Editing Skin Textures - How to retain quality?

[LizzyGirl]

Hi all! I've googled this and have read many articles, but nothing I've found addresses this particular issue I'm having. I've been attempting to edit Fair Skin and PureSkin textures for my own liking. Little things like normal map of the stomach to make it look nicer, tinting the anus, etc. But every time I edit these textures in GIMP (latest version) I get weird after-effects.

 

Before, I wasn't aware I had to save with compression. That was causing my characters' skin to black out in game. The solution was to compress them to DXT3 or DXT5 if the texture had alpha. Solved the black out issue, but... with any kind of compression, those beautiful 4 and 8K textures gain unsightly artifacts... :(

 

Is it just not possible to edit an existing texture AND keep the quality? What am I missing... I let GIMP generate new MipMaps and everything, but they are of very poor quality compared to the originals, with lots of 'squares' clearly visible at the higher resolution mips.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated :D

[27X]

1. Pureskin is already compressed to fuck and back. If the pixels and artifacts were any bigger it'd be an atari sprite.

 

2. There is no such animal as lossless compression and that includes bc7.

 

3. You don't have to save with compression. Compression and format aren't the same thing. Format needs to be correct, compression will result in crap. Simple as. Pretty obvious solution.

 

If GIMP can't save in the right format then save as a TGA and use Paint.net to save and convert without compression.

[Andy14]

Without compress in Gimp.

with Alpha -> RGBA

without Alpha -> RGB

[LizzyGirl]

Sooooo is there a difference between 'exporting' and 'saving'? Gimp will 'export' a .dds file with all of the compression and mipmap options, but can't 'save' a .dds.

[RW311]

Yes there is if you could save or save as you would end up with all the layers flattened and it would defeat much of the reason you use dds. Export is needed to open the menu options for how the image needs to be saved, what format and compression level etc... 

[LizzyGirl]

Okay, I think I'm catching on. From what I gather, 'compression' is not necessary, and results in poor quality. I need to export the .dds in the correct FORMAT. Andy14 mentioned a format of RGBA for images with no alpha. However, I have no such formatting option when exporting. I see an RGBA8 and RGBA4... but my guess is those aren't the same as RGBA lol

[RW311]

It's old topic but unless you want to use another tool besides gimp for export this is still accurate.

 

[Andy14]

5 hours ago, LizzyGirl said:

Andy14 mentioned a format of RGBA for images with no alpha.

Maybe my mistake. RGBA is for dds with Alpha channel and RGB for dds without alpha.

[yatol]

11 hours ago, LizzyGirl said:

From what I gather, 'compression' is not necessary, and results in poor quality.

 

poor quality? did you bother checking?

try guessing what is the a8nsomething (uncompressed) and what is dxt1 (compressed)

too far to see any differences?

even with TES Texture Merging Utility, it's complicated to see the differences

 

it's another story if you edit the compressed texture again, and again, and again, and again...

there won't be much differences between 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 3 and 4.... there will be more between 1 and 4, since 4 is the result of x compressions

 

you have uncompressed textures for walls, armors, furnitures?

there are uncompressed textures for bodies, for the ones that feel like editing them, playing with that is just a useless waste of ram

 

and if you want to check difference between uncompressed and compressed, do that with msn, that transparent texture is just 3 colors, it's easier to choose between uncompressed 2k or compressed 4k looking at that

 

 

 

[LizzyGirl]

I 'think' I may have achieved my goal with these export settings. I say 'think' because the texture look fine after editing, but I have to wait to see if they will randomly black out while playing.

 

I couldn't help notice it disallowed the format option after I selected compression. I've found that if I don't use compression, the textures will black out within a few minutes of playing. Including a pic of that too.

[LizzyGirl]

Yatol, of course I checked, which is how I noticed my character looking like she broke out in shingles because the artifacting was so bad. Also, sometimes the textures just black out altogether. No one's going to miss that. The problems I am dealing with are so blatantly apparent to the eye that it is impossible for me to 'not' notice. Your acrimony does not help. What we're trying to accomplish here is minimal loss of quality after editing. I appreciate the other bits of advice, though

[yatol]

1 hour ago, LizzyGirl said:

What we're trying to accomplish here is minimal loss of quality after editing.

there's no loss of quality if you save uncompressed...

how about searching some sites about that stuff in google, to find out how to do it right?

 

black body above have nothing to do with whatever was selected for that texture

when your ram get full, if you don't ram ctd because of stupid "tweaks", the game unload the biggest textures to make room for what it have to load

the biggest texture, it's the uncompressed body msn, unless for some reason you have 2k bodies with 4k walls or 8k grounds

msn it's the lighting texture, no msn, no lighting, and without light, the mesh is black

 

as for what compression to use, how about doing what they say for texture optimiser, smco or other optimision stuff?

for msn you go either uncompressed either r5something

for transparent textures, you go dxt5

and for the rest dx1

 

you don't have dxt5 above? then i bet you forgot to install that, and if whatever you pick doesn't look good, i bet it's a format not supported by skyrim.exe, that fail to load it right

 

 

 

 

[LizzyGirl]

But if I save uncompressed. the body goes black, guaranteed. Not at any particular time, just whenever it chooses to do so. About 3 hours ago, I made my edits to the original PureSkin texture, saved it uncompressed with no mipmaps, and the file size doubled. Ignoring that, I loaded the game anyway and my character looked spectacular. I ran showracemenu and her body immediately went black.

 

If I DO save it compressed (last save was BC2/DXT3), the skin looks rough, but never blacks out. At least its had all morning to do so and hasn't done it yet.

 

Honestly all of this trouble just to tint the nipples and give the tummy a less muscular appearance? ?

[Grey Cloud]

28 minutes ago, LizzyGirl said:

But if I save uncompressed. the body goes black, guaranteed. Not at any particular time, just whenever it chooses to do so. About 3 hours ago, I made my edits to the original PureSkin texture, saved it uncompressed with no mipmaps, and the file size doubled. Ignoring that, I loaded the game anyway and my character looked spectacular. I ran showracemenu and her body immediately went black.

 

If I DO save it compressed (last save was BC2/DXT3), the skin looks rough, but never blacks out. At least its had all morning to do so and hasn't done it yet.

 

Honestly all of this trouble just to tint the nipples and give the tummy a less muscular appearance? ?

There are two possibilities here assuming your hardware is up to the job.

Either your Skyrim is not set up and configured correctly or you are using 4k or above textures.

 

If you are getting the black while using 2k textures then your game is not set up correctly. If it is when using 4k textures then dropping down to 2k is a lot simpler than arsing about with compression.

[yatol]

29 minutes ago, LizzyGirl said:

saved it uncompressed with no mipmaps

you don't see a problem here?

didn't i said above to look for sites on how to do that right, to see how to do it right?

if the .dds have no mipmaps, when skyrim.exe load it in your ram, you are wasting cpu ressources to generate those missing mipmaps

 

you are close to a house, wall texture is 2k

you move back, 2k texture from vram is unload and replaced by the 1k version, that is in the dds that was put in your ram

you move back again, 1k is replaced by the 512*512, then 256*256, then lod if there's a lod for that

that's the purpose of mipmaps, to not have the stuff too far at full resolution to reduce vram usage

 

mipmap it's that, it's to reduce the vram usage, you stick to what you see in skyrim textures.bsa, and that's all

 

31 minutes ago, LizzyGirl said:

 I ran showracemenu and her body immediately went black.

 

because there wasn't enought ram to load showracemenu interface, so the biggest texture was unload, and that's the body _msn, and without it, there's no light on the mesh

[LizzyGirl]

Yes I see the problem. I mentioned I did so intentionally just to screw with it. That was a just a fun experiment to see how long it would last until it unloaded the texture. I completely understand mipmaps and their purpose.

 

However... during that blackout, my diffuse was the largest texture, as it had somehow reached 272MB of size... COMPRESSED.

 

See my problem isn't understanding how these things work, why the engine does this or that. What I don't understand is why are my textures still turning out to either look like garbage or fail altogether when I am doing everything I am supposed to do. Following the sage advice of Groovtama:

 

Diffuse(no alpha) = DXT1/8.8.8

Normal(no alpha) = 8.8.8

 

Generate new mipmaps to support the edits. Filesizes double or quadruple, then my character has shingles despite the .dds image itself showing no artifacts whatsoever. I kinda feeling like I'm swelling a balloon by taking air out of it ?

[LizzyGirl]

Okay so here we go. Step by step. Original Pure Skin 4096x4096 diffuse texture loaded into GIMP. Filesize is 10,923KB

 

Load DDS Checkbox Window:

 

Load mipmaps - Cleared (I will generate new ones)

Automatically decode YCoCG/AExp images when detected - Checked (I have no idea what this one means)

Show this dialogue - Checked (need it to select load mipmaps later so I can check on them)

 

Image loads. I edit it. All I'm doing it drawing on it.

 

Export as...

 

 

No compression. Everything I've read has supported that PC textures need not be compressed if you want to keep the visual fidelity, which is what I want. If I don't use the Box filter for the mipmaps, they will be very pixelated, very quickly.

 

Alright, and OK... EXPORT. (takes GIMP a few seconds)

 

Filesize is now 65,537KB... as expected without compression. But wasn't it delivered compressed anyway? I still don't understand how I'm adding 50MB of data to a file by saving it when it was already compressed. Does the editor UNcompress the file when you open it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Azazellz]

"Uncompressed" means texture will be saved "as is", without any changes.

"Compressed" means texture will be proceed through some compression algorithm.

If texture already compressed at least once - that's all. You can't "uncompress" it - because color data was changed.

 

For example, if you save new texture at DXT1 - you will get compressed DXT1 texture with low quality.

If you save it again at 8.8.8 (no compression) - it will be the same DXT1 texture. but with size of uncompressed texture.

 

Just try to re-save high quality PNG picture to low-quality JPEG, then new JPEG picture to another JPEG, and again, and again.

And then compare results.

This is how "compression" works.

 

P.s. for dds format things are not so bad as for JPEG. Re-saving DXT1 into DXT1 will not decrease texture quality any further, for example.

[RW311]

https://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=DXT_compression_explained

[yatol]

8 hours ago, LizzyGirl said:

Okay so here we go. Step by step. Original Pure Skin 4096x4096 diffuse texture loaded into GIMP. Filesize is 10,923KB

 

15 hours ago, yatol said:

 

 

it's another story if you edit the compressed texture again, and again, and again, and again...

there won't be much differences between 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 3 and 4.... there will be more between 1 and 4, since 4 is the result of x compressions

[LizzyGirl]

Guys... thank you for all the thought but you're just looking down on me like I know nothing about compression, etc. We are well beyond that understanding. I get it. I AM a digital artist after all so file types, textures, compression, layers, I understand all of that. What I ultimately needed to know was which compression and format does Skyrim use, and if anyone else had experienced an apparent error in GIMP with regards to finalizing the DDS. This whole thread has been about "what am I missing?" not "school me on the basics" It's about as aggravating as when your boss reminds you to do the same task that is a regular part of your job every single day. At some point you're going to be like "Dude I been doing this for 12 years."

 

I am not reloading the same edited DDS every time, yatol. I have copies of the original, untouched image ready to be edited each attempt. Yes this means I am doing the same work over and over again, because I'm persistent like that lol

 

Nevertheless, I believe I have found a formula that works. The funny part is it is what I described in my step-by-step approach described earlier. It seems the problem was the 8092x8092 textures. After switching to 4096x4096, I haven't had any troubles, even with the dds left uncompressed. I played for about 6 hours yesterday and didn't have a single black out.

 

Shoot... today is Monday... the textures will probably black out on my every 5 minutes today lol

 

[27X]

Quote

 'My problem is this, this thing is a fact'

Except this thing is not a fact. It is your inability to understand the problem is your platform, and methodology. And for the record the file formats Skyrim will take is a matter of public record, so you shouldn't be confused about that at all.

 

The elephant is the room is your GPU's inability to take the size of texture you insist on using, because Skyrim can throw out 16Kx16K just fine, provided your card can actually display it and keep it in active memory.

 

 

 

 

16 by 16.

 

Secondly, you use the phrase digital artist and then you use the phrase GIMP. These two phrases don't go to together. Almost no digital artist uses GIMP except in niche cases for very old very public and very gone over to death reasons.

 

Thirdly you have on three occasions demonstrated a complete lack of context to a very public, very open source, very almost TEN YEARS OLD pipeline set for editing textures in Skyrim and insist on attempting to make your method the defacto method despite not achieving the results you want. Repeatedly.

 

1. Load the texture

2. Edit the texture

3. save the texture as 32bit TGA since you insist on using GIMP instead of CS

4. Open the texture in Paint.net

5. Save the texture as an >RGB or RGBA DDS< >with mips.< Do you see the word DXT in there? No, no you don't.

 

That's it. That's all. You're done. If your card isn't robust enough to handle 8K textures without compressing them all to fuck, there's zero reason you should be using them. Since pureskin is already compressed to fuck, you shouldn't be doing anything with it anyway if your concern is "vanity/quality" unless you intend to simply change colors or add states to the alpha channel.

 

 

 

[yatol]

 

1 hour ago, LizzyGirl said:

I AM a digital artist after all so file types, textures, compression, layers, I understand all of that. What I ultimately needed to know was which compression and format does Skyrim use

 

amators can find that in 2 min with google, and a pro can't?

 

1 hour ago, LizzyGirl said:

It seems the problem was the 8092x8092 textures. After switching to 4096x4096, I haven't had any troubles, even with the dds left uncompressed.

 

what's the point to save a dxt1 4k as 8k?

beside wasting your ram for nothing

you think fair skin, mature skin or the rest was done in photoshop, gimp or whatever?

that's photos of a real bodie merged onto an uv map

not very detailed photos, those ones are harder to get

[LizzyGirl]

Sorry. I've been out a while...

 

27X... those... are a lot of personal attacks and assumptions. Of course I use GIMP to draw on. Can't afford photoshop. Were you implying one cannot perform digital art on GIMP? 'Digital artist' and 'GIMP' don't go together? That's an opinion. My 'method' is not a singular method. I'm not sitting here trying the same thing over and over again. I'm experimenting with different settings and controls, always keeping a backup of what I'm trying to edit. No one, I repeat, no one is dumb as you wish they were. Lastly... I've mentioned already, multiple times, that for whatever reason, Paint.net will not install on my machine. I have yet to find a solution. And no I can't find any solution. So of course I'm trying to find a workaround without having to use that program.

 

Yatol... Google isn't perfect. In fact, it really gets on my last nerve sometimes finding everything BUT what I'm looking for, or having the desired information 40 pages down the line rather than up front. And since I have seen many, MANY photorealistic pieces of art representing the human body in my line of work and hobby community, it is not ridiculous for me to lightly assume those textures were made in a digital art program.

 

Finally... I SAID I FOUND A WAY TO MAKE IT WORK despite the doubts of some of you. All mistakes are forgiven :)

 

 

 

[yatol]

6 hours ago, LizzyGirl said:

 

Yatol... Google isn't perfect. In fact, it really gets on my last nerve sometimes finding everything BUT what I'm looking for, or having the desired information 40 pages down the line rather than up front. And since I have seen many, MANY photorealistic pieces of art representing the human body in my line of work and hobby community, it is not ridiculous for me to lightly assume those textures were made in a digital art program.

 

no idea what you call digital art program, but whatever you are doing in gimp, can compete with that?

putting some colors on some pixels that are called mario bross, that's history

if you look closely at the eyes

you can see the room where they took photos of those eyes... (unless they edit the texture a little, but most of the time, they don't)

bodies textures are the same, photos

download an oblivion body texture from nexus, and download a v3 model, it's the same uv map

you just have to save the .jpg as .dds to have it ready for oblivion

not for skyrim, because they took shorcuts to save time, to... release an unfinished game (windhelm arena, carriage ambush and whatever, is still unfinished, not even for nothing special edition)

 

before making nords, you start with the easier stuff, to have an idea of what you are doing, before the complicated stuff (make sense right?)

so after making fish, skeevers, wolves.... time for argonian

once argonian was done, since they were short on time, they didn't redo all that for khajit, khajit were converted to argonian, given argonian skeleton and animation, that were edited a little, and done

and.... same for nords, that have reptilian uv map in skyrim

 

there's a tool in daz to load a v4 texture on v3, a genesis 3 texture on genesis 2, you can also load a v7 texture on reptilian, it's probably like that mature skin, fair skin and the others were made (it's that or morph copy unp to daz v4 to bake the textures, that take more time)

instead of messing around with some old textures conversion in gimp or whatever, why not just convert newer textures?