Hey guys,

I'm currently retexturing some of the creatures in New Vegas. Everything runs fine so far, except when it comes to the retexturing of ants. Different from other creatures, ants have a shiny "chrome"-like surface on their skin. I already figured out that this is some kind of enviromental mapping and I have to make it in greyscale somehow. But whatever I've tried, it just won't work. Using the vanilla _e.dds or _m.dds won't have any effect either, because this seems based on the colour the object has. Is this just as easy as creating normal maps?

In particular, I'm trying to create a black ant with this reflecting surface. Anyone ever did this, or can help and show me how to do it?

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=197

You need an environment map and an environment mask. For an ant you could possibly cheap out and make the entire mask a solid block of darkish grey, what it would mean is that the entire carapace would be equally shiny. If you want to make some areas matte and some glossy, you can copy/paste the alpha channel of the normal map, or the main texture itself, to get the outlines, and color in matte areas with solid black and glossier areas with lighter grey or white. The environment map needs to be a cube map. They're weird. Tiling is tricky, so you could probably just use one of the original "..._e.dds" files that came with the game.

When I picture a shiny black ant, I picture it with sort of a multicolored iridescence. You can accomplish that by using an environment map with a multitude of colors rather than the usual normal colored background. Start with an existing environment map image and use photoshop to make it a bit more psychedelic, or start with an image of soap bubbles or something.

Thanks a lot Imp, your help is always appreciated, but unfortunately this was exactly the tutorial I've used when intially trying to make the enviromental stuff. I'm also using Gimp, so anythings a bit different from Photoshop. I'm not quite sure that this is related to the _e.dds rather then the _m.dds (what's the difference?). On the other hand, it should work with the vanilla _e.dds and _m.dds, but somehow it doesn't. I'll keep trying what you adviced me...see if I get any decent results.

I think I found the problem. It was related to the normal map. The ordinary way of making normal maps somehow rendered the ants without shiny surface. Usually I turn black to transparency in layers option before applying the normal map, this was they way I've learned it when modding Oblivion. I just skipped this step and set the normal map scale to 5, that did the trick.

The alpha channel of the normal map is shininess, it effects the specular hightlight - the bright spot caused when a light reflects off of the surface. The _e map is the environment map, its an image you see reflected from the surface of environment mapped models. The _m map is the environment mask. It's similar to the alpha channel of the normal map, except that it controls how visible that reflected image is. If you make the entire _m map white, the object will look like chrome. All black and you won't see any reflections at all. It's best to use something in between - chrome surfaces are sort of cliche in computer graphics, plus when it's accomplished via environment mapping rather than a true reflection of the surroundings, it'll look weird when you're able to see that the environment mapped reflection (the image from the _e file) doesn't match the surroundings.

If you just paint over the alpha channel of your ant's normal map with white or a light grey, the surface of the ant will be uniformly shiny, and you won't need to bother with the environment mask and map (might not look as cool as rainbow iridescence though.)

Thanks for the in depth description. It seems I'm able to use the vanilla _m.dds and modifie (scaling all shades from white to black) it to my preference, I got pretty decent results with it while experimenting yesterday. This knowledge will come in very handy in future experiments. Thanks again.