Skyrim Engine and HD Body textures question(s?)

[squares]

Greetings. 

 

I have a little problem with HD body texture, femalebody_1.dds in particular. It's an uncompressed , 64mb 4096x4096 CBBE monster, that looks oh so damn good ingame, but doesn't have COS vagina part painted. So I fired my paint.net, added a missing part where it should be and saved it as a A8B8G8R8 femalebody_1.dds texture.

Now you probably already guessed what bothers me, after some time ingame or even at a start I encounter a black texture bug. I googled what can couse or how to fix\avoid it and I did fixed it with huge (to my eye) quality loss.

But here is the strange thing - this problem only occurs after I edit the original texture. As long as I leave that 64mb monster as it was, nothing bad happens. So I'm thinking, I did something wrong when I was editing that texture or saving it and I need help finding my mistake.

 

Solutions that worked, but I can't use, since all of them reduce texture quality:

 

Save as DXT5;

Resize to 2048;

?.

 

My goal is to keep the same quality as original with my edits. Any help is appreciated! 

 

^{P.S. I might overdid with commas here. Sorry, not a native.}

 

[SassaAria]

Why did you save as RGBA? 

All the diffuse I've seen are RGB,  No reason for alpha in the femalebody diffuse that I have seen. 

Might just fix your problem.

 

LOL.  Nice avy by the way.  Know that one.

[yatol]

It's an uncompressed , 64mb 4096x4096 CBBE monster

 

uncompressed 4k it's 87 mo, a8nsomething

 

jpg saved as dds a8nsomething in paint

jpg saved as dds dxt5

jpg saved as dds compressed dxt5

there's no difference

 

it can be another story if you mess with the texture (compressed dxt5 will lose more details than a8nsomething)

[squares]

Why did you save as RGBA? 

All the diffuse I've seen are RGB,  No reason for alpha in the femalebody diffuse that I have seen. 

Might just fix your problem.

 

LOL.  Nice avy by the way.  Know that one.

 

I have no knowledge about textures. I barely can open\edit\save and not without a mess, as you can see. I think, I've tried every save option in paint.net, including RGB which looks the same in the preview as original and weight less, but it's either goes black too or looks not as good ingame. I'll try again to be sure, though. Thank you!

 

 

It's an uncompressed , 64mb 4096x4096 CBBE monster

 

uncompressed 4k it's 87 mo, a8nsomething

 

jpg saved as dds a8nsomething in paint

*image*

jpg saved as dds dxt5

*image*

jpg saved as dds compressed dxt5

*image*

there's no difference

 

it can be another story if you mess with the texture (compressed dxt5 will lose more details than a8nsomething)

 

 

As I said I don't know anything about texturing and I can only work with paint.net, and it's options as an open source alternative to stupidly expensive PS. I think, there is no option to save as uncompressed DXT5 there and, yeah, compressed DXT5 looks much worse even on a save preview. Anyway, it's looks the same on your screenshots (Is that Fair Skin Complexion, btw?), but I usually play in 1st person, so the skin is much closer to the point, where I can see the difference and it's bothering me. 

 

Maybe I should try to contact the author of my textures and ask him or her about it...

[SassaAria]

 

It's an uncompressed , 64mb 4096x4096 CBBE monster

 

uncompressed 4k it's 87 mo, a8nsomething

 

jpg saved as dds a8nsomething in paintthere's no difference

 

it can be another story if you mess with the texture (compressed dxt5 will lose more details than a8nsomething)

 

To be clear, are those all snaps from paint?

not in game? 

if not in game, would be safer to get game snaps for true rendering or shader visuals.

 

and showing a snap with an alpha for diffuse just confuses the issue and the op

Or do you know of a diffuse with alpha for femalebody?  please link.

 

[SassaAria]

 

I have no knowledge about textures. I barely can open\edit\save and not without a mess, as you can see. I think, I've tried every save option in paint.net, including RGB which looks the same in the preview as original and weight less, but it's either goes black too or looks not as good ingame. I'll try again to be sure, though. Thank you!

 save as 8.8.8u  (skipping the 4th 8 or the alpha.  that's if you have it in your programs.

if not link or pm your file and i'll save for you in photoshop

[yatol]

 

To be clear, are those all snaps from paint?

not in game? 

 

 

that's in game screens...

loading daz jpg like that it's too brigh

don't know what mature fair skin or the other do to it, i try random things, put that in bodychange and check how it look in game

 

it's that you have to do to see the difference between uncompressed a8nsomething and compressed dxt5

 

 

without the bodyshape loading i wouldn't know what is what

 

 

 

 

 

alpha? 8.8.8u? have no idea what it is

just check in game how it look to choose what i do

 

4 k compressed texture > 2k uncompressed texture (unless it's a msn, you don't want the red to be less red near other colors)

[SassaAria]

yatol, those are really nice hi-res snappies

 

the op wrote he was saving in A8B8G8R8.

for femalebodydiffuse he just needs R8G8B8, or what shows up in photoshop nvidia dds export tool as 8.8.8u (not DXT1 or DXT5), cos op wants bigger uncompressed files.

But why include alpha when it increases file size needlessly alot? Or worse, there's black on alpha.

Edit: It may also be easier if op posts the texture and one of us can take a look.

 

also, in reply to op, are you using a bodyslided body? or a static body?

in nif, change to CT_Mutable (from CT_Static) if bodyslided. 

Have had the black texture appear randomly sometimes with some outfits.  Changing to CT_mutable fixed it.

Doesn't seem related given its working with other textures, but thought would mention it as another possible cause, cos computers...lol

 

 

[yatol]

the op wrote he was saving in A8B8G8R8.

 

he is just wasting ram for nothing

http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/4283-all-about-textures/

everyone is wasting ram for nothing

 

 

you can take a look at how the texture look in the top right, that 4k*8k is mostly empty

on the left, it's parts of that texture copy paste in a 2k texture

if you look closely at the original, there's some black & white crap here and there

probably leftovers from how that texture was made

if he didn't saw that in game, nobody will see the difference between the 8k texture and the 2k

but to use the 2k texture, you have to edit the uv map of that tree... time consuming crap

 

on the left, there's more ram wasting

 

doubt someone can see in game the wood branch of tree 1 isn't the same as branch of tree 2

 

grass isn't better

a lot of 1k could be resized to 512*1024 or 1024*512

 

and let's not forget the... tintmasks

texture optimiser ignore that folder by default

that would have help when i was playing with a gtx 570 1280 mo...

step 2, death to doubles

that make a huge difference, had 2 bsa for that before...

 

you need uncompressed to generate tintmasks that aren't bars on the forehead with the crap kit

that don't mean you have to play with them

 

 

[squares]

also, in reply to op, are you using a bodyslided body? or a static body?

in nif, change to CT_Mutable (from CT_Static) if bodyslided. 

Have had the black texture appear randomly sometimes with some outfits.  Changing to CT_mutable fixed it.

Doesn't seem related given its working with other textures, but thought would mention it as another possible cause, cos computers...lol

 

I use COS Body from bodyslide. Didn't have problems with outfits, I mean, when it goes black, it goes black no matter what character is wearing, but I'll remember that trick, thanks. 

 

So, about quality - I use Fair Skin with goosebumps. It's very clean and bright texture. I know that those goosebumps come from another body texture in same folder, but I swear there is a difference between original set and all those I edited. Was testing RGB and so far it is closest to uncompressed I had and it didn't bugged yet. I don't have any other heavy textures in the game, mostly 1k for cities, caves, rocks, water etc. I have GForce 970 and with original texture, game was using only half of available memory. Even with enb I have 60fps most of the time, unlesss some heavy scripting involved in the scene, it may drop to ~45 briefly. This is when the bug with edited texture usually happens. Or after reading some book that loads like second or two (not all of them). So, the body is the biggest vram offender.

 

Also, thanks for offering to save my edited texture, I don't really want to bother you. I can dl PS, just too lazy and paranoid. And thanks for link to afkmods, will definitely read.

[27X]

no difference

 

You need a new monitor or new eyes. The days of "I run skyrim on a 13" laptop or "I use a 1920x1080 vizio TV for a monitor" have long since passed, and so has the 'conventional wisdom' associated with them. Also DDS formats being 'identical' isn't even specious, it's literally disinformation. There was a quality difference way back in 2001 circa Aliens vs Predator 2 and there is most certainly a difference now, especially in which channels receive which compression algorithm and at what level of strength when being saved and compressed. Direct Draw never was and never will be lossless.

 

 

While there are certainly ways to waste bandwidth via texturing, they aren't practiced by either Haley or Navetsea.

[squares]

Please don't start "wars" here

I use old 1440x900 monitor with couple of dead pixels which needs cleaning from smoke. The only reason Im so obsessed with dds quality, is that I have Immersive First Person View, where the skin is much closer to POV and when I started experimenting with texture, I coudn't save the quality of original due to paint.net export limitations. With your and gimp help, I was able to archive desired, thank you!