Hey folks,

I just got a stable game together last weekend (thanks to everybody who stopped in to help me with that), which means it's time for two things: (1) Tampering with my load list again and (2) making my first mod!

I'm starting out with something relatively small and simple, but (in my opinion) much needed: a Khajiit retexture. I've checked out a couple of tutorials/introductions on texturing, but I have a few questions that were not answered there. If you'd help me I'd appreciate it and, well, I'll get the new textures finished faster.

Some brief technical details before I get into the questions: I am editing textures using Photoshop Elements and the Nvidia plugin that lets you open/save as dds format files. My operating system (for modding) is Windows XP, but it's physically on a MacBook Pro; hence I am working with a Mac keyboard that has no 'print screen' key.

- How can I take screenshots in game? Bear in mind that I have no 'print screen' key.
- How do I see and edit alpha channels in Photoshop?
- I found the head, body, limb, teeth and ear textures when I unpacked the Oblivion texture bsa, but no age textures, and no tongue or mouth. Are Khajiits assigned a tongue and mouth texture that is in some other folder? Do they have no assigned age textures?
- I couldn't find what looked like 'makeup' textures in any of the character texture folders. Where are the textures that are controlled by all the "Lips pale red/dark blue"-type sliders in the character generation screen? How do they work? Are Khajiits assigned their own unique makeup textures? Can they safely be messed with or are there special related issues?
- Do textures and normal maps need to be the same size/resolution? For quality reasons they obviously should be, but is my game going to break if they are not? Will they still display properly if they are not?
- As I understand it, the use of mipmaps means that hi-res textures are only loaded into your graphical memory if you are quite close to hi-res-textured objects. If so, why would the use of hi-res textures have an impact on FPS? It seems that only one or two objects could be all that close to the camera in a given frame.

If there are good tutorials that cover this sort of information, point me to 'em and I'll happily read them through.

Thanks all,
Asterai

Starting small and simple with a Khajiit retex? That's hardly small and simple unless you just want to play with the Hue/saturation and similar sliders for a bit. I also doubt photoshop elements is suited for advanced texturing, you may want to either get Gimp or a full version of Photoshop CS.

As for texturing tutorials: There are quite a few at both the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page and http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/18-texturing/

Not at home right now, so I'll have to anwser some questions by digging in my (bad) memory as I haven't got Photoshop at work...


http://www.fraps.com/download.php can take screenshots without the PrtScn button.


Not sure you can in Photshop Elements or if it's even the same as in photoshop CS, but the Alphachannel is in the Channel tab under Layer View. If you use an excisting texture there's already one there that can be altered just like the normal image (darken/lighten parts mainly). if you're making your texture from scratch you need to create it yourself.


I'm almost certain they share the teeth textures and such with the other races. Check in NifSkope to see the texture filepath.


I have no idea how that works exactly, but some people here will know for sure. But I'm pretty sure that there's no .DDS file for it.


I assume it'll still work, not sure why you'd want to do that though. :shrug:


From the CS Wiki: "...if you don't generate mipmaps, the file will look odd at a distance or for those without texture size set to maximum."

Well, ha, it's simple compared to all the other mod ideas I have written down somewhere, which generally involve things like new models and animations, or complicated quests, or learning a lot about scripting in Oblivion. I do already know how to draw, which I figured is a pretty good step in the right direction. The existing textures also help, as they provide nice basic guidelines to where things belong.

I can't find that "channel" tab under layers, so I guess I will need some heavier software before I finish. So far, though, Elements is much more responsive than the paper-and-chalks I'm most used to working with, so I'm happy with it for now. If anyone else knows how to work alpha channels from Elements, though, that would be easiest.

I was mostly asking about the different-resolution maps because I don't have a matched hi-res normal map on hand, and didn't want my testing to get hung up on account of it.

Anyways, thank you, I'll look into those links.

Asterai

There not under layers, go to your toolbar menu up top and select Windows, then click channels, if the image you have has a alpha channel, you'll see it there. You can modify alpha channel how ever you like, DL http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=33399 , some of those image look awful but its only the alpha channel that's seen(for those that dont already know), and some dont resemble the orig image. Im on holidays tomorrow and be back in a week, so hopefully other be able to help Any way hope that helps info helps a bit, just to let you know that CS does a great job

Having some artistic talent will certainly help in texturing, so that's absolutely a pro! :foodndrink:

Mind you that while texturing appears to be more simple than modeling it can be a very challenging task. Especially when making textures from scratch for new models. They either make or break the model.

Why not try out Gimp for your texturing needs? It's free , has many online tutorials available and it will give you better tools for your texturing efforts. It will also take care of handling normalmaps (http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/GIMP:_Quality_Normal_Maps).

Have fun!