DocClox Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 I'm trying to make some dirty overlays for slavetats. I can make the overlays without issue. Where I run into problems is when I load them into Blender. I need to load them because I need to be able to smooth over the seams in the UV. What I do is create PNG textures, load them into Blender, hide the seams, export back to PNG and then load the files in the Gimp and export them to DDS. The trouble is that the dds files are far, far darker than the PNG textures appeared in Gimp. If I can see the textures in Blender, the result will be almost solid black in-game. If the textures are right in-game then they're practically invisible in Blender and I can't see to smooth out the seams. I know very little about textures and DDS format. Can anyone give me a pointer or two here?
Earen Posted October 2, 2015 Posted October 2, 2015 - That's not format issue definitely - Feel free to load DDS textures in Blender - The textures are dark in Blender cause you haven''t added any light source(?)
DocClox Posted October 3, 2015 Author Posted October 3, 2015 - That's not format issue definitely Hmm... OK, I'll rule that one out then. - Feel free to load DDS textures in Blender I tried that and got some odd square artifacts when I tried to blend things. It might have just been some sort of glitch though. I'll try that again. - The textures are dark in Blender cause you haven''t added any light source(?) I don't think that's it. I have three lights in the scene. Not opimally positioned now I look at them again, but enough to see what I'm doing. I deleted all the other textures and set up a basic flesh-pink material so I could see what the tats were doing, and I can see that just fine. It's just that my dirt textures are pale wispy things barely visible against the material. In any case, The textures are too dark in-game. In blender I can barely see them. In Skyrim my girl looks to be wearing a rubber catsuit. And there's a mod for that already
GornoDD Posted October 3, 2015 Posted October 3, 2015 Load your texture in the compositor and setup a "viewer node" to see the actual PNG image as it would be exportet. That help tracking the problem somewhat. If its still very dark, you can setup color nodes to raise the brightness as a post-processing measure. Other than that. Are you baking the textures out with ambient oclusion turned on? That can give you problems like this
DocClox Posted October 3, 2015 Author Posted October 3, 2015 "Viewer node" - is this the Cycles renderer I've seen mentioned? I've generally avoided that because I wasn't sure how well those textures would export for Skyrim. If they'll work that's good news: opens a lot of possibilities. I'm not baking the textures at all. My usual workflow involves using Quick Projection to map tats onto skin and then saving the modified texture. It seems to work for tats, so this is basically the same approach only loading a premade texture in rather than projecting one. Does that change things?
GornoDD Posted October 4, 2015 Posted October 4, 2015 "Viewer node" - is this the Cycles renderer I've seen mentioned? I've generally avoided that because I wasn't sure how well those textures would export for Skyrim. If they'll work that's good news: opens a lot of possibilities. I'm not baking the textures at all. My usual workflow involves using Quick Projection to map tats onto skin and then saving the modified texture. It seems to work for tats, so this is basically the same approach only loading a premade texture in rather than projecting one. Does that change things? The problem most likely doesnt come from blender, but from the conversion to dds. If the png from blender does look good it has to be the dds file. In dds there are multiple layers of information. Also there is luminosity map and alot of other layers like rgb maps etc. Red green and blue can be too dark on its own. I havent worked with dds myself so it would be the best to look up a good tutorial how to properly convert. In GIMP the dds plugin shows alot of options when converting. Its important to select the correct ones. This can avoid this problem from the start.
DocClox Posted October 6, 2015 Author Posted October 6, 2015 Yeah, I freely admit I don't know what I'm doing with the format. It might be as easy as anything to make the textures so they look right in blender and then adjust the alpha in the gimp.
DocClox Posted October 9, 2015 Author Posted October 9, 2015 Not sure what I was doing, but the problem seems to have cleared up by itself. (always worrying when that happens). Is blender supposed to be able to save dds files? Mine tells me that the format support is read-only. Probably means I'll need to still work with PNGs when smoothing over seams.
GornoDD Posted October 9, 2015 Posted October 9, 2015 Not sure what I was doing, but the problem seems to have cleared up by itself. (always worrying when that happens). Is blender supposed to be able to save dds files? Mine tells me that the format support is read-only. Probably means I'll need to still work with PNGs when smoothing over seams. Havent used that dds plugin for blender ever tbh. Is that now actually standard? Havent used blender in 3 month. Its usually better to go with PNG anyways. You could also take a look at substance painter if you like, its pretty much a textures artists wet dream. check out the trailer
DocClox Posted October 9, 2015 Author Posted October 9, 2015 Yeah, Koffii had nothing bu praise for Substance Painter as well. For my part, I'm not sure I'd get enough use out of it to justify the outlay. I'm pretty much a scripter who occasionally dabbles in modelling and textures
GornoDD Posted October 9, 2015 Posted October 9, 2015 Yeah, Koffii had nothing bu praise for Substance Painter as well. For my part, I'm not sure I'd get enough use out of it to justify the outlay. I'm pretty much a scripter who occasionally dabbles in modelling and textures Im literally the opposite. I have modelled/textured/animated for ages and now go into papyrus for the first time. I find scripting to be much harder to learn. Im struggling much with understanding all of this. But once you understand something its a real blast
DocClox Posted October 9, 2015 Author Posted October 9, 2015 Yeah, nifskope is the thing I'm struggling with most at the moment. I've been messing around with Gimp and Inkscape for years, and I've done a tiny bit of Blender work, even a little animation. But the NiF is terra incognita. Still, it's like you say: if it was easy, everyone would be doing it
GornoDD Posted October 9, 2015 Posted October 9, 2015 Yeah, nifskope is the thing I'm struggling with most at the moment. I've been messing around with Gimp and Inkscape for years, and I've done a tiny bit of Blender work, even a little animation. But the NiF is terra incognita. Still, it's like you say: if it was easy, everyone would be doing it Nifskope (as important it is) can make you want to kill yourself sometimes. It has so many really weird behaviors (esp with shaders). I have modded for New Vegas and at its hight had a very good understanding of it. But so much has changed in nifskope since then. I actually shying away from relearning all that has changed with it. Also im actually really tired of having no proper converting from blender 2.5+ but having to do it in 1.49b. Thats the biggest bummer for me personally
DocClox Posted October 9, 2015 Author Posted October 9, 2015 Subject of which, did you see the new plugins for Blender 2.6+ and nif were released last week? The developer (ghostwalker is it?) reckons it's pretty much working now.
krighaur Posted October 9, 2015 Posted October 9, 2015 DDS texture have many formats, that store differently each pixel. The way the alpha channel is stored is another factor. I wrote something on the subject for the game NWN , but it's in french language. I may traduce it if you need. Some example of format : DXT1 = Compresses image at 8:1 ratio (file size of 512x512 = 171kb)DXT1A = Same has above but with a 1bit alpha channel (only black or white, file size of 512x512 = 171kb )DXT3 = Compresses image at 4:1 ratio, supports an 8bit alpha if necessary (file size of 512x512 = 342kb)DXT5 = Same has DXT3, but supports an interpolated 8bit alpha (file size of 512x512 = 342kb)R5G6B5 = Uses 5bits each for the R,B channels, and 6bits for G channel, no alpha channel supported (file size of 512x512 = 683kb)X8R8G8B8 = 32bit, but there is no support for 8bit alpha (file size of 512x512 = 1,366kb!)A8R8G8B8 = Same has X8R8G8B8, but includes full support for an 8bit alpha channel (file size of 512x512 = 1,366kb!) You could also look at this tool http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/5755/?
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