I have a new texture I'm having problems with. At certain angles in the sun, I get white splotches on it. From some angles it looks pretty bad. (Look below and to the right, and above and to the left of the anvil in the gap where the pieces are supposed to be put together. That's the only spot that it does this though. The rest looks fine.)

I know enough about texturing to be dangerous, so I don't know how to fix this. The only thing I replaced was the diffuse and normal for the decal that goes on the guard shield. I just copied the nif and changed the texture path of both to my new textures and make a new armor and armor add on in the CK.

http://ypdesign.com/skyrim/helgen/images/shield01.jpg

looks like normal map, best check the dds's single color channes and alpha channel (if any).

if this is only from certain angles, guess you'll find the spots on green- or red-channel (look closely though, this goes with very low contrast)

OR did the original model's dds have alpha channels and you saved yours without? might be some transparency issue in that case

edit: on second look - that anvil-icon on the shield, if it's a decal...?, then most likely everything non-icon-parts would be transparent so you'd see the shield surface around it - so artefacts in your dds's alpha channel would cause stg like this

So how do I fix it? Here's the textures in case you want to take a look. As I said, it was about all I could do to hack this together, lol.

http://ypdesign.com/skyrim/helgen/files/shield.zip

Thanks!

hm well, the key to this is definitely the normal map:

the parts with your issue are transparent on your textures, to make beneath texture show through for "scratches" as in many other spots of the shield too, there's nothing wrong i can see with that in your tx (except maybe that it's mirrored from what i see in your jpg, but i don't think that's actually an issue)

so whatever these white stripes are, they're showing through from whatever texture is beneath yours.

(or do you have any specular or glow maps left in there from prev textures?)

for a test, you could retex the shield body with stg more or less flat and non-shiny, some wood or landscape tx-set or whatever and see if it still shows

to fix it, you'd most likely either replace the body texture, or just paint over these two particular scratches in your tx so they're not transparent anymore

or you could also tell me what model you used (if vanilla) and i'll look what i find

It's just the vanilla guard shield: meshes\armor\stormcloaks\shield.nif

Did you try just using the stormcloakshield_n.dds instead? I found the textures for the stormcloak/hold shields and their _n files don't have the scratch marks on them (they're also rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees which makes no sense). The stormcloakshied_n .dds file should work. I'm not too experienced with texturing, but from my understanding the _n files add a 3D look to objects and change how lighting effects the objects. Since a painted design on a shield doesn't change it's 3D shape, it makes sense that all the shields use the same _n file.

I just went pretty much monkey-see, monkey-do, and since all the other decals for the various holds had their own normals, I made one for mine. My extent of normal making, I should mention, is that of Miax's GIMP tutorial. But I follow it step by step. and yeah, normals add subtle 3d effects, and I believe are also sometimes called "bump" maps? But I'll try one of the other normals and see what I get. Thanks!

Most likely your texture it isn't properly baked or saved as a normal map, and the texture itself wasn't converted to tangent space normals.

ok guess i found out what causes this: right under your tx's "scratches"-transparencies in these two spots, the shield's tx below itself has, uh, what's the word, furrows...?, between the boards, y'know , so i think what this is is just these normal-3d-"edges" that are _meant_ to reflect from certain angles for relief effect, it just looks odd because they're the only thing you see through.

so i'd recommend you just open your normal dds in the imaging software of your choice, there's "scratches" where your issues are, just go through color- and alpha channels and paint over the to evil ones with their neighboring colors in every channel but rgb (= 4 times all in all) (i'd do it for you as this'd take me less time in ps than typing this post, but got nowhere to post non-image-files, could post jpg's for every channel on imageshack at best)

edit: naaah - good you wrote about the decals for the other holds. just compared yours to those:

the transparency scratches, yes? you can NOT have these in the normal map rgb!!! ONLY in alpha channel!

"black" (your supposed transp.) in, like, red-channel just means "be very very shiny when light comes from..."

so: keep scratches in normal map alpha. put them out in all color channels. should be fine then.

Well, like I said above, the extent of my normal map skills comes from a tutorial from the Nexus I found. It says desaturate your image, use the Map>Normal Map plugin and edit a few settings and export which is how I did it. When you start talking RGB, channels and that stuff it may as well be Swahili because I don't know all that stuff. I'm a hack at best with textures. I'm just trying to get something usable for my mod, lol.

ok does this work?

(pls tell me when u got file so i can del)

It says file not found.

If you wish, you can email it to me at ilovegolf@triad.rr.com

you need to right-click "save link as", just clicking won't work

AWESOME!

Looks incredible in game to me, especially with my guards matching armor! (Here's a sneak peak for those who happen across this thread.)

http://ypdesign.com/skyrim/helgen/shield.htm

cool, glad it helped (actually just painted over the transparency-gaps in the color channels like said above)

Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I still have something going wrong here. I'm trying to make a new texture set with my texture and the normal file s7o worked on, and the CK is saying there are no mipmaps on the normal file. So I tried to pull it up in GIMP to make the mipmaps, and GIMP won't open it for some reason. It sais, invalid file, invalid header and this: Opening 'E:\Helgen Rebuilt Assets\Armor\Shield\FIXEDhattuguardsshield_n.dds' failed: DDS image plug-In could not open image

Remake the normal map with the original DDS file.

And when you save it as _n.dds, make sure you choose "Generate MipMaps" from the drop down.

Yeah that's what I did. Gonna test in game. (crosses fingers)

EDIT: That did it. I think I found out what I did wrong the first time too. Like I said, the only thing I have to go by is Miax's GIMP tutorial, and it has never failed me. But I'll admit I haven't done any textures with transparency (alpha channel?) in them. Anyway, I think the first mistake was using a bmp to make the normal, so I exported a png this time. Secondly, I missed the step for setting the curves on the alpha channel in GIMP, lol.

that's certainly not the dds, it _does_ have mipmaps (i currently have it open and can see them, original nvidia dds-plugins for ps),

and i just made a texture set with your texture and my normal and applied this to the stormcloaks shield without any problems.

guess there must've gone something wrong with the download (edit: and that gimp msg's very much point to a incomplete file)

or something, best try to http://www.neuwinger.com/dl/HattuGuardsShield_n.dds (file should be 342KB in win explorer, or 349.680 bytes in my ftp-prg)