(wip) Custom aMidianBorn Steel Plate Armor

[Sets00na]

A month ago I made some alterations to cabal's texture for the nord plate armor but I can't figure out in where did i screwed up.

The cloth parts has a gloss-like reflection. I didn't touch the meshes. I will leave the custom textures if anybody is interested in looking at it and tell me where did I mess up. Hopefully it will help me in future mods I release.

custom.rar

[Sets00na]

This is my problem:

 

 

The shine in the clothing.

[Sets00na]

I will leave the bmp files for those who want to check them.

I know I'm triple posting but I really would like to solve this problem. If any of you find out the problem, can you tell me how to solve it?

 

BMP files.rar

[Blaze69]

The problem is in the normal map.

 

Skyrim stores the specular texture as the alpha channel of the normal map; black means dull/matte and white means very shiny, but at the same time and because it's an alpha channel, for the texture file itself black means fully transparent and white means fully opaque/no transparency. Thus, a fully opaque texture or a texture without alpha channel is read as "full #ffffff white specular map", which in game translates to "shiny as hell". That's what happens to your textures, as the normals are opaque/don't have alpha channels.

 

Try restoring the Alpha channel from the original textures, that should remove the extra shine.

[Sets00na]

9 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

The problem is in the normal map.

 

Skyrim stores the specular texture as the alpha channel of the normal map; black means dull/matte and white means very shiny, but at the same time and because it's an alpha channel, for the texture file itself black means fully transparent and white means fully opaque/no transparency. Thus, a fully opaque texture or a texture without alpha channel is read as "full #ffffff white specular map", which in game translates to "shiny as hell". That's what happens to your textures, as the normals are opaque/don't have alpha channels.

 

Try restoring the Alpha channel from the original textures, that should remove the extra shine.

Thanks for replying. How do I do that?

[Blaze69]

58 minutes ago, Sets00na said:

Thanks for replying. How do I do that?

I only know how to do it in GIMP, and it would go like this:

1. Load the original aMidianBorn normal map and use the "Colors -> Components -> Decompose..." option.
2. Set Color Mode to Alpha and press OK. You should get a new image with the alpha channel of the normal (which should be a grayscale/black-and-white image).
3. Load your edited normal and use the Decompose option again, but this time pick "RGB" in the Color Mode. You will get a new image with three layers, one per color channel (Red, Green and Blue).
4. Copy the alpha image you got from Step #2 and paste it into the image with the three channels from Step #3. Rename said layer to "alpha" and move it to the bottom of the list (below Blue).
5. Use the "Colors -> Components -> Compose..." option. Set the Color Mode to RGBA and make sure the channels are set in the proper slots.
6. Save the new composite image as DDS with DXT5 compression, mipmaps enabled, and with perceptual error metric enabled (under "Advanced Options").

There's probably a better or faster way to do it, but this is the one I found and it works for me.

[Sets00na]

It worked. Thanks. Expect new mod soon.

[Sets00na]

Mod uploaded. Go check and put screenshots. Too lazy to do it.