Nail paint mods + Photoshop related issues

[thelveres]

So I embarked on a quest for painted nails, found 2-3 mods online plus one that has equipable nails, but non of them hit the spot exactly.. the first two replaced the entire body/hand texture, and compared to the vanilla cbbe textures there was a slight discoloration between the body and feet, and a somewhat more visible seam  (even when you are using the body included in the package).

 

The equipable option makes you wear light armor on your hands which replaces any other armor you might be wearing, plus, it sort of looks like you are wearing fake nails.

 

So i set out to paint the cbbe hand texture myself, since I managed to just use texblend + photoshop to edit the black toenail preset included in texblend.

 

The problem is that you cannot do the same thing with the hands, since the nails are integrated in the texture and not standalone. There didn't seem to be any appropriate preset in texblend (nor could I find one online). The bodyslide mod, does seem to have one nail preset option, but really does not work very well (at least with cbbe) - color leaks out of the edges.

 

I am still a photoshop beginner, and after trying solid color, I ended up opting with an adjustment layer for hue/saturation. After a lot of tweaking with magic wand, select color etc, I ended up just selecting the textures pixel by pixel, and loading the game multiple times until I got a result i was 90% pleased with. Using the adjustment layer and the psd file, I now had a base to change nail color at will. 

 

This is where the problem arises: Even though I am using the original cbbe texture, and I did no editing on the non-nail part of the hands, I still got a slight discoloration/seam effect (same or lesser in magnitude as the mods I mentioned above). I wonder if just opening the *.dds and saving it again alters the texture in some way (texblend does not seem to suffer from this issue).

 

I opened the file using the default options. I am not sure if I am allowed to post the resulting psd file here, but I can on request.

 

Any guidance would be appreciated.

 

[Groovtama]

Either use race menu where nails are an overlay or use one of the hands with long nails where the hand has the character skin hand texture and the nails have their own. Tinkering around is pointless the setup with a whole hand texture is just pointless.

[thelveres]

Either use race menu where nails are an overlay or use one of the hands with long nails where the hand has the character skin hand texture and the nails have their own. Tinkering around is pointless the setup with a whole hand texture is just pointless.

 

The problem is, any cbbe body texture I have tried so far, except the default one, has issues with either head discoloration or hand discoloration of a magnitude greater than the one I have been experiencing so far. Do you have a link for long nail hands matching the vanilla textures correctly?

 

The race menu only has a 1 nail tint texture as I mentioned, which has color leaking all over (in the hand tint menu top right). Are you referring to some other option I have missed ?

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

One thing I learned very fast in the Skyrim modding scene is that CBBE is nice but not nearly as supported as UNP and it's offshoots. I'd recommend changing body types to unp or UNPB and trying racemenu again or get the UNPB nails mod here on LL.

[winny257]

One thing I learned very fast in the Skyrim modding scene is that CBBE is nice but not nearly as supported as UNP and it's offshoots. I'd recommend changing body types to unp or UNPB and trying racemenu again or get the UNPB nails mod here on LL.

 

no offense, CBBE is still better than unp! unp is not at all, no ass, no breasts, and the hip is also too narrow. I get the big shake when I see this body.

 

german \ deutsch  !

 

nichts für ungut , cbbe ist immer noch besser als unp ! unp geht garnicht , kein arsch , keine titten und die hüfte ist auch zu schmal . ich bekomme das große schütteln wenn ich diesen körper sehe .

[thelveres]

Well I have found a temporary solution, but I still need to fix some small pixel parts missing paint to do it. Basically, I remove the paint layer from my modified hands, and used it in a new file with an empty background, then merged it with my hands in texblend, now hands have no discoloration issues, but the process of perfecting the paint matching is painful.. reloading the game all over just to see some pixels are missing and/or leaked somewhere.. Wish there was a way to preview the results on the 3d model in real time. Heard something about uv maps from a friend but not sure how to acquire/edit them yet.

 

The reason I switched from the unp body were discolorations with hands and head there as well, I could get the seams to disappear but so far the cbbe vanilla texture is the only one I have managed to get the best results from.

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

yeah the original unp was not meant to be big boobs and ghetto booty like CBBE was hence why I said "or UNPB" which has much larger breasts compared to the original UNP body and xp32 who is doing the UNPB body mod now is working on the ass.

[Groovtama]

Search "nails" here or on nexus and you will find many nail versions

 

on nexus ex. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/5910/

 

They should also work as replacers, if you have seams (because it may be CBBEv2 hands and CBBEv3 hands may be different) try to copy the nail mesh over to the CBBEv3 default hands with nifskope.

[Vioxsis]

Get nifskope http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope to view nifs and to export a UV map

 

 

 

 

Right click the nitrishape > textures > Export template

[thelveres]

Get nifskope http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope to view nifs and to export a UV map

 

Right click the nitrishape > textures > Export template

 

 

I have tried the kaw claws, I do not think they are hands, just nails (when using them with my custom painted hands, I can still see the edges of the original color underneath.

 

I will have to try out nifscope, will look up on tutorials on what to do with uv maps.

 

Here is the uncanny thing though, these are the original hand textures from the current cbbe release,

 

 

while these are from the textures I modified using texblend, even though nothing was changed apart from the nails. I still think the seems are more noticeable:

 

 

I still think the seems are more noticeable, and I don't know why.. maybe texblend does alter the files more in some way?

[thelveres]

Get nifskope http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope to view nifs and to export a UV map

 

 

Right click the nitrishape > textures > Export template

 

Ok I followed your instructions, and exported the mesh with a good resolution of around 2000 to get a good feel for it.. and.. I can safely say it seems even harder to paint using this template   The front part of the finger is sort of a mess, full of lines.. unless I am missing something ^^

 

I also tried using kaws hands as meshes.. it worked ok for 3rd person, same amount of seams as vanilla, but it had 2 big caveats: Trying the same mesh on 1st person view results in clipping of the thumb nail and all the npcs have the same nails as the main character.

 

Here is the point I am at now with the texblend file:

 

Pinknails.rar