How do you add a glow to a texture for race overlays?

[sila]

I want to add a nice glow effect to the pentagram, similar to the tattoo:

Spoiler

How would I go about doing this? What software would be required, if any?

 

I am trying to compare the glow version to the nonglow version from lewd marks in GIMP but I can't really make heads or tails of what I am looking at and have not really been able to find any tutorials that do what I want.

[yorpers]

It's something that can be done in slave tats or racemenu in game. They both have 2 color options, one for the overall color and one for the glow color. 

[sila]

17 hours ago, yorpers said:

It's something that can be done in slave tats or racemenu in game. They both have 2 color options, one for the overall color and one for the glow color. 

That is not what I desire, look at the screenshot I showed, both the tattoo and the pentagram have exactly the same settings on the in game glow options.

 

The option in slave tat and racemenu makes it visible in dark areas, but it does not glow brightly like the ones made to glow do.

Edited August 23, 2022 by sila

[traison]

Edit: Also missed the pentagram. Nevermind.

Edited August 23, 2022 by traison

[yorpers]

15 minutes ago, sila said:

That is not what I desire, look at the screenshot I showed, both the tattoo and the pentagram have exactly the same settings on the in game glow options.

 

The option in slave tat and racemenu makes it visible in dark areas, but it does not glow brightly like the ones made to glow do.

My bad I didn't look close enough to even see the pentagram in the picture?

 

Generally for better glow effects you don't want something to be completely black though. Might be the problem right there. If the pentagram is a black texture on an alpha channel, try making it grey on an alpha channel.

 

If that doesn't do it you can upload it here and I can take a look.

[sila]

25 minutes ago, traison said:

My bet would be that that bloom effect is from an ENB. DDS files do not contain such info that I'm aware of, and things like SlaveTats and RaceMenu only use one dds file at a time so there's no "slot" for a glow map texture.

 

Edit: The insane radial blur in the screenshot is kinda a giveaway, though I do recall seeing that option in the vanilla SSE ini. Sort of doubt it goes to such extremes though?

I don't care about the lighting effect, specifically the difference in glows on the tattoos. I want them both to be the same. Both tattoos are simple overlays and do not come with anything related to lighting.

 

 

18 minutes ago, yorpers said:

My bad I didn't look close enough to even see the pentagram in the picture?

 

Generally for better glow effects you don't want something to be completely black though. Might be the problem right there. If the pentagram is a black texture on an alpha channel, try making it grey on an alpha channel.

 

If that doesn't do it you can upload it here and I can take a look.

So it is the color that is doing it? It was indeed black when I was looking at the texture. That is something I can work on then. Would Gimp be the right software to use? I wouldn't want to share the files other than a link to the mod though, since it's not mine. It was from this:

 

 

Long story short... my goal is to have the best succubus cursed character I can. I wanted the pentagrams as something of a curse mark with the Active Overlays mod from nexus increasing the glow effect at higher arousal, then player succubus quest to force transform at arousal thresholds.

 

I just need the tattoo to actually glow was the issue. If I can get this and an smp tail working with PSQ my goal will be accomplished 

Edited August 23, 2022 by sila

[traison]

Looking at lewdmarks, which contains 2 variants of each texture; one glowing and one regular. The glowing ones are white (ffffff) and the regular ones are gray (444544). The gray color is the color that SlaveTats replaces with the color picked by the user. Don't recall white ever being mentioned as a special color though so don't know how that works.

 

Edit: As for your question "will gimp work", the answer is "maybe". Its dds support is lacking. Unfortunately I know of no other alternative than maybe photoshop with "official" nvidia plugins.

Edited August 23, 2022 by traison

[anjenthedog]

5 minutes ago, traison said:

Edit: As for your question "will gimp work", the answer is "maybe". Its dds support is lacking. Unfortunately I know of no other alternative than maybe photoshop with "official" nvidia plugins.

Well... Paint Dot Net natively supports DDS

[FutaNemesislol]

10 minutes ago, sila said:

I don't care about the lighting effect, specifically the difference in glows on the tattoos. I want them both to be the same. Both tattoos are simple overlays and do not come with anything related to lighting.

 

 

So it is the color that is doing it? It was indeed black when I was looking at the texture. That is something I can work on then. Would Gimp be the right software to use? I wouldn't want to share the files other than a link to the mod though, since it's not mine. It was from this:

 

 

 

i think a reason why it isn't glowing is because...well i made it black... now if i were to make it red(or any other color that looks good when its glowing like this...it would most definitely glow(especially when going into racemenu and making it glow/brighter), i used substance painter to make the pentagram..i seriously need to update this mod to .. you can also change the color using paint.net

 

Spoiler

 

Edited August 23, 2022 by FutaNemesislol

[yorpers]

10 minutes ago, sila said:

So it is the color that is doing it? It was indeed black when I was looking at the texture. That is something I can work on then. Would Gimp be the right software to use? I wouldn't want to share the files other than a link to the mod though, since it's not mine. It was from this:

Potentially, All the tattoos with the best glow that I have used were not pitch black, but instead dark grey or even lighter. As far as the right software I actually suggest using a mixture of gimp and paint.net. 

 

Gimp for the actual editing part, and paint.net for saving them in bc7 since you are on skyrim se. Gimp does not have the capability to save in that format, but it is the superior compression. Just make sure to use 'copy visable' when you copy/paste the textures from gimp to paint.net if you take that advice. It seems to work much better with pictures with alpha channels than the regular copy/paste for some reason.

 

EDIT: looks like you got a lot more information while I wrote this?

Edited August 23, 2022 by yorpers

[traison]

Just now, anjenthedog said:

Well... Paint Dot Net natively supports DDS

 

Didn't mention that because I'm having a hard time believing it can open all dds textures when even the nvidia utilities can't open most textures you find in sse mods these days. Then again, back in the day Microsoft did have the best dds viewer and conversion tools. Maybe they're back at it with paint.

[sila]

13 minutes ago, FutaNemesislol said:

 

 

i think a reason why it isn't glowing is because...well i made it black... now if i were to make it red(or any other color that looks good when its glowing like this...it would most definitely glow(especially when going into racemenu and making it glow/brighter), i used substance painter to make the pentagram..i seriously need to update this mod to .. you can also change the color using paint.net

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Oh I was trying to do it myself to save you some work, but if you wanted to change it I wouldn't say no to it.  But don't bother if you are busy with other stuff, especially if I can figure out how to do it on my own.

 

18 minutes ago, yorpers said:

Potentially, All the tattoos with the best glow that I have used were not pitch black, but instead dark grey or even lighter. As far as the right software I actually suggest using a mixture of gimp and paint.net. 

 

Gimp for the actual editing part, and paint.net for saving them in bc7 since you are on skyrim se. Gimp does not have the capability to save in that format, but it is the superior compression. Just make sure to use 'copy visable' when you copy/paste the textures from gimp to paint.net if you take that advice. It seems to work much better with pictures with alpha channels than the regular copy/paste for some reason.

 

EDIT: looks like you got a lot more information while I wrote this?

Is that paint.net different than the one that comes with windows? Just to make sure since I used to think notepad+ was the same thing too 

[yorpers]

1 minute ago, sila said:

Is that paint.net different than the one that comes with windows? Just to make sure since I used to think notepad+ was the same thing too 

Yes, you can google "paint dot net" to find it easily.

Edited August 23, 2022 by yorpers
Typing error

[sila]

Success 

 

Thank you for the replies all.

 

Surprised it was as easy as just changing the color.

[anjenthedog]

1 hour ago, traison said:

 

Didn't mention that because I'm having a hard time believing it can open all dds textures when even the nvidia utilities can't open most textures you find in sse mods these days. Then again, back in the day Microsoft did have the best dds viewer and conversion tools. Maybe they're back at it with paint.

Paint dot net is not a Microsoft product and afaik has never been, although it's original source material  was.  It has been donationware (ie freeware for the random user, donation for those who use it routinely and have some excess funds to part with to help in its maintenance and development), since day one afaik.

 

I can open and "manipulate" and save any .dds file I encounter in Skyrim SE using Paint Dot Net. Never used it for dds prior to installing Skyrim SE and was pleasantly surprised to find it natively supports them, after reading dozens of posts talking about gimp (I do not like gimp personally, and never did. it's clumsy), and as to using photoshop ... well, I've been using photoshop for ~30 years and have a current subscription (the $10/mo deal), but (personally) I wasn't all that enamored with having to install additional addons just so I could edit DDS files.

 

But honestly, I'm not here to sell anyone. I offered it as an alternate. If you have some preconceived bias against it, ok. You do you, I'll do me.

 

Edited August 23, 2022 by anjenthedog
stuff

[traison]

Not a bias, it just seemed to me that a tool that opens and manipulates ALL dds files has become as rare as the old microsoft directx dds utilities became in their last years of relevance. It was as if someone was sitting on the file format patent like adobe did with pdf for the longest time. For that to be in a tool that, I guess pretends to be a slightly more sophisticated version of a program that's been in windows since... what 3.1 (or earlier?) seemed by default quite unlikely, so I never even looked into it. While this is inconvenient for batch processing, it's still great news that at least *SOME* solution exists.