A little help,please - Re-texturing question

[deiMuddaduhund]

Hello there,

 

i recently started getting into retexturing and stuff, read a lot of tutorials and all in all, works quite nice for the start, i just have encountered the first thing i can't figure out.

 

I made ,for my personal use only, a retexture of the Chainmail Robes and the Iron Pauldrons from the pauldrons-mod. WHile al the textile and leather like textures for the chainmail robes turned out quite ok, i can't get the metal to shine "the right way". I read all about the shiny-ness issues and such, and adjusted the specular map, made several new normalmaps with different techniques and programmes, but it just doesn't shine right.

 

I copied the BSShaderproperties from steel armor, adjustes the glossines and specular strength values and colors and so on, i also tried different environment maps, but somehow, the texture still looks more like dull glas instead of shiny, yet scratched metal.

 

Maybe some of the more experienced texture artists here can give me a hint in the right direction where i'm missing something? I suspect my normalmap or the specular map ( which, if i have gotten this right, is the alpha channel in the normal map?) might be the issue, i just don't find better looking "settings" for them.

 

Any tip or help is very appreciated. I attached a screenshot with 2 versions, with the one on the left the better one, to show in which directuion i progress.

Edited April 29, 2013 by deiMuddaduhund

[budcat]

Try changing the "has vertex colors" flag on your NiTriShapeData to yes and see if that helps.

 

I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject, but I seem to remember having the same problem and that being what someone else recommended I do and it working.

[Elleh]

Hm. Well it could just be an adjustment that needs to be made in nifskope, but I'm not sure what. (I don't do much in nifskope beyond the minimum to make stuff work in-game.) Try what budcat suggested, and make sure you have BSNumUvSets at "4097" instead of "1" - from what I've seen the 4097 doesn't seem to alter how the normal map's alpha is read, 'tho. So just a shot in the dark.

 

It looks like the spec highlights are just really broad. I'm not.... totally sure if/what properties might control that in nifskope, but maybe you could share the values of your "glossiness", "specular strength", and so on? Ooooor, maybe it is a shader issue? Do you have "Skyrim Shader Type" set to "Environment Map" - and what Shader Flags do you have set? Doesn't look like an e-map is showing up at all, really. Hmmm, hmmmm......

 

You could even share your specular map and environment mask (not the map - the mask) if you are comfortable with that, and you don't seem to have sucess in nifskope. A general suggestion for making the illusion of really shinyshiny metal, is to make the diffuse darker than what you think it should look like and make the spec-map have lots of bright white highlights. In-game, this will give the impression of the high-contrast you see in real-life, highly-reflective metals.

 

Just some ideas. Haven't really run into this problem myself yet, so I'm not sure what went wrong....

[deiMuddaduhund]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Noob question: What's the Environment Mask?? Maybe thats all whats missing cause i have no idea what that should be nor how to create one^^ . Is it the third texture that shiows up in nifskope which has the M in the filename? Steelarmor also has these three textures, the diffuse map, normal map and another one which i think is a brighter version of the diffuse map?

"has Vertex Colors" says yes, and the BSNumUvSets is also 4096. I have honestly no real idea yet what the last setting really means, just found that mentioned by someone in another forum thread i've read, though i don't know where anymore. Shader Flags are all like in vanilla steel armor, i didn't change anything there. Glossiness in the left half of the picture is 20.0000 and specular strength is at 0.3000 .

Im right now trying to darken the diffuse map, to the point where i can't see real details anymore in Photoshop, gonna see how it turns out  in game.

P.S: I Just learned that what i prior referred to as "Environment Maps" are actually called cubemaps if got this right

Edited April 29, 2013 by deiMuddaduhund

[Twizzler77]

Honestly, it doesn't look like there is any normal map applied at all. It looks like the lighting is simply being pulled from the smoothing groups of the mesh.

 

Are you sure the normal map is hooked up correctly? Try applying another normal map from a different asset to see if that works. It won't be lined up correctly but at least you would be able to see the normal/specular texture affecting the lighting. If a different normal map works, then you know it's something with your map and not the mesh. If a different normal map doesn't work, then something with your mesh is set incorrectly.

 

Could be wrong but hope it helps!

Edited April 29, 2013 by Twizzler77

[deiMuddaduhund]

Omg, turns out i more or less did everything right, but made one really stupid mistake :biggrin: Thanks for mentioning that there doesnt seem to appear any normal map at all cause that got me thinking. I didn't pay attention to correct filenaming (the _n;_M endings to the filename), so actually,my skyrim might have only loaded the diffuse map cause its first in order, but none else. Now, the metal looks really f***ed up cause i made an extremely noisy and oversaturated specular and normal map cause all the time i thought, damn, why am i not seeing any real difference in game and took things further and further. Boy, do i feel stupid now :biggrin: Now, with correct filenaming, it looks like this (Left is ENB turned off, right is on):

Edited April 29, 2013 by deiMuddaduhund

[budcat]

Looks good. Glad you got it working.

 

Nothing worse than thinking you dotted every i and crossed every t and still ended up with a CTD!

[deiMuddaduhund]

Exactly!

[Twizzler77]

Glad that worked!

 

Incorrect naming is the bane game developers everywhere. :)