adding Normal, diffuse, and specularity textures to Blender?

[iamsocool1]

Any tutorials on how to add normal, diffuse, and specularity textures to Blender, and how to make an NPC with your body mesh?

Just asking... (Might be asking a stupid question, but really... I am a noob at 3D modeling)

[DrakeTheDragon]

I don't know of any tutorials about this, but it happens I 'stumbled' across this topic myself recently (oh well, as recent as half a year ago can be, anyways).

I explained it in a PM to someone, and I only know technical details about Oblivion's GameBryo engine, but the differences shouldn't be too big anyways.

 

As far as I know, the diffuse texture is the regular one, the normalmap is a seperate file, and the alpha channel of this file is the specular map, by design. It could be some things changed for FO3 though and they're now all seperate files or something. It can't have changed for Blender 4.9 internally though. So here goes:

 

 

Normally every Object from a NIF already has one Texture, "Texture Type" "Image" selected in the "Texture" tab, in the "Map Image" tab "Mip Map" and "Interpol" checked, and in the "Image" tab "Still" checked and the respective image mentioned accordingly. In "Material Buttons" you then see which Material belongs to which Object and which Textures the Object has (most of this material stuff is pretty much unknown to me, too, honestly), the properties of the material in the "Material" tab (the same way they end up in the NIF), in the "Texture" tab the mapping to the Textures used, in the "Map Input" tab "UV" and "Flat" always selected and "UV:UVTex" entered after "Object" (for telling which UV map to use for texture mapping, "UVTex" is default when you create a new one in the UV-Editor), and in the "Map To" tab for regular textures (=diffuse) only "Col" (Color) checked.

 

This already is enough for Blender to render and for the NIF scripts to export. If you want to have normalmaps also used inside Blender though, you need to 'confuse' the NifScripts a little now. It could be all these additional texture entries in the NIF will even confuse the game after export, but for normalmaps inside Blender renders that's the only way. You now need to for every single Object (this works neither on the basis of Material nor Texture, but must be done for each individual Object seperately!) add a new Texture in the "Texture" tab inside "Material buttons" (you can also use an existing one, as Objects can share the same texture instances, which saves a lot of work defining them only once), in the "Map Input" tab check "UV" and "Flat" again and enter "UV:UVTex" as well (this time it will be empty by default), and in the "Map To" tab deselect "Col" and select "Nor" (Normalmap) instead. Did you create a new Texture, you now also need to switch to "Texture buttons" and choose "Texture Type" "Image" again, in the "Map Image" tab select "Mip Map", "Interpol" and "UseAlpha" this time, and additionally click "Normal Map" underneath (so it actually becomes a normalmap even), and last but not least choose "Still" in the "Image" tab and select the normalmap image.

 

For specular maps you need to create a 3rd texture each time, mostly similar to the settings for a diffuse texture, but instead of "Col" choose "Spec", or what's it called, for the specular map this time. It can use the alpha channel of a normalmap texture directly this way, or you can create a special specular map grey-scale image for it instead.

 

That's about as far as I could decipher the whole process myself so far. The render images I achieved with this looked pretty much satisfactory though:

http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2012/346/c/4/xmas_2012___preparations_by_drakethedragon_1980-d5nsskn.jpg

Uhm, sorry for the spam. That pic turned out bigger than expected.

So far only the actual bodyparts in this image got the special treatment though. 2 additional textures set up the way I described for each and every object in the scene became a bit much pretty quickly.

Edited April 10, 2013 by DrakeTheDragon