More in-depth texturing information or tutorials for Nifskope?

[SmedleyDButler]

So, while working on new outfits, I often refer Insumdave's excellent BSLightingShaderProperty Basics tutorial. However, it's somewhat general and more a set of instructions than it is an explanation. So if I want a specific "look" I often find myself trying to copy all the exact settings, flags, etc. from an existing piece of armour. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't and I don't know why because I don't have the deeper knowledge of what all the flag and settings actually DO.

 

I tried looking for a more in-depth tutorial, but surprisingly haven't been able find anything yet (vastly prefer text to video, if possible), and the old Nifskope github manuals don't seem to be up anymore?

 

The main issue I'm having trouble with is playing with shader settings, alpha channels, and cubemaps for creating textures with a dulled reflective quality, like wrought iron, worn steel or new leather. Even if you don't know a general good tutorial for Nifskope's detailed texture settings, something which at least talks about good settings for creating soft reflective textures would be just fine.

 

Thanks.

[Guest]

Sorry for the late reply lol. I've been fiddling with shader properties for most of the past year and while I don't know many tutorials, I'll try help out as best I can. If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend checking out these two articles on it:

• Texture Sets & Texture Slots
• Animated Textures in Nif Files Tutorial

The first goes into more detail about the specific map slots and what shader flags they're associated with. The second is just a post on controllers which while being kind of unnecessary info, it really helped me understand a lot more about the lighting shaders. 

It's easiest to learn through replicating others, tbqh, and just building upon it until you feel comfortable with it all. Try be ambitious with whatever you're working on and go further than you probably should. For instance: trying to make a sword glow > trying to make the sword glow different colours or brightness > trying to make the sword glow as well as have a cubemap. Just keep breaking the rules as best you can until you learn the limits. It really helps, or it did for me and I made a lot of cool toys in the process. I'll try and share some other stuff I know though and it'll be nice to just have it in text, tbh. 

 

For dulled metals:

Firstly, if you haven't read the first article I linked yet, you should. Change your Shader Type to Environment Map and check Environment_Mapping in Shader Flags 1. This'll let the mesh properly use texture slots 5 and 6. I'm going to assume your dulled reflective quality you're looking for looks something similar to this? (There's more pics of it here if that's not clear enough) If not, I hope it's close enough. For this I've used a cubemap from Team TAL's Dark Souls Pack - firekeeper_e.dds. It had this dark, dulled shine to it that I really liked. To dull it further, it was actually mostly done in the normal map. I used the same dirt overlays from the diffuse to create a bumpy, noisy kind of look to the plates. A similar look can be done with the envmap mask texture. The envmap scale at the bottom of the BSLightingShaderProperty is still at default 1.0, but the specular colour was changed to a slightly-lighter-than-mid-range grey. Envmap scale is very powerful for dulling the shine too though. Most of the darkening, dulling, and detail is all in the textures though. Not much of a surprise there, I guess. Hopefully that helps.

 

About normal maps and specular maps:

Specular maps do about 95% of the work for making the specular settings of the Shader Property look good. It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit to figure out that specular maps were stored inside normal maps so if you didn't know that already, you do now lol. Specular maps work by value - the higher the value the stronger the specularity (black = matte, white = gloss). Because of this, they're placed inside the normal map's alpha channel to.. I'm gonna guess it's an attempt to save VRAM. It's why most normal maps are semi-transparent. For that new leather look you mentioned, make sure you have a specular map and that the specular map is looking up to your standard. It really does make a difference. I usually avoid using the Lighting Shader's specularity settings as much as I possibly can and most of the time, you can.

 

Alpha Properties:

These are tricky and you'll probably learn more from the first link than from me, tbh. These are used for diffuse textures with transparency involved, like fur or chainmail. It only reads the diffuse map's alpha channel. Alpha properties are controlled outside the Lighting Shader, under the NiTriShape as an NiAlphaProperty. Flags can be changed directly by number or by clicking the flag icon. The alpha property can mostly only render in a strict on/off state. All opaque, The Alpha Threshold limits how transparent a texture can be before it's not displayed. The Blending flag allows for a smoother transition over the alpha threshold but it comes with a visual cost. Light in the game will effect them differently to everything else and ENB won't be able to read their depth properly. It's why hair mods use the Hair and HairLine combination to create soft-edged hair that doesn't look buggy in-game. With that said, KS Hairdos is a great resource for learning how Alpha Properties work. The Alpha Property is also what allows the use of two Shader Types on "one" mesh for effects like the sword I linked earlier or these eyes (glow map and environment map again).

 

I'm sure there's a bunch here that's irrelevant to you but I wanted to have a place I could copy and paste this stuff from if I ever needed it haha. I might add more later. If it helps, here's two resources you can use for figuring out more about shader properties and other.. mesh property.. things. Just pull them apart and see what you find, if anything ? 

• Glowing Eyes Template - glowing eyes that pulsate. I haven't updated it in a while and it might have a shader flag or two I hadn't learned about yet still enabled idk. Looks like this in the game.
• Magical Arcing Effect - An animated magical effect I made for one of my character's staves. Gfycat by Daymarr

 

[SmedleyDButler]

Wew! That's tons of information - thanks loads!

 

The specular map being hidden in the alpha channel of the normal map is fascination. I thought the specular was a separate file, which I think now I was confusing for the normal map (slot #6 black and white), which explains why it seems seem to be affecting the reflectivity of the cubemap except at extremely low shades (and then it was full of artifacts).

 

I did figure out a while ago that the alpha maps for basic transparency are hidden in the Alpha channel for the base texture, but had no idea this was replicated with the normal maps.

 

So yes, there's tons of useful information here. Interestingly it's the subtle textures which interest me more than flashy ones. For instance, I've been stumped trying to create a robust suede texture for a jerkin.

 

By the way... where's your redguard's armour from? Something you put together yourself? It's not so much the armour which interests me as the quilted underoos. Good padded jacks to put under armour are hard to come by!

[Guest]

Glad it helps! ^^ If you have any areas of NifSkope and shaders you'd like to hone in on, I might be able to help. There's probably some stuff I've forgotten to mention, tbh. The envmap mask, btw - the sixth slot - it's like a layer mask in PS or GIMP but just applies to the envmap. Black = not reflective, white = reflective. A lot of sword mods can give you good examples of how it can be used. Not a lot of detail can really be shown through it but its definitely helps in some cases. Sometimes it can make things look worse though, it really depends on what you're working on. As for artifacting.. well that's just DXT compression being annoying I guess. Personally, I don't compress the textures I make unless they start getting really large. 4K is usually my limit. Other things can just hog my vram because why not lol

 

The armour is a mashup I put together for the character using one of shinglescat's armours as a base. Other elements are from some TW3 outfits and Outcast Shen. The rest is all texture changes and physical edits. For that quilted look, I used these textures, haha. Inverting the values of the AO map and playing with Levels a bit makes for a great specular map for it too. A little strange but I think it turned out good.

[SmedleyDButler]

3 hours ago, Artsick said:

Glad it helps! ^^ If you have any areas of NifSkope and shaders you'd like to hone in on, I might be able to help. There's probably some stuff I've forgotten to mention, tbh. The envmap mask, btw - the sixth slot - it's like a layer mask in PS or GIMP but just applies to the envmap. Black = not reflective, white = reflective. A lot of sword mods can give you good examples of how it can be used. Not a lot of detail can really be shown through it but its definitely helps in some cases. Sometimes it can make things look worse though, it really depends on what you're working on. As for artifacting.. well that's just DXT compression being annoying I guess. Personally, I don't compress the textures I make unless they start getting really large. 4K is usually my limit. Other things can just hog my vram because why not lol

 

The armour is a mashup I put together for the character using one of shinglescat's armours as a base. Other elements are from some TW3 outfits and Outcast Shen. The rest is all texture changes and physical edits. For that quilted look, I used these textures, haha. Inverting the values of the AO map and playing with Levels a bit makes for a great specular map for it too. A little strange but I think it turned out good.

 

Yep. What I meant by "artifacts" is that it seemed the envmap mask (I think?) ONLY operates in black and white and not in partial tones for semi-transparent reflections. So, in mistaking it for the specular map, I thought that having graytones would mitigate shine. Instead I just got an effect where you see a pixellated moire pattern of reflecting and non-reflecting surface. Now I understand why!

 

As for specific help, there's the suede/buckskin texture I've been trying to get. I ended up bodging something together which was tolerable by using a fuzzier, lower resolution texture, but really this was a hugely inferior option and it bugs me.

 

I've been changing a couple of the colours on other parts of that outfit, so I don't have it ready to send out this minute, but I should be able to PM you a file with the meshes and textures tomorrow if you think you might be able to help!

[Guest]

I'm not very skilled in the texture side of things so I can only really recommend places to search like textures.com or cc0textures.com. There's probably a ton of others but it's not usually something I dig too far into. Not having a texturing program doesn't help out much either lol. For lighting shader properties I'd suggest maybe.. A lower glossiness value (around 10-30) and changing the other options enough to make sure it's not reflecting too strongly. Just because I feel like it's very matte and doesn't reflect much but if it would it'd be over the whole face if that makes sense. Hard to say  

I'll be happy to check it out! I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do or how fast I'll be but it's not a problem.

[SmedleyDButler]

14 hours ago, Artsick said:

I'm not very skilled in the texture side of things so I can only really recommend places to search like textures.com or cc0textures.com. There's probably a ton of others but it's not usually something I dig too far into. Not having a texturing program doesn't help out much either lol. For lighting shader properties I'd suggest maybe.. A lower glossiness value (around 10-30) and changing the other options enough to make sure it's not reflecting too strongly. Just because I feel like it's very matte and doesn't reflect much but if it would it'd be over the whole face if that makes sense. Hard to say  

I'll be happy to check it out! I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do or how fast I'll be but it's not a problem.

I'd agree that suede or buckskin would be extra matte.

 

For the time being I am going to try and increase the resolution on the torso part of the armour and see what that does. If that doesn't work out, well, I can always post the armour and see who has any suggestions.