I'm trying to reskin the T-51b to look more like titanium that's been exposed to excessive heat in some places (energy weapon burns). The http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/images/13361-1-1283410691.jpg in this screenshot is kind of what I'm going for. The trouble is, the lighting in that shot happened to be just right in that one area, but normally in game the specular looks a lot flatter - I'm starting with a texture that was supposed to look like matte green paint, not brushed metal. If I were in the 3D Studio Max material editor I'd be tweaking the specular highlights, but I've got no idea how to do something similar for a fallout texture. Anyone have any idea what I should be editing to make something look more metallic? Now that I'm writing this, I can't think of anything in Fallout 3 that had a really shiny metallic finish to it, so maybe its just a limitation of the graphics engine - you've only got a diffuse and normal map to work with.

i guess in that picture it looks like environment cube map. you have more than the diffuse and normal map. you usually also have a specular intensity map, you can have glow mask textures, and if you enable the shader for it, environment map, environment mask map, and you can use parallax mapping as well. < though probably not on armor.

anyway- a cube map that is designed for a metalic finish, but also contains that purple/green for the iridescent effect.

I have one actually (though i didn't tile all the edges, but you probably won't ever see that in this map, so it is technically unfinished as one of my experiments)
It will probably only work correctly on a diffuse that is around a mid grey, if it's colored the iridescent coloring might not look correct, and specular map that is also mid grey or sightly brighter too. add in some AO to the spec map and some scratches, and make it a bit extra contrasted, < the env map seems to default to using the specular map as the mask map if no mask map is set up in the texture set. so if you want al the control possible, you will have to make a full env mask map.

anyway try this env map and the suggestions i made, and maybe it'll at least give you a starting point for further refinement.
http://rapidshare.com/files/416998705/Iridescent_e.dds

if you don't know about environment maps and how to set them up, i wrote 2 articles of some of my research on them in the nexus article section. they are a bit outdated on 1 or 2 things, but it should save anyone time in understanding how to use them.

Thanks, I came across your FO3Nexus environment mapping article last night - I've got something together now that's starting to look closer to what I want. I started with an image of the sky above some sand dunes, it sort of matched the general color of the wastes. The armor looked way too pale, titanium is reflective but far from chrome, so I colorized the environment map to a dark pewter/gold color and it now looks about right. I also played around with the "glossiness" in nifskope, and a much lower value, around 15, looks good once you've got the environment map on there. That value seems to work for both the leather/cloth parts of the armor and the metallic ones, so I may not need a specular map. I did make an environment mask though, sort of a necessity when you've got both metal and cloth.

Thanks for the cube map. I'll give it a try - the color scheme isn't that far from what my attempt ended up as.

Thanks! That's a huge improvement.

Here's an updated http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/images/13361-1-1283622988.jpg

cool. every thing you said works for me... except not needing a specular map.... you absolutely do need one! trust me. you can paint metal almost entirely in the specular and have it actually look good. plus with multiple materials svck as metal and leather on the same map, you will need to specular map to actually help differentiate between materials. I would just keep the original vanilla spec map and normal map seeing as you are doing a retex. I would think you are already doing that though right.

you can use the env mask map to tone the env reflections down more to any specific areas, but I guess you knew that kind of stuff.

I was able to figure most of this out because of your environment map article, though I did take a bunch of Photoshop and 3D Studio Max classes about a decade ago that gave me some background. I did keep the normal map from the original T-51b, but I notice the specular map slot is shared with the normal map in Nifskope. There's also a height map slot, and based on what I understand about normal maps, the two accomplish the same thing (basically both are more modern versions of old school bump maps?) So if you include a height map, does the dds in the normal map slot get used for specular instead of normal?

Bethesda always stores their specular maps in the alpha channel of the normal map. Therefore, the normal map and the specular map use the same texture file/slot in Nifskope. I'm not sure what you mean about height maps... I'm not aware of their use in Fallout 3 or Oblivion.

I saw the height map listed http://www.fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=197 as one of the 6 texture slots available in Nifskope. I don't know what its used for, and a quick google search hasn't turned up much. That's good to know about the normal map alpha channel though, something like that would have been my other guess.

Thanks for sharing the link! I'm still learning textures and half of what Ghogiel says is still foreign to me.

Reading... :read:

I did mention parallax....

the height map slot is used for the parallax offset map. basically this displaces the texture co-ords. while it does use tangent space and is an attempt to make the surface of the geometry more detailed, It works in quite a different way than a normal map.

the parallax map itself is actually composed in the same way as a displacement or height map would be. it is in fact basically a height map.

and btw, niftools has also corrected that mistake in nifskope, where it previously listed the order of the texture slots incorrectly. so pay no attention to what that article says in that regard. < you can trust the nifskope listing if you are up to date with the release.

Not the same as parallax occlusion mapping (POM), I've only encountered that in Cryengine. It looks F'ing awesome when done right.

So... it sort of shifts the normals depending on what angle the surface is being viewed from? And the POM would actually be able to hide surfaces if you're viewing them at a shallow enough angle that the protrusion dictated by their normal map was high enough to block the surfaces behind it.

as i understand it, and from looking at, basically scrolls the UV to warp the texture depending on the view angle.

i don't know if nifskope displays it in F3 nifs...nver used p maps in F3. but you can enable parallax shader in Ob nifs and nifskope will display the parallax effect so you can get a good look at it.

There are several rubble files in the game that use parallax maps, such as the ones with bricks in the Pentagon/Citadel. Follow the breadcrumb trail to their NIFs and textures via the GECK. I've also revamped one of my Oblivion standbys to FO3 and redid the textures, including the parallax: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10386

I heard that Oblivion's engine didn't like parallax on skinned geometry, though. That may have changed with the FO3 engine, however. And the nice thing about the FO3 engine is now parallax and environmental reflection maps can be used simultaneously.

And a tip: Less is more with fine details on parallax maps. I know that from experience. Don't overdo them, they'll just look bad.

To Ghogiel: Can you put that cube map somewhere else besides Rapid(S-word)? First, it gave me an HTML file instead of a DDS file, and secondly, it won't let me DL it again for a while unless I pay.

It's too bad the specular maps are black and white alpha channels instead of full color - the reflection color might be based on the diffuse map, its tough to tell, but a specular that changed color independent of the surface would allow for some pretty cool iridescence.

i suppose, but its probably not worth it..its nothing special or even good.
if you really must have it I'll up it somewhere else in about 5 hrs,

They are pretty easy to create. Take an image of the sky, crop it to 6:1, and then try it out. If its too chromy, use colorization and brightness/contrast to darken it and tone down the color, in concert with your environmental mask. The mask is the tricky part, but you can use your diffuse map or the normal map's specular channel as a starting point.

that's not exactly how to create a cube map. that'll just produce a fairly useless map full of seams...that is actually displayed incorrectly on the model. so I don't recommend doing that. but it might be worth making a bunch of those to get a quick rough idea how different maps may look sort of.

basically you would end up with a bunch of randomly rotated squares images being displayed on the model in no particularly sensible order. If you do it correctly, you get a perfectly tiling env map, and the ability to control any area to be displayed on the model according to object space, so you can do things like this > http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/images/10174-2-1259392999.jpg

I found that while real world images do work in a way, best are ones that have no recognizable features.. so that cactus is just wrong unless you are in the desert... with a cactus near you. It just illustrates point. A plainly featured snowy mountian and sky works for chrome. the color of earth can be a bit stark if you ask me. anything like a horizon is a common form of env map. the vanilla chrome env map is just a straight line with a gradient falloff to each side.

anyway its best to experiment yourselves imo.

I explain how to create them by hand in one of the 2 research articles i wrote on the nexus. or you can use a program to do it for you... i believe i link to one such free program in one of the articles.

This was my main reasoning behind not bothering to tile the image. If you pick a more homogeneous image and tone things down with your mask, the seems won't stand out. Subtle environment mapping with a fairly dark mask also seems more appropriate for most materials - mirror finish chrome is a rarity in real life, and can make things look painfully computer generated. Also, the more recognizable your environment map, the more out of place it will look when you move to an area where the reflection should clearly be something else.

For a sword blade, chrome might be what you're going for, but with no broad surfaces the seems and the details of the environment map will probably be difficult for your eye to pick out.

tiling the map is of minor importance even if you don't care at about seams, But, It's primarily the rotations of 6 images that make up a cube map that is more important, your map will display wrong on the model if you do not order and rotate the images, imo the seams are rightly less important. < like the one i posted earlier in this thread, it's not tiled, but the horizon will display correctly, the tiling is hardly visible, but if I didn't make a horizon, It wouldn't display correctly, and the seams would jump right off the model

take a polished sword like your example, you are most often dealing with a horizon line of some sort in this ones env map, this is what makes it a map that is useful for metal. and if you do not order and rotate the 6 images correctly, and since the sword in flat, they will show up as distinct lines. I wouldn't be happy with it. It takes 10mins to rotate these things correctly tops, btw it took me far longer to work it out and write those articles. I already did 90% of the work.

anyway I would likely notice immediately that the env map is incorrect, the reason why I made these articles is because, until i did so, not one person had actually made env maps.. they were actually using 1x1 sized maps that don't even render and stuff. but no one else seemed to notice or care, so i guess i am alone and there is no point doing research and writing tutorials.

I hadn't thought about the horizon lines - if the surface is highly warped it might not matter, but even a collection of small, reasonably flat surfaces would probably show that something was off.

I'd blame the generally weathered look of most of the fallout textures for the lack of environment mapping, but it can definitely add some great detail, especially to metallic textures (something that seems almost entirely absent from vanilla Fallout). The armor I was working on just did not look right until I implemented the environment mapping that you described - I'm using that cube map you posted, and I'll credit you when I put out the next release of Powered Power Armor for both the map and the tutorial. I tried figuring it out intuitively when I saw the environment check box in Nifskope, but was way off (as most people probably were until they found your tutorial - it's the first thing that pops up on google when you search for Fallout environment mapping.)