Modify a texture to make it affected by darkness

[IOPASD]

I installed the mod Superior Spider Daedra Retexture, which is cool looking and all, but I have a problem regarding darkness. Basically it makes the creature glow in the dark, not affected by light levels. I was wondering if there is a way to fix this by editing the texture file. I have both Gimp and Photoshop, but I do not know how to tackle the problem. Thanks in advance.

 

PICS

[Pellape]

There are many things that effects something to glow. Basicly it is either the alpha channel in the Normal file (x_n.dds) that you need to make darker and that is best done with editing the alpha separately with DXT2BMP, well you export and import the alpha that way and make it darker with gimp or PS. The separate alpha can be saved as both bmp or png. Glow can also be made with a glow texture (x_g.dds) and you need to make it darker or delete it if you do not want it to glow at all.

 

There are many different versions of dds textures, so if you edit the texture in Gimp, be sure to check which DXx version is used to create them in the first place. Each version has some different features so if the textures are DXT5, do not save them as DXT1 or maybe that will solve the glow completely... :wink:

 

Well here is the links:

• DXT2BMP
• Gimp dds plugin
• Gimp Normal Map plugin

You can also play around with the material setting in the mesh with Nifskope but that is not the right way if you only did DL textures and not also a mesh.

Edited April 7, 2021 by Pellape

[IOPASD]

Couldn't maake them 100% dark, but your tips definetly helped. I don't mind it as much now, and besides, a Spider Daedra with glowing red details and glow-in-the-dark eyes is kinda cool. Thanks a lot!

[DrakeTheDragon]

Hmm, the way this is glowing, that is actually emitting light, doesn't come from the textures but from the material of the mesh.

 

Glowing surfaces in Oblivion comes from the "emissive" property of the mesh's materials, and then the glow map ("..._g.dds") is laid over it as a kind of mask, to remove glow where it's black and control intensity of glow in other places through grey scale. I don't know what happens though, if you have the surface still emit light but the glow map completely black, apart from it not making any sense of course.

 

The alpha channel of the normal map ("..._n.dds") controls the specularity, that is basically a factor to all shine and reflection effects, but these only work by reflecting light.

In your picture there is no light to be reflected, and it also doesn't look like just the reflection of light, so I'm pretty sure it must be the mesh's light emission instead like explained.

 

The mod you linked doesn't have a replacement for the models, only textures. So the emission must come from some other mod, or it even was already part of the Vanilla game's Spider Daedra model to begin with.

 

Oh, and, the body inside and the armor it's wearing are probably separate pieces inside the NIF, so you might be able to turn off the emission of only the one you don't want to glow and keep the glowing red parts and eyes.