Environment Map (Mask)

[Sneaksmile]

Hello!

A curious question ... I've always done the Environment Maps (Mask) for the game (texture Mods) ... taking the Diffuse Map and converting it to black and white image and then saving it as DDS file, and that's it. But I don't think that's the correct procedure. Is it? I have never had problems with that, but I think that doing that way does not take advantage of all the potential of the Environment Maps (Mask) when you modify them in NifSkope. I searched in Google and YouTube but there is really nothing or not accurate. Does anyone know if this is correct or am I doing the Environment Maps (Mask) in a wrong way?

Thanks.   

Edited August 12, 2021 by Sneaksmile

[Seijin8]

48 minutes ago, Sneaksmile said:

Hello!

A curious question ... I've always done the Environment Maps (Mask) for the game (texture Mods) ... taking the Diffuse Map and converting it to black and white image and then saving it as DDS file, and that's it. But I don't think that's the correct procedure. Is it? I have never had problems with that, but I think that doing that way does not take advantage of all the potential of the Environment Maps (Mask) when you modify them in NifSkope. I searched in Google and YouTube but there is really nothing or not accurate. Does anyone know if this is correct or am I doing the Environment Maps (Mask) in a wrong way?

Thanks.   

 

Strictly, there's nothing wrong with how you're doing it.  It isn't "professional grade", but neither is Skyrim's lighting engine.

 

Ideally, the design of the environment map depends on the outfit you are using.  Say it is a leather armor using a cube map for the metal (buckles for instance), then you'd want almost everything except the buckles to be very dark, almost black, and the buckles to be at least 50% gray.

 

Same principle on steel armors with fur or leather (like the vanilla steel plate).  Metal areas lighter colored, leather darker.

 

Generally, metals would be lighter (since they're more reflective) and fabrics would be darker, but if you are doing a silk dress with a leather belt, and you were using a cubemap specific to the silk, then you'd want most of the outfit to be lighter colored on the environment map and the buckle to be dark, maybe black (in that case, get the metal shiny using the normalmap's alpha).

 

Fiddling with the specularity (on the mesh and the normal map's alpha channel) for one type of shine and a combination of environment map and cubemap to get a different type of shine can get you decent results with making outfits look more natural.  The ideal is to split off the mesh for each material type though, since that gives you more control; you don't have to compromise one part of the mesh to make another look good, but that process is comparatively performance draining (for modern PCs that generally shouldn't be an issue).

 

Edited August 12, 2021 by Seijin8

[Sneaksmile]

On 8/12/2021 at 3:08 AM, Seijin8 said:

 

Strictly, there's nothing wrong with how you're doing it.  It isn't "professional grade", but neither is Skyrim's lighting engine.

 

Ideally, the design of the environment map depends on the outfit you are using.  Say it is a leather armor using a cube map for the metal (buckles for instance), then you'd want almost everything except the buckles to be very dark, almost black, and the buckles to be at least 50% gray.

 

Same principle on steel armors with fur or leather (like the vanilla steel plate).  Metal areas lighter colored, leather darker.

 

Generally, metals would be lighter (since they're more reflective) and fabrics would be darker, but if you are doing a silk dress with a leather belt, and you were using a cubemap specific to the silk, then you'd want most of the outfit to be lighter colored on the environment map and the buckle to be dark, maybe black (in that case, get the metal shiny using the normalmap's alpha).

 

Fiddling with the specularity (on the mesh and the normal map's alpha channel) for one type of shine and a combination of environment map and cubemap to get a different type of shine can get you decent results with making outfits look more natural.  The ideal is to split off the mesh for each material type though, since that gives you more control; you don't have to compromise one part of the mesh to make another look good, but that process is comparatively performance draining (for modern PCs that generally shouldn't be an issue).

 

Thanks!! That clarifies many of my doubts!