'To Do' thread for Ibsen's Ghost

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
I'm using the Photoshop plugin instead. I might update the list because I generated the rootworm normalmaps with the Photoshop plugin and was satisfied with the results. If they need changing, I could always redo them from the original textures.

However, I noticed that, whilst creating the normal maps, I kept getting an error message or something saying that I would lose alpha channel information or something. Would that affect the original .dds texture files and is this something I need to do something about? I wondered whether this were responsible for the lighting in the tunnels being especially dim or if this was purely due to the current lack of lights in there (I'll probably use the glowshrooms to some extent here and see if they fit okay).

I don't use Photoshop, but saving a normal map of a regular texture, as long as the normal map is a different name (even if you added the "_n" to make it work in Oblivion, when you saved it) when you saved it, it won't overwrite the original regular textures.

But if you re-saved the original regular texture with the same name of itself, and Photoshop is giving that error, you might have also messed up the regular texture, by resaving it under a different dds format, possibly.

For the rootworm textures, here's how I would save the various textures:

Firstly, you need a dark enough version of the regular texture and save it as - DXT1, RGB. Then you need the normal map for the dark enough texture. If the reg texture is dark enough to prevent shine in the game, sometimes you don't need an alpha channel in the normal map. Therefore, save the normal map as - DXT1, RGB.

Sometimes you do need an alpha channel in addition to a darker texture, or if the darker reg texture was too dark to even look right for your purposes (in other words, you needed to make the dark reg texture lighter, to the point that it will start to shine a bit). In this case -

Regular texture (and almost all regular textures that have pure texture covering the whole visible area, such as tileable and seamless textures): save as DXT1, RGB

Normal map to prevent bright glare: DXT3 or DXT5, plus RGBA8

But if your textures need to have alpha in the regular texture too (like in how some Oblivion plant reg textures need to do in order to show only the petals and certain leaves, that have have invisible areas. Suppose using Nifskope, you export the UV texture map of a NiTriStrip or NiTriShape from an Oblivion nif to your PC Desktop. If you compare the exported UV Map, and the colored in and finished regular texture, and you see that the finished texture, in some same area between the two of them, did not have all the "enclosed lines" (that would still be visible on the UV Map) representing a mesh part fully colored in, but instead the shape of the texture part there was cut out from a picture/photo/other and pasted in that area with precision (and the surrounding UV Map lines/seams erased, so they don't appear in the texture). A good example is the petal area of the flower in my Hibiscus plant textures. If this is the case, then a regular texture of yours with similar build, needs to also be saved with alpha channel (DXT3 or DXT5, plus RGBA8). Of course, you need to add the alpha layer to the regular texture first, before saving in aformentioned format to allow the alpha layer to be "active".

Koniption