

[BlueSteelRanger]

@Pellape: "Do compare the ground mesh with the weapon mesh, make sure they point at the same textures in Nifskope. If the texture work on one mesh, it will work on all meshes." This is why the crown thing is so confusing -- I've got all my textures and meshes in the proper places. The swords came out without a hitch. The crowns though, won't come through on the ground models. And I've tried routing them to other textures to experiment with what'd happen.

 

I am afraid I don't have Photoshop at all but my PSP 7 does have the wand selector tool. And possibly dumb question but what exactly is a mip-map?

 

Haha, true. I'm happy to say that all I need to do now is fix that little crown issue and write in some lore. Well, technically I could release a version of the palace without the crown set or the lore books. All of it is completely finished beyond those two points.

I wish to all blazes that I had some distraction-free alone time though. That's one thing I haven't had since March. But, well. The greater good. I'm not going to lie, the virus scares the daedric sh** out of me.

 

I must thank you for being so patient with this utter greenhorn that I am. May I name you in my Credits section when I release this thing?

[Pellape]

Yes, you can mention all of us if you want really. Dimitris did that as well, not me yet but the others here. ;)

 

PSP is Photoshop as far as I know ;)

 

What are those crowns? Maybe I could take a peek at it if you upload it somewhere? I might solve it.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Sadly there's not many slots suitable for things like crowns or tiaras in this game. Anything equipped to the head slot, as you noticed, will replace the entire head. This is for full-face helmets and the like.

Anything equipped to the hair slot will replace your hair and ears. This is for open-faced helmets and the like.

So the only slots left for these things usually are either amulet (self-explanatory I think) or tail, for when amulet already is no option. Removing the tail on a tail-less race is always an option. Unless it's a tailed race, then the tail slot is not that great a choice.

 

Still wondering what could be up with the ground model of your crown.

 

And "mip map" isn't really something you yourself need to know all about. It's simply part of the DDS texture file format, in other 3D games also with other file types. Mip maps is what gives you differently sized textures for objects at different distances. When you only see a couple pixels of the object, there's no reason to put the entire 1024x1024 resolution texture over it. That's why such textures then are usually stored in different sizes all put into one file, 1024^2, 512^2, 256^2, 128^2 and so on, don't know how deep down it goes. I've seen pictures of it looking like the famous drawing of the artist drawing the artist drawing the artist and so on. But that's just for visualization's sake. The graphics app you're using to create the texture will take care of all of it for you automatically. You can just toggle generation of mip maps on and off on saving.

[Striker879]

I extracted Thadon's crown from the SI meshes BSA and looked in NifSkope but I didn't see anything different between the ground mesh and the worn mesh aside from the collision added to the ground mesh (texture paths are identical, meshes look the same and material is the same for both). Of course for Thadon's crown there is also an EGM file so that it will work on different heads.

 

Does the crown you are using have gem stones or the like? I ran into a case once with a ring that was missing some texture files for the gemstone ... the game generated error for that was long spikey purple rays to infinity (but very thin ones because I guess the gem mesh was very small on the ring ... though that wouldn't go along with the rror not being there when worn and only appear with the ground mesh).

[Pellape]

Sorry I did miss to explain the mip maps, which Drake took care of :D It is a damn smart way to increase perfomance as when you are far away from an object which has its top dds at 2048 x 1024, you do not want that object to have that texture, so lets say you are 30m from it (90ft), it shows you the map 3 instead, that has the size 512 x 256 and it still looks perfect. I did forget at some point to check the mip maps when I saved a painting and it did look awful at distance. It works, but if many textures would been saved without them, the game performance would suffer a lot. Well I went and resaved the texture, checking the mip maps checkbox, saved and it did look much better and natural at that very same distance. The normal map must have mip maps as well or the object will be black. the *_n.dds that makes the texture not to be flat.

 

Mip maps at icons are NO NO NO and NO. It will not work and the icon will look distorted and terrible and Icons do not use normal maps. I even think tga files works as icons. We used to use TGA in early Morrowind modding but it has not the same quality as dds has. I do remember they looked awful and so did the icons in that format. And suddenly the dds exporters was released and we flushed TGA.

[BlueSteelRanger]

"What are those crowns? Maybe I could take a peek at it if you upload it somewhere? I might solve it."

 

Here, I snagged them from this modder's resource: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/16426/?

 

"Removing the tail on a tail-less race is always an option. Unless it's a tailed race, then the tail slot is not that great a choice." Thankfully I don't mind if the tail on my Khajiit is removed. Oddly enough though, through my testing, the tail has not disappeared at all and the crowns fit on the head well. There's minor clipping due likely to the Khajiit head shapr/ears, but I never mind that at all.

 

"Does the crown you are using have gem stones or the like?" Yes, as linked above. The gemstones come out perfectly, to boot.

 

Haha, now you're getting into stuff I've never heard of. I'm not sure if these have mip maps. I will say though that the models do show up from a decent distance. I couldn't tell you how well they render though since my sh*tty eyes have very little function to speak of.