[!] If you've released a texture mod, or plan to, please rea : V - Skyrim

» Sun May 05, 2013 12:02 pm

Why's that? The character limit?

Good to know.

I figured by unraring he meant extracting.

» Sun May 05, 2013 11:41 am

No, because it defeats the purpose of load and install order.

I only answer the question posed, I don't tend to assume much. That's grounds for a completely nonfunctional project where I come from..

» Sun May 05, 2013 1:13 pm

That table explains why the vanilla HD texture pack causes me to stutter like crazy around people. Half the armors and weapons are 4096 in size. The jump from 512 to 1024 and 1024 to 2048 isn't that big, but from 2048 to 4096 it's absolutely massive. No wonder I need to use the "optimised" mod in order to reduce them to 2048.

» Sun May 05, 2013 4:52 am

Excellent thread! Worth the lengthy read for Huleed's tip alone - I'm saving my normal/spec as 8.8.8.8 uncompressed now, for (I think) better results. Thanks!

» Sun May 05, 2013 2:34 pm

My bold

+1

» Sun May 05, 2013 3:27 pm

Done

» Sun May 05, 2013 1:59 pm

Thanks!

» Sun May 05, 2013 3:55 am

PMs to Admin works occasionally ( Sent Martigen a PM too if he gets time to review and update any necessary info for the OP )

@ Martigen - Now that your topic is sticky; For newbies a couple of things which would be nice included ..

Tools for Texturing; I do not have Adobe Photoshop ( borrow my daughters copy occasionally ), but there are probably useful links to plugins could be posted for those that do ( <<-- needs input from users )

But the alternative's for those that cannot afford Photoshop ...

G.I.M.P ( Gnu Image Manipulation Program ) 2.8 - http://www.gimp.org/
G.I.M.P DDS Plugin ( Updated end of July for G.I.M.P 2.8 ) - http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/
G.I.M.P Normal Map Plugin ( Updated end of June for G.I.M.P 2.8 ) - http://code.google.com/p/gimp-normalmap/

The following is not as advanced as Photoshop or G.I.M.P, but is very capable of producing superb graphics

Paint.NET supports dds files out of the box these days - http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
Variety of plugins pinned on the paint.net forums - http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/forum/7-plugins-publishing-only/

Goujosamma is a Paint.NET enthusiast, and has produced a guide and ...
Normal tools by Goujosamma - http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/6843

And maybe as a sub-topic of the OP, regarding Bethesda's HiRes DLC packs

Brumbeks "Detailed anolysis of HighRes Pack" - http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1343691-info-detailed-anolysis-of-highres-pack-click-to-learn/
Which will eventually fall of the forum ...

The following spoiler includes the meat of the topic, minus formatting if you wish to include ..

Spoiler

Ethatron is still developing DDSOpt further.

His latest http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/5755 version is a lot more advanced than the previous 0.7.3 version, but also he posted a list of all dds files he knows of in the http://obge.paradice-insight.us/wiki/DDSopt page ( Scroll down to "The Preview" "Infos" )

Edit: Also @ Martigen - Top tip: If you edit posts on this forum, before you click Save Changes, copy the whole post into notepad; For those frequent forum html spam injections these days ( It doesn't matter what editing mode you are in .. its gonna happen, and you will curse )

» Sun May 05, 2013 2:30 am

Also worth noting :

In the Vanilla game, there are a huge amount of textures which are stretched - The problem is not necessarily with the textures themselves, but the scale applied to them by the games vanilla meshes.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/26126 by Langley, is the most comprehensive collection of mesh fixes to date for this problem.

So if your replacer textures look wrong in game, I would check the meshes they are applied to are not the cause of your problems first.

» Sun May 05, 2013 8:03 am

Posted this elsewhere but also useful fo this topic :

http://www.irfanview.com/, ( with the plugins installed ), allows you to view dds files quickly without loading up a full blown paint package.
You can right click a dds and choose 'Open with' from windows context menus, and once opened, go to the image menu, and choose information ..

Gives lots of information about the exact format the dds file was saved in.

A tip for doing those close up crop images en-masse ..

If you have a bunch of screenshots taken in game so you end up with a heap of screenshots, but only want the cropped part http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=9131818Untitled.png

Use say Paint.NET to note the upper left coordinates of the box
Then also note as you drag a rectangle the lower right coordinates.

Then - IrfanView can perform a little magic. Put all your un-edited copies of the screenshots in a working folder ( the games default .bmp format is ideal because IrfanView has to perform converting the files to a new format ( say .png ) at the same time as batch cropping, otherwise the cropping will not be performed ) Edit: See Worm's following post below ref' settings.

In IrfanViews 'File' menu, choose 'Batch Conversion / rename'

In the batch dialogue, browse to your folder, and shift select all images, the choose 'Add' http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=6521120Untitled2.png

Then change the 'Output format' to a different format than the source images, tick 'Use Advanced', click the advanced button, tick 'Crop' and enter your upper left x and y pos, and the lower right width and height coordinates, then click 'Okay', and lastly 'Start Batch' http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=3637126Untitled3.png

You will end up with a folder full of the cropped images - I changed them all to .jpg before packing them all into the final thing to reduce their file size greatly, http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=1260916Untitled4.png

Sounds like a lot of steps, but if you have ever wanted to manually crop a load of images the same, doing them individually in G.I.M.P or Paint.NET can take ages, you can load all images into layers in those tools, and crop them all like a cookie cutter through all layers .. But IrfanView does the same trick on multiple files a lot quicker, because you dont have to manually setup a load of layers for each image

» Sun May 05, 2013 1:10 pm

Excellent tips, alt. Thanks! I've often wanted to find out which settings a DDS had.

» Sun May 05, 2013 1:08 pm

+1 alt. I've been using Irfanview for 8 years and it's one of the best free programs out there, as essential to my desktop as Adobe Flash Player.

One addendum though...

This is not true. You just have to make sure overwrite existing files is toggled in the advanced options if your output folder is the same as your source.

» Sun May 05, 2013 2:42 am

I am new to texturing and i been using Gimp, what exactly should i be clicking when saving the texture? when i click Generate Mipmaps it increases the size of the file by at least 1MB, and if i click in BC1/DXT1 or BC2/DXT3/5 i cannot open the file afterwards, it gives me an error... what am i doing wrong?

» Sun May 05, 2013 5:02 pm

Thanks for this post, I have been making textures for a little while now but I have always been concerned about the different compressions. I use GIMP and I am no expert so I have a few questions that I would like to ask.

If a texture has a "hole" in it and I see the white and gray checkerboard "behind" it, that's a transparency right? And transparencies ARE alpha channels right? If I am understanding this correctly then I have been creating alpha channels without actually using the "add alpha channel" feature!

Also, for some reason, when I try to compress with GIMP I get anomalies in my textures so I have to save as default, no compression and then use the "Optimizer Textures" tool to compress and mipmap.

Thanks to anyone that can answer this!

» Sun May 05, 2013 3:50 am

Sounds like you have the requisit plugins installed for GIMP ( DDS plugin / Normal Map plugin ) soo .. You can open Skyrim textures with GIMP ( v2.8 ) and it will recognise them ( it will ask if you want to load mip-maps etc .. Just a note; I dont load its previous mip-maps, you want to regenerate new mip-maps anyway when you have finished work on the main texture so will not be needing the old mip-map layers )

Generating mip-maps will increase the size of the file, because you are saving more layers instead of just a single texture.
But depending on the texture type ( most of them ) you will want to generate mip-maps. Pretty sure this has been covered in this topic already.

Saving the file - You cant just save it ( again I will specify GIMP v2.8 ) - You need the "Export" option in the file menu

What type of file ( DDS format / Compression ) you save it as depends upon the type of texture you wish to save
This is mentioned in the OP ( first post of this topic ), and also linked, but I will give a summary Ethatron put together in one of his readme's in reply to the next questions ...

Texture types ( as listed http://obge.paradice-insight.us/wiki/DDSopt ).

The purpose(s) for the game, the dimensions and mip-levels as well as the format and compression the texture is saved in.

The following use-cases are known (for Oblivion and Skyrim):

in a "menu"-folder: User-interface element, alpha channel = element-mask
in a "landscapelod"- or "terrain"-folder: World-space normal-map for terrain, no alpha

with a "_n"-suffix: Tangent-space normal-map, alpha channel = specularity
with a "_msn"-suffix: Model-space normal-map, no alpha
with a "_g"-, "_glow"- or "_emit"-suffix: Glow-map, alpha channel = mask
with a "_hh"-suffix: Gloss-map for hair, no alpha
with a "_hl"-suffix: Detail-map for hair, alpha channel = opacity
with a "_m"-suffix: Reflectivity-map for light-sources, no alpha
with a "_em"- or "_envmap"-suffix: Reflectivity-map for environment-maps, no alpha
with a "_e"-suffix: Environment-map (some are planar, some are cube-maps), no alpha
with a "_b"- or "_bl"-suffix: Backlight-map, no alpha
with a "_s"-suffix: Specularity-map for skins, no alpha
with a "_sk"-suffix: Tone-map for skins, no alpha
with a "_p"-suffix: Parallax-map, no alpha
with a "_d"-suffix: Diffuse-map, alpha channel = opacity
with a "_h"-suffix: Haze-map, alpha channel = unknown

All other name.dds are Color-map, alpha channel = opacity or parallax

A lot of Info on TES Alliance

Specifically for Skyrim http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/tutorials/category/39-graphic-artistry/ <<-- This part of TESA is new so still building

Older topics for Oblivion http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/tutorials/category/14-texturing/ <<-- But still very useful knowledge for Skyrim and a lot more fleshed out ( its had plenty of time to mature for that game, but there are a lot of similar texture types ).

GIMPs documentation http://www.gimp.org/docs/

Ref Alpha channels in GIMP, if you are saving a texture without a transparency layer, then you are not giving it an alpha channel.

Here's one of the Vilja Custom Eyes textures I made for Viljas optional files, this shows the menu option needed to create one ..

http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=2733539Untitled.jpg <<-- It already has an alpha channel so the option to add one is ghosted out in my case.

Adding an alpha channel will probably solve the anomalies you are seeing after generating mip-maps, but not sure what is going wrong there for you.

Saving a texture in its correct format though without mip-maps, can as you know be solved with an optimizer - Personally I use DDSOpt's excellent remipping capabilities for speedily doing batches of worked on textures just to re-mipmap the lot of them without using any other constraints.
But the texture needs to be in the correct format required before you feed it to an optimizer ( unless the optimizer just uses suffixes to determine its type .. I dont use the one you mention so cannot be sure ), so that the optimizer can determine what type of texture it will churn out .. with added mipmaps.

PS - If you accidently load mip-maps, knowing that you will need to regenerate them anyway, you can right click on the "Main Surface" ( in the layers box ) and choose "Flatten Image" - This will get rid of the mip-map layers instead of having to reload the texture and untick them http://www.bild.me/bild.php?file=7500124Untitled.jpg

Edit: Forum editor mess clean up.