Modeling and Texturing Tutorial Wik - Recently Updated Pages

Basic Sword (Mesh Only)

Weajiin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:20:05 CDT

Preface:

Tools you will need:

Blender 3d
Blender Nif Scripts
Nifskope
Unpacked Oblivion BSA meshes archive
The Elder Scrolls Construction Set (Oblivion)

The methods we use later on in this tutorial are a bit primitive; hacking and slashing an existing game weapon and replacing it with one you modeled in blender along with stealing a similar weapons collision mesh.

This tutorial assumes you have basic knowledge of blender's User Interface. If you don't know how there are plenty of very descriptive step by step tutorials that you can warm up with online.

Also as I have stated above you will be using weapons that came packed with the game in the bsa archive. If you have not unpacked your oblivion.bsa and don't have access to the meshes inside, you should look up a tutorial on how to unpack it and import it's files into blender for editing.
I suggest using bsa commander, a tutorial can be found here http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/BSA_Unpacker_Tutorial"//cs.elderscrolls.com.

If you follow everything here you will easily end up with a sword like this.
I created this sword in less than two minutes, it may take longer depending on your skill with blender, this may or may not look complicated, but it truthfully isn't.

Now that all of that is out of the way, lets begin!

Part 1 Firing up Blender:

Double click on your blender icon.

We are going to start with the handle of the sword.

Delete the default cube, right click on it in object mode and hit (x) but make sure you don't move your 3d cursor.

If you do (ctrl-z) until it is back in the center.

Push (num-pad 7) to make sure you are in top view.

Now hit the spacebar, add, mesh, cylinder.

Make your settings like these.

If you are in top view (num-pad 7) you will see something like this.

Oblivion

Weajiin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:17:15 CDT

Animated Weapon
Basic Sword (Mesh Only)

Photo Gallery

Weajiin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:14:48 CDT

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New Cuirass in Blender Part II

SickleYield — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:33:32 CDT

Explanation

This is a continuation of my Custom Cuirass in Blender tutorial. If you haven't done the first part, this one is unlikely to be helpful. A quick reminder: There is more than one way to do this, and this is just the method that I've found to be effective for me. If you have another one, write another tutorial.

New Shortcuts in Blender for This Tutorial

These are new since Part 1 and will be referred to in this tutorial: CTRL-w: Save a file. p: separate selected vertices into a new mesh. CTRL-a: Apply size and rotation before export. u: UV unwrap selected vertices or faces.

The Pauldrons

Adding pauldrons is optional. This is a little tricky if we're choosing not to add verts. What I usually do is to copy a big patch of vertices from the shoulder section of BOTH shoulders in Edit Mode using select and shift-D, then g-z to slide them up above the original shoulders to somewhere we can work on them easily. Depending on what pauldron shape you’ll want, you might have to subdivide all these vertices. These will be your proto-pauldrons. Then I select just the outer row of vertices on one “pauldron” and do g-z again to drag them slightly downwards. Next select two that are opposite each other and press alt-m and “at center” when that comes up. This merges the two vertices into one.

Repeat until you have a closed shape that is roughly domelike. This will be your pauldron. Give it the shape you want by using the g and the axis keys before you lower it back down onto the shoulders. I don’t recommend joining the mesh to the cuirass, because that can make texturing much harder later on. I do recommend doing each change you make on one pauldron, then the other, in a continuous way. It can be hard to replicate all the changes from one pauldron on the other side otherwise. You can just make one and copy it, but then the weight paint will be wrong for the side it’s on and you’ll have to rename all the bones to which that particular pauldron is painted (this is done in Edit Mode).

Alternately, you can make the pauldrons totally from scratch and copy the weight paint onto them using the Easy Rigging in Blender tutorial on this site. You will then also need to redo the UV map.

The Arm Section

Now when you make this part of the cuirass, you need to have a couple of things in mind. If you want a sleeveless look, you don’t need to do anything here; you’ll just leave the bare arm sections with your cuirass.

If you want an armband look, you can do the same as you did with the cuirass: copy the arm sections and enlarge them using ALT + s. I recommend molding the edges of these also as described in Part 1, so that it's obvious they have some thickness to them.

Once again, toggling the wireframe (z key) is an excellent way to make sure things overlap just right, or to select vertices that are behind other vertices.

Once you get the copied arm sections situated, trim away whatever you don’t want. Remember, gauntlets usually cover part of the wrist, so unless you have a very clear and specific idea what gauntlets you want to make/use you don’t want to put things there.

If you want multiple, separate parts of the arm section, it's very easy to do. Go ahead and shape everything the way you want it. Then go to Edit Mode and select just the vertices you want to be a different mesh. Press the P key and choose “selected” from the dialogue that pops up.

The vertices you chose are instantly an all-new, separate mesh. This can be very useful.

Optional: The Skirt/Kilt Section

Bethesda’s default cuirass meshes generally have a lower section that protects the hip/groin areas of the body. This overlaps the greaves and provides additional protection over them. However, it creates some issues with fit. This is why this part of Bethesda meshes tends to be so large; it has to fit over every type of greaves in the game to avoid clipping.

If you want a shorter cuirass, you don’t have to include this. Or, if you wish, you can include this section with the greaves instead of the cuirass to make your cuirass compatible with more different greave styles. Remember, using the p key technique you can separate any mesh into as many parts as you want.

If you do want to include this section, there are a couple of ways to do it. One is to import a game cuirass and delete everything but the skirt (don’t forget the skeleton!), then scale and subdivide and grab and drag that into the shape and size you want. Don’t forget to parent this to your skeleton, or you’ll get a really odd look ingame. If you want something longer, do the same thing with a plain skirt mesh from the game.

Alternately, you can select a ring of verts on the lower torso at the waist. Press shift+D and then p. Go to object mode and select your new "mesh" (which is just a ring of verts). Go back to edit mode and extrude into the shape you want by pressing e and dragging verts downward. You will need to recalculate the normals outward if you do this, and again, you will have to UV map and rig it.

Bonus Section: Editing the Default Game UV Maps

Bethesda’s default UV maps for their body meshes look nice In the UV screen, but once you get them out and start trying to texture them, you realize that they are somewhat difficult to work with. The femaleupperupperbody.nif in particular has considerable distortion in the chest areas. It is very difficult to texture over UV maps with no straight lines in them.

Before I get into what I’m about to propose, you need to be familiar with the UV window and where it is.

Here is a dress whose upper bodice I made using a method similar to the one for the cuirass above: SickleYield's Regency Ballgown

I then discovered that I wanted to paint folds on the bodice, but it was impossible with the UV map as it was and my limited drawing talents. After much flailing, swearing and muttering, this is what I did.

I went into UV Face Select mode in Blender. (Now you do this in edit mode because Blender's later versions have no UV Face Select.) Then I used the bounding circle (b,b) to select the front half and ONLY the front half of the bodice. Then I went to the UV screen, which I had in a small window off to one side. It was showing the section I had selected with its overly-curvy original UV map.

Then I went to the UV dropdown and selectedunwrap (You can also just press the u key.) Suddenly my UV map was beautifully flat. I repeated this with the back half and laid them one above the other in the UV screen, so that they could still be used on the same texture.

Now, what you get by doing this is still rather curvy for us to use a flat phototexture over it. So then I used the weld commands (w,2 and w,3) to straighten the lines where possible. On female chest sections, you’ll sometimes just have to learn how to draw lines curved on the UV to make them look straight in-game.

If you straighten lines too much, you’ll get a bizarrely stretched texture that won’t look right. If you don't straighten them enough, texturing them will be much harder.

You can also use seams to make your UV map turn out better. This is just like a seam in a real garment - it tells Blender that there is a break in the mesh there and to act accordingly. So when doing the above, instead of selecting all the front verts and then all the back ones, I could have put a seam up each side instead. To make a seam, select a row of vertices and press ctrl+e and choose "mark seam." You can use the same command to clear seams as well. Play around with this a little and UV mapping gets vastly easier.

It's easy to select a whole row of vertices in Blender. Choose one at each end of the row, then press w+alt+7 and "edge length" when that comes up. Usually this will give you a nicely selected row. You can try using select-edge loop, but that doesn't work well on meshes that are not evenly curved.

Export: Putting It All Together

It has now probably been several hours of staring at your screen, swearing violently at Blender, et cetera, and your cuirass hopefully now looks like you want it to look.

First, highlight your new cuirass mesh (or all meshes if you have more than one). You should have NO skeleton in your file at this point! We have to import a clean one for things to work out well in game.

It's time to import a skeleton. Go to file-import-netimmerse/gamebryo. Navigate to meshes/characters/_male/skeleton.nif. (It will not be there unless you have unpacked your .bsa files and/or are using a skeleton replacer.) A screen pops up with your import options. Choose "skeleton only + parent selected" and then import.

Now you should be able to grab the skeleton and move it around. If you did things right, your new meshes will move with it. Do not try to export until after your UV and weight painting are all done. Before you export, be sure and press ctrl+a to apply your changes.

Make sure you’ve saved your finished project in Blender. You can save by pressing CTRL-W.

We don’t have to add textures or materials, because they’re already there. You’ll want to add different textures, so you won’t have a fleshtoned cuirass, but I’ll show you how to do that in NifSkope.

Now make sure you've selected the skeleton and export, using the settings we did back in part I. A screen will come up that lets you name your cuirass and decide where to export it.

Minimize Blender when you’ve exported, then click through the Data files on your computer until you find your cuirass.nif in the armor section. Now we'll do what we have to do to make our cuirass actually show up in Oblivion.

Necessary NifSkope Alchemy

And guess what? This section was once long, but is now basically obsolete thanks to the wonderful makers of the NIF scripts. Basically, you need to open up your mesh in NifSkope only to change textures and materials and maybe export the UV map. You can export the map of one piece by selecting that mesh, then right clicking. Then choose textures-export UV map and tell it where you want the map saved. You can use this for texturing.

If you get a mesh that crashes the game after this, the odds are good you did not export with a skeleton or exported with two.

Note on Skin Pieces

If there is skin showing, you need to make sure every skin piece's material is named "skin" and nothing more. Blender sometimes will change it to skin.001 or similar when exporting, which will cause people wearing it to always appear Imperial from the neck down instead of their actual race. Make sure the armor parts are NOT named skin, because then your armor will be textured like flesh and will look very odd. Naming the material “armor” will generally give good results in Oblivion. There are other things you can do with materials, but we won't cover them here.

The section of your cuirass that covers the arms must have "arms" in the name of the nitristrips or nitrishape in NifSkope, as in "cuirass:arms" or "upperbody:arms." Otherwise it will not show up in first person.

Now File-Save. You can replace your original exported cuirass, or give this one a new name if you like.

Adding/Changing the Textures

I'm not going to tell you how to make a texture from scratch here, but once you have one, here's what you do to assign it to your mesh. First, make sure you put your texture in a folder somewhere in Oblivion/Data/Textures. Please don't just dump it into the Textures folder, which creates clutter with other mods, but make a new folder for your own textures and give it a name you and others can remember.

Now go to your open mesh in NifSkope. Expand the nitrishape node. Expand the nisourcetexture node. You should see a line with a little flower next to it which is labeled nisourcetexture. If you made your cuirass from body parts, this will probably have the imperial body texture in it already. Double-click, delete that, and type in the path to your own texture. It will usually look something like data\textures\armor\cuirass.dds. This tells NifSkope where your texture is.

For now I'll leave it that the texture must be a .dds file and it must have a normal map, which is called something like cuirass_n.dds. You don't have to assign that in NifSkope. As long as it is in the same folder as your texture, it will work fine in Oblivion.

You can leave the parts that are supposed to be flesh with the Imperial body texture on them. As long as you made sure the material is called skin and nothing but that, it will be changed to match whatever race is wearing the armor or clothing. The body parts will still have the same UV map no matter what, though, so don't expect Exnem's textures to look right on the default armor or Fantasy Figures textures to look right on BAB armor.

==Important Tip: Making Meshes Double-Sided in NifSkope==

I still recommend molded edges, but if you aren't able to do that or do want to create an impression of very thin material, you can do this instead.

If you look at your mesh in NifSkope from the right angle, you will realize you can only see it from one side – from the “back” or “inside” it's invisible. This doesn't matter if no one can see that side of the mesh, but often they can, and it will look wrong in-game. We can fix this.

Click on the nitrishape of your mesh that you want to be double-sided. Now right-click and choose Block – insert. Choose nistencilproperty. It's under the letter "s" because all the options start with "ni."

NifSkope will probably bump this NiStencilProperty all the way down to the bottom of your list of nodes. That's okay. Click on it and choose block-copy again. Now go up and click on your nitrishape and paste the stencil property into it. It should now show up in the hierarchy of the nitrishape, where it belongs.

When you click on the nistencilproperty in the block list, the detail screen down below should show you something that says DRAW_CCW_OR_BOTH. Click on the dropdown and change it to DRAW_BOTH, like this.

Now you should magically be able to see both sides of your mesh with the texture shown on both.

=Getting The Mesh Into The Construction Set=

Double click on the construction set icon on your desktop to load up the CS. If you don't have this icon on your desktop, I urge you to put it there right now. Now wait for it to load. This may take a while, and then there will be very few items on the screen. That's because we haven't loaded any data files.

Click file - data in the top menu. You should see a list of all the mods on your computer here. If you don't have any, it'll probably just show oblivion.esm. Click on that so that a little "X" appears next to it, making it active, and then click "OK."

Now wait for THAT to load. Or come back in two years.

Eventually it will finish loading and you can see every object in the game and every cell in Tamriel. Find the objects window, which has a list that says "Actors," "Items," etc. Click on Items to expand it, then click on Armor. Now you see a list of all the armor sets in the game. You can click on one set, say "Glass" or "Daedric," in the left-hand pane and it will show you all the pieces in just that set in the right-hand one. Pic.

Choose a cuirass that has the kind of stats you want. Glass and Daedric are very popular because they are the best light and heavy armor in the game. Don't choose one that says "arena" anywhere in the ID, because those have scripts on them that we don't want. Double click the cuirass of your choice to bring up its information. Click on the name of the nif (say, glass/f/cuirass.nif). A little window will pop up with the data directory in it. Click through until you find your own new cuirass mesh. Click on that and click "OK". Your mesh name should now appear in the window.

Notice that there is a space here for a separate mesh for both male and female versions of the cuirass. If you want both sexes to be able to wear your armor and look good in it, you need to make meshes for both. Otherwise you get terrible-looking armor when the opposite sex wears it, the way it generally happens with Bethesda's original Crusader cuirass from KOTN or the Steel and Dwarven cuirasses from the default game.

You'll also need to create a path to a new icon, which you can make easily in GIMP using this method: [[http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Better_Icons_The_Easy_Way_With_GIMP Easy Icon Tutorial]]

Now, this is different from swords and shields. You need a world object, so that your cuirass will be visible when a character drops it in the game. I will link to a method for that as soon as I've made a tutorial for it.

This next part is very important. You need to change the ID of the new cuirass, not just the name. The ID is above the name and looks something like "GlassCuirass" or "DaedricCuirass". You must change this to a new ID such as "AAMyCuirass," or you will replace every glass cuirass in the game with yours. Be sure and give it a unique name, too. I put the AA designation in this test cuirass so that it will be up at the top of the list and easier to find.

When that is done, click OK. You'll get a message asking if you want to create a new form ID. ALWAYS SAY YES.

=Getting the New Cuirass Into the Game=

Now your cuirass will appear in thearmor list. It will be listed alphabetically by its ID, although you can change the sorting method by clicking the headings of the list. If you keep it in a separate folder such as Data\meshes\armor\TestArmor and don’t just drop it into Data\meshes\armor, the Construction Set will create a special tab just for you under the Armor list over on the left.

Now you can drop the cuirass into the inventory of a merchant, into your house, or into the street of a random city. If you already have a quest all planned out, you can do that, too, but I don’t plan to cover that here. Go to file - save in the main CS menu and give your mod a name. Close the CS. This might take a while. It might even crash. This is okay, because we already saved.

After all that work, you can now go into the game and see where you screwed up.

Ha ha. Just a little bitter humor there, based on the number of times it normally takes to playtest before an acceptable version is reached. Don’t worry, the cuirass is the hardest piece of armor to create; everything after this is cake. To facilitate this process, modders will often create a new container in Hawkhaven, the testing hall, or another cell that can only be reached with a console code and put all of their armor into that container. This makes playtesting easier. You can then set up your armor in a shop or quest (or whatever) when you're sure it all looks the way you want it to.

Making armor takes time, but before long you’ll get used to the steps and it goes much faster. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of seeing a character wearing your new armor for the first time.

New Cuirass in Blender Part I

SickleYield — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:18:47 CDT

Introduction

This is a step-by-step guide for making a new cuirass from body meshes using the program Blender and the NIF scripts. Until your modeling skills increase to a fairly high level, it works best with fitted styles. Sample result (cuirass only, pants are a retex):

This is not a short tutorial because making armor is not a short process. It’s lots of fun, and the results can be amazing, but if you’re going to do it you need to be prepared to invest some time.

Important Preliminaries: Your Modding Toolbox

You will need:

1. A BSA unpacker such as TES4BSA.

2. The latest version of Blender, and a working [http://math.hws.edu/eck/cs324/ knowledge] of the program. It's complicated.

3. NifSkope, a powerful mesh editor.

4. The Blender NIF scripts, which allow export of meshes from Blender in the right format for Oblivion.

5. The GIMP. The link for the Blender tutorial page above also has some excellent instructions for GIMP. I use GIMP, and any texture instructions will be specific to that program.

To use GIMP for Oblivion, you'll also need the .dds plugin for GIMP.

Important Warning: Blender/NIF Script Compatibility

As of this writing, the NIF scripts are at version 2.21 and PyFFI 0.6. It is likely some button-pushing instructions will quickly become obsolete as the scripts evolve, so feel free to contact the author for further information.

Useful Blender Shortcuts

I’ll probably mention these throughout the tutorial, but you can always refer to this section if you forget one (or I do).

r: rotates the mesh from whatever direction you are viewing it. Use carefully or the results are very odd.

s: scale the entire mesh up or down by dragging the mouse up or down. Also may drags the mesh out of alignment with the axes, which you can avoid by going to object mode and finding the "center new" button in the edit panel. Clicking it should fix the problem.

ALT + s: shrink or fatten along normals. This may not mean anything to you, but it's actually what you wanted when you chose “s” nine times out of ten.

r and x, y, or z: rotates the selected mesh or vertices on the x, y or z axis.

s and x, y, or z: scales the mesh along an axis.

g and x, y, or z: grab and move selected a mesh or vertices on x, y, or z axis. Again, you can do this without x, y, or z, but you often won't end up with the position you want.

z: when used in edit mode, makes every vertex visible and the faces transparent. Very useful for selecting hidden vertices from any given angle.

b: a crosshair appears that you can click and drag to create a rectangular selection box.

b, b: a circle appears that you can scale up or down by rolling the mouse wheel to create a selection area.

Mouse wheel: hold down and drag to “roll around” the screen and look at the mesh from different angles. Hold down shift/wheel and drag right or left to move right or left only. Scroll mouse wheel up or down to zoom in and out.

Tab: switch between modes. If you're back and forth between Object and Edit a lot, which you will be, this can be useful.

Importing Necessary Body Parts and Skeleton

Start out by opening Blender by double-clicking the icon on your desktop. If this is your first time, you’re probably looking at a boring gray grid. If you see a cube here, press a and then delete. Choose “yes.”

We'll start with the body parts. Go to file-import-netimmerse/gamebryo. Navigate to the body mesh you want to make clothing for, usually in Oblivion\data\meshes\characters\_male. Yes, Bethesda put all the female nifs in here, too. Now you should see a long list of nifs. I’ll start with femaleupperbody.nif, because I’m female and my characters usually are, too. If you want to do the male version of your cuirass first, you could use upperbody.nif. Double-click the mesh and press “Okay” to import it.

The NIF scripts now give you some different options. Don't mess with them just yet; just make sure the "Oblivion" button is pressed so that you're using those import settings.

Now you should see a torso floating above the grid in Blender in Object mode (the default mode when you open Blender). Usually there will be a skeleton also, which we can't use. Click on the skeleton to highlight it, then delete. DO NOT FORGET THIS OR YOU WILL BE SORRY.

Now repeat this process for femalelowerbody.nif, femalehand.nif, femalefoot.nif, and if you want, also humanhead.nif from the "imperial" folder (not the "_male" one). This should give you a complete body. I recommend that once you’ve gone to this much trouble, you save this as something like femalebody.blend. Then do File-Save As again and save it as mycuirass.blend (or whatever you wish). This way you’ll have a stored version of the body that you can use for future armor projects. I mostly work with Fantasy Figures and Robert's Male Bodies, but I try to keep a version of both sexes of whatever bodies I'm using for this sort of starter purposes. The pictures I'm making are using a smoothed-out version of Fantasy Figures Beta.

Just to recap, at this point you should be looking at your complete male or female body in Blender.

The Torso and Neck Line

Right-click on the middle of the female torso to select it. Now go to the dropdown that says Object Mode and switch to Edit Mode. Pressing TAB should also do this. The torso goes from a featureless surface to a network of connected dots, the vertices and faces of the mesh. With the default game topless mesh, the surface is smooth, and you can go straight to making a top out of it. This is why we use the topless one and not the lumpy bra version.

If you’re using a different body mesh such as Fantasy Figures, BAB, etc., you might need to shrink the nipples so they don’t stand out and make it obvious this piece is from a body mesh. I've already done this for the pics you've been seeing in order for this to be a more or less all-ages tutorial. Sculpt Mode is your friend for that kind of work, but I'm not going into that for now.

Select a random vertex anywhere on the body by right-clicking it. Press g. Move the mouse around and observe how the vertex is dragged away from the body. You can use g and x, y, or z to drag the vertex on just one axis at a time. This is good, because otherwise you can get odd-looking results from the third dimension that you can’t see. Before you continue with this, I recommend going back to Object Mode, duplicating the torso section (shift-D), and then switching back to Edit. Scale the copy to be a little larger than the body section using ALT+S, not just s. Try to get it to where there is no overlap or clip between the underlying torso and the duplicate that will become your mesh.

You can check the overlap by switching to wireframe mode. Press the z key. You can see different sides of your mesh by pressing numbers on the numpad, or ctrl + any numpad number. If you're scratching your head because your mesh looks like that already and has been driving you crazy, find this button and click it off.

Important Tip: Proportional Editing

Here's something much more useful than plain g. At the top of your buttons window, below the 3d window, there is a line of little symbol buttons. If you hover your mouse over them, it should say what they are. One of them looks like a little orange circle. This is the proportional editing button. Click it and choose on.

Pick any random vertex and grab it again. Notice how when you do that, it pulls more than just the one vertex? This lets you smoothly edit parts of the body instead of having to do it vertex by vertex. Also, if you hold the mouse still and move the wheel, you can grow or shrink how much is affected around the vertex you chose. This is ridiculously useful when you're making clothing and armor. There are also different kinds of proportional editing you can choose, so feel free to play around with those.

Now you have a body section and a proto-cuirass over it. Select the proto-cuirass and make sure you're in Edit Mode.

Now it’s time for the fun part – making your cuirass torso look like a cuirass instead of just like smooth skin. I can’t tell you exactly what to do here, because it will depend on your preferences and art skills, but I’ll give you some suggestions based on my own projects.

Do’s and Don’ts

DO NOT:

Distort vertices too far. This mesh is already weight-painted – it’s already been told which bones it should move with. If you move a vertex from breast level up to head level, it will still move like part of the breast section. And if you stretch a vertex very far from others near it, it will stretch the texture oddly.

Add new vertices by extrusion, unless you're willing to accept the consequences. They won’t be part of the weight painting or the UV map and will mean you have to redo the weight paint and UV map yourself. This is important because it will affect how your mesh looks with a texture on it, and even whether you can make that texture at all. If you already know how to rerig and do a new UV map, you can safely ignore this one. There is a tutorial here for the weight painting.

Accidentally make your cuirass intersect the body sections under it. This is known as clipping, and it looks terrible in-game. To help avoid this, make sure you look at your mesh from more than one angle as you work.

DO:

Subdivide. If you select some vertices adjacent to each other and then go down to the buttons window in Edit Mode, you should be able to see a button that says subdivide. You might need to hunt through a few tabs for it. If you click Subdivide, it will double just the vertices you chose. One square will become four squares, a line of three vertices will become a line of six, and so on. This gives you a way to add more detail than the original mesh leaves room for.

-Use the knife tool. This is wonderful if you want to divide faces only horizontally OR vertically instead of both at once (like subdivide does). You can access it by pressing SHIFT + k. You can then choose a mode; I usually use midpoint, but feel free to experiment. You use it by left-clicking outside the area you want, then dragging across the area likethis and pressing enter. When used horizontally, the result is something like this.

Mold the edges. Subdivide or knife cut around the armholes, neckline, and hem to make an extra row of vertices. Grab the very outer rim of vertices and pull them back into the body mesh so that your cuirass has obvious, three-dimensional edges. This is an optional technique which is not used in some prominent mods, including much of the BAB clothing and armor. Unless you're already really good with super-detailed texturing the way the BAB team is, molded edges are a better way to make your cuirass look solid and real instead of like a layer of paper over the body.

Tips and Techniques

Bear in mind whether or not you want to add pauldrons (details below). If so, don’t add a lot of decoration in the shoulder region.

If you plan to include the upperbody section under the cuirass as part of it, you can show skin underneath. This is why I had you copy it. This way you can have different necklines by cutting off vertices, or you can have open sides that are closed with decorative fasteners (something I enjoy doing with my cuirasses). I’m not promoting skimpy armor – I try to always have mine cover the important organs and so on – but it’s a valid technique for making your cuirass actually look like it was made from pieces of skin sewed together, different bits of shell or metal, or et cetera.

Remember, collar and hemline variations help to distinguish your cuirass from the plain old body mesh. Experiment with subdivision and grabbing to create new hem shapes, a mandarin collar, etc. For parts of the cuirass that need to have an “inside” showing, you can easily make that happen in NifSkope. I'll show you how down in the export section of Part 2.

Don’t forget to export the UV map of this section when you’re finished. Switch to UV Face Select Mode. Go to UVs-Scripts-save UV face layout. Here's a picture. A screen will pop up that allows you to choose the directory in which to save a .tga of the UV map. It doesn't matter where you put it, as long as you can find it later. You can use this layout to make a new texture that fits your mesh. You can now do this in NifSkope as well if you'd rather, and that way is sometimes faster.

Continued in Part II: Other parts of the cuirass, and how to export all of this.

The Gimp

joededman — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:54:07 CDT

Gimp = Gnome Image Manipulation Program

Installation and Download

You dowload it and the Gnome libraries from The Gimps Website (GTK+ and Gimp) Edit: (You can also DL and install the helpfiles a bit below the Gimp DL too. I will get to this at the settings tutorial)

1. Start to install the Gnome Graphic Libraries (GTK+) (Redhat use a lot of GTK+ graphics for their Linux "desktop" and Gimp is part of it too *blinks*)
2. Install Gimp (and helpfiles)

3. Download and install the Normalmap plugin fromGIMP normalmap plugin
4. Download and install the dds plugin from http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=4816

So where should we install or unpack the plugins?
You have 2 places to choose. As gimp is made for network computers, the user cannot add things to the folders where the software is installed so therefor all private plugins, patterns, brushes, gradients.... .... should be installed, saved or unpacked at: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\.gimp-2.2 and you see the folder plug-ins? Drop the files there.

If you want to play god or root (administrator), place the plugins at: C:\Program files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins if you installed Gimp at the default folder that is otherwise you know where you installed gimp hopefully.

Two DLL from the Normalmap plugin package must be installed elsewhere:
Place libgtkglext-win32-1.0-0.dll and libgdkglext-win32-1.0-0.dll in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\bin directory.
For the latest versions of gimp install them in C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\bin
(Found that little gem of wisdom at http://davenunez.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/using-the-gimp-to-create-bump-maps-for-fsx/ after much frustration.)

5. Download and Install DXTBMP from http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm. I will explain later why.

DDS and Normalmaps

DDS
(Maybe we start in the wrong end but someone that knows graphic basics, will get started immediate with this info. We get into how to make graphics later on.)

There are 3 types of DDS or versions.
DXT1: Very handy as the files get two times smaller then the others types. (Probably more compression and less quality)
DXT3: I don't know much about this one as I never use it. (Probably less compression and higher quality)
DXT5: Semitransparent Textures like Eshme's Glass Armor. (Same file size as DXT3)

When you make a DXT5, you get what you see and you don't need to think about the Alpha Layer at all as you get it automatic with help from the DDS plugin (Dont think much about Alpha when you work with Gimp). I go into details later about how to make these in 2-3 different layers. It is the same with DXT1 and DXT3 but they cant show semi transparens as far as I know.

When you make a texture, you want to include mipmaps, the picture gets layered and each layer is twice as small as the layer above to prevent lag from objects far away. The Gimp DDS plug-in makes the mipmap Layer 2 and up (or down) totally BLACK so no wonder that my meshes became black when I started to use this plug-in. If the texture is not semitransparent but is either 100% transparent or 100% opaque:

1. Save as: (I use [A] for this as shortcut)
2. Type the filename.dds (Gimp will run the DDS plug-in automatic after you click [OK])
3. A new window pops up and you choose to save as DXT1 and don't check the [ ] genereate mipmaps check box as it is pointless.
4. Click [OK]

1. If you made the texture semitransparent, simply choose DXT5 at the DDS window that pops up and uncheck the generate mipmapping.

To be able to save as any DXT format, the texture must be 2X² which means (X² * X²) or 16*16, 32*32,,,, 512*512, 1024*1024 and so on.
(The ² really stands for binary in this case.)

1. Now load DXTBMP
2. Load or Drag and Drop your texture to it
3. Check the mipmap checkbox at the right side of the window
4. Save (The default DXT will be the DXT type/version you saved in the first place from Gimp or whatever (PSP and PS) but double check it in the save window that pops up.)
5. Do exact the same with your Normalmaps and Glowmaps as well

Making Normalmaps (*_n.dds)
The normal map plug-in is really damn cool and it includes 3D models so you can test or preview your Normal mapping as Flat, Sphere, Torus or a Teapot.

I made a shortcut for my Normalmapping at Gimp Settings and I choose the key [Alt-J] but we get to Gimp settings a bit later as there is a lot we can do there to get Gimp to work faster and smother for us. We will make it to a nice tool I assure you.

Making a Texture easy for this normalmap example

Skip this section if you allready have a good texture loaded and jump to the "Making the actual Normalmap" subsection below.

1. Press [Ctrl-N] so you can create a new canvas (picture) or go to Gimp main window and choose Archive - New
2. Make it 512 * 512 pixels at the next window that pops up.
3. Hit the fill bucket at Gimp main page or Press [Shift-B]
4. Below the tools at Gimp main window, you see the settings for each tool: Press or check Fill Pattern there
5. To choose pattern, you either click the pattern symbol at the field between the tools and the toolsettings or write dri at the row next to the [] Fill pattern and I think the pattern Dried mud will be visible as that is the one we will choose as it is so damn easy to create a goooood normalmap with such a texture
6. Go to your Canvas (Picture Window) and fill
7. You have created a damn good texture now. Congratulations *jumps up and down in excitement and screams*

Making the actual Normalmap

1. Load or create a texture or use the one we made above.
2. As we will play with the 3D preview, make a copy of the texture:

2a. [Ctrl-A] (Mark all)
2b. Pull down the menu Edit - Paste as New (I use the shortcut [G] for this one as use this feature daily
2c. Have this copy active as now we will normalmap it.

3. Pull down themenu Filter - Map - Normalmap at the copy
3a. Push the [3D Preview] so we see what we are doing and choose teacop from the pulldown menu at the 3D Preview window. Change texture at the first pulldown under the teacop and choose between the 2 that is loaded with Gimp and use [ALT-TAB] or the mouse to go back to the Mipmapping window again. Put them side by side. The 3D window also has a [X] fullscreen button, which is damn handy and you can have the Mipmap window visible during fullscreen mode as well. Very nice. It is you that choose how you want to arrange your windows and choose the texture to use as preview though of course.
3b. There is many filtertypes and I use Sample 4 but try others as well.
3c. Minimum Z: I allways set this to 1.0 which is min, and I thought it was max really... Well play with this one and see how it changes the teacup.
3d. Scale: This is the most important setting I think and it can be set between -100 - 100 and I usually use 3 but I will be less carefull in the future really. Putting it at 30 and Minimum Z: 0.5, gave the bloody teacop a new dimension, the 5th dimension I think. *grins* (Even I learn a lot here when I make this tutorial and I will make much better Normalmaps after this tutorial is finished for sure as I play with gimp right now when I write this of course.)
4. I usually don't touch other settings, exception is the Option at the right side: Invert Y, which I use if I feel that the Normalmap feels inverted. Setting the Scale negative will solve this I noticed, -3 instead of 3 so you choose.
5. Follow the Save instructions now for DDS and save your Normalmap as filename_n.dds in next to your filename.dds

When we find our favorite settings, making the Normalmap will only take a few seconds but I think I will use the 3D preview much more often now though.

Previewing Alpha at the Normalmap 3D preview? Well, I think we can do that after we saved as DDS and loaded the file again. I will test this later.

Lets see if I start to write section 3 today or not. It took over 3 hours to make the 2 first ones. I think section 3 should be about settings so we use the same environment in case I mention: Press a key or something that you haven't mapped.

Usefull Gimp Settings

Before we start making icons and stuff, lets tweak Gimp and try to make it easier and faster to use. *starts gimp*

Gimp has looooads of different settings and tweaks and I only use some but maybe I find a new while we are inside the settings window? Lets find out.

If you are in a hurry and don't want to read it all. Look at Row number 3 and 8.

Go to Gimp main window, the one with tool icons and tool settings
Pull down the menu Archive and the Settings. (damn what a big window that popped up) *grins*
1. How would you like a new canvas to look like when you press [New Picture]? Play with it now or when you feel like it
2. [Helplines settings] Well we skip this one for now. We will use them during the tutorial later on though.
3. Now we get serious. [Interface] at the 3rd row is very important I think and I allways go here when I install a new Gimp version
3a. Check everything. [X] Dynamic Shortcuts is something I will teach you later when we closed the settings window
3b. If you want to make shortcuts now already, press the [Edit Shortcuts] button but 3a is funnier and faster. Dynamic ones. But one shortcut that I use is only editable here or Gimp quit itself so we click it.
3bI. Click [ + ] File Scroll down to Save as and click it.
Press the key [A] and every time you want to save something as, you press the [A] key and saving as new is something I do very very often. Always I would say and I will explain why later i don't use Ctrl-S when I save and it is about being effective and planning the future and making texture templates.

Close the Shortcut window now.

4. [Themes]. At Linux, we have 100 or 1000 or 10000 themes or more maybe. Here we have 2 at Windows. I think we can DL Gnome themes and put them at GTK+ really. Lets make a test at a later tutorial really. (Am I tempted to try it? YES I AM) Hmm. That is Gimp themes though but we will play with GTK+ anyway later as i am convinced they will work as GTK+ is GTK+, no matter if it is Unix, Linux or Windows
5. Did you Download and Install Gimp Helppages? Well I just did myself as i often forgot them and here you can make settings for them. I test GIMP internal Helpfile reader right now and it is okay. Small letters though so the webbrowser is maybe better? Well it didn't started for me so I will use Gimp helpfile reader instead. Press [F1] whenever you need help.
6. [Toolsettings]. Edit: Change the default Scaling from Linear to Cubic
7. [Toolbox]. They are good as they are
8. Picture Window (or Canvas as I call it). Set [X] checks everywhere if anyone is empty. I hate when a window stay small if I want to zoom in and I want the window to change size when I scale. This is settings i always do when I reinstall Gimp or update it.
9. [Look]. This one confuses me a bit as we have settings for normal and fullscreen look. Fullscreen? What do they mean by that? I don't see anyway we can turn gimp into a PS like fullscreen application?? maybe we one day understand this settings here better?
Lets skip a couple of rows or you look at them your selves later
12. [Settings for other Input Units]. I think you can make settings and get other units to work with Gimp here like a Drawing pad or what it is called. I think this settings is for Linux users maybe as I think Windows will handle this but I am not 100% sure.
13. [Input Units settings]. Here we have many interesting Keyboard mappings and how the mouse wheel should act if you hold down shift, ctrl, Alt or combinations. I think I have lot to learn here and I don't have a mouse wheel where I sit at the moment so i cant test them. But I think you should read the settings and test them though. Lets go back to this later on when we find good use of it.
We jump to 16. [Folders or Directories] Do you want to have your own brushes, patterns and so on stored at your homedirectory or at the Program folder? That is up to you really as long as you don't use Gimp from a Program Server that is as then you shouldn't touch this at all.

Making an Icon for Oblivion

without adding nor editing the Alpha Channel and still let it have an Alpha channel.
Hmm Sounds complicated, doesn't it? It isn't really.

Remark: This tuturial looks long and complicated, but it take me max 10s to make an icon this way and it will for you too when you get used to it.

Either we make an icon manually, which should get the best visual result as it will become sharp and crispy most likely but it takes time too.
Easiest and fastest way to make an icon is to create it from a screenshot from your Mesh that it represent. Well you can handmake an icon and follow the example as well if you want too of course.

As we will take a screenshot, lets use Gimp for it. Lets start to make a Shortcut key for the Screenshot and I use [Ä] which makes things very complicated as that is a Swedish/Norwegian sign, which is not even used in Denmark. I tried to find a good key for it as we will add more and more keys but I cant really. The second key from L to the right. Lets always call it Ä even if it should be ] at English keyboards if I am not misstaken. We have ] at another place at our Swedish keyboards.

Dynamic Linking works at those menus too it seems so lets make one.

1. Go to Gimp main page, the one with the tools
2. Pull down the Menu Archive and click [get] or [insert] or what the submenu above settings might be called in English.
3. At row 3 at that submenu, we have screenshot. Let the mouse hover over it and hit [Ä] (the ]) key.
4. Done

Lets make the icon now.

1. Doubleclick a Nif file (I assume that you have Nifscope associated with Nif's?) a book Nif should be good as books are damn easy to use in this case.

1b. If you are at CS, you can also draw a book out at the preview window as alternative to Nifscope. Be sure nothing is behind it so it is grey and nice there.

2. Let it be small but not to small

3. Activate any gimp window, Main or whatever as it doesn't matter
4. Push the new key you made [Ä] or []]
5. Gimp asks if we want to dump the whole screen or only a window. Dumping the whole screen is luxury so we [X] Catch a Window
6. Now you get a crosshair in the middle of a small window. Grab it put it at the Nifscope window.

6b. (Alternative way to make screenshot: Press [Alt-Print Screen] when Nifscope is active and go to Gimp and press [j])

7. Go to (activate) the window containing the screenshot.

8. Lets make a rough cut with the Knife tool (I don't know the English name for it) use Key [shift-C] and frame the book like this with your mouse from one upper corner to the opposite lower one:

Now click within the frame with your mouse, click the book as one example, and it should look like this now:

9. That picture has a ground layer that is opaque so we shall copy it and delete the opaque layer and make a new that can handle transparency instead

9a. Open the Layer window with the key [Ctrl-L] and click the (copy button) and click the Lower Layer one time and it will look like this:

9b. Now click the Trashcan button or hide the lower layer by clicking the eye next to it, which sometimes is very handy if we want to reuse the original Layer, which we will mostly but not this time though

10. Lets get rid of the grey part now. We will us the wand now which is mapped to the key [Z] so press it.

11. Click with the mouse at the grey area and click [Ctrl-X] and we got rid of it and it should now look like this:

The grey square pattern surface show us that it is nothing there behind the book. Just Empty Void.

12. It is time to start zooming but we should remap the zooming keys first really.

12a. Rightclick the canvas (Picture)
12b. Click Row 4 at the pop-up menu called [Show] - [Zoom] at the next submenu (row 3) and let the mouse Hover above the:

12bI. [Zoom Out] --> Press the [-] at the numeric pad
12bII. [Zoom In] --> Press the [ + ] at the numeric pad

13. Go to the book picture if you are not there already that is and zoom in by clicking the [ + ] key a couple of times, lets say 2 or 3 (I click 3)

14. We will make a new cut now with the knife so click [Shift-C]

15. Frame the book and focus at where you put the right and the left borders of the cutting frame. Try to set the like this:

(Now we see clearly that I forgot to include the new bookpages.dds that I made together with the "Halls of The Phoenix Order" mod as the pages are completely white. I will have to make a patch.)

16. Go to the cutting window that always pop-up over the picture when we want to cut something. Irritating, but I am sure you moved it away a bit, didn't you?

16a. We see at the cutting window that the width is 103 pixels (Bredd in Swedish) and that the Height is 100 pixels (Höjd). If you got it 103 as well, then it is a miracle as it is most likely that you have a different width. Change the height so it is the same as the width so I change it to 103.

16a. Adjust the Start Y: so the book gets as close as possible to the center.

(One remark here is that the 4 corners of the cutting frame works a bit different. 2 of them move the corner if you drag it and 2 of them moves the whole frame. I am sure that you find out which corner is doing what very fast. *blinks*)

16c. Click the button [Cut] or go to the book and click in the middle of it, well somewhere within the cutting frame at least.

17. Time for some scaling and we should now create a scaling shortcut and i think is a proper one.

17a. I think you will manage to make the dynamic shortcut for this one but I can tell you which menus that has the scaling tool and you right-click the picture as usual.
17b. [Picture] - [Scale Picure]. Hover over it and hit ( is usually the Smear tool but I don't smear often really, well except when I make your screenshots into paintings though...)
17c. Damn, it didn't worked as that key is occupied so lets go in to Gimp settings then and assign the Scale Picture to . It is best to use the Scale Picture really and you find it at [Picture] at the shortcut window. There is also a Scale Layer, but it only scale the current layer, which can become very usefull sometimes but Scale Picture is something that we use to 99.8% I think. If you don't find the settings, Read the previous Tutorial about Gimp Settings, specially Row3.

18. Hit your new key or if you failed to assign Scale to S, then use the pulldown menu Picture - Scale picture

19. Change 103, 103 or whatever your picture is to width 64 and Height 64 (64, 64 from now on). As long as the chain is closed, the scaling will be proportional, the same in X and Y.

19a. Before you hit scale, go down to the Quality section at the Scale window and set Cubic Interpolation instead of Linear and we get higher quality for sure. You can also increase the X and Y resolution, which NeilV adviced us to do a couple of months back, but I don't see much differens if I do that with Gimp really. Maybe PS reacts differently there. I am sure it does when we use the Sharper function but lets debate that 3-4 rows down.
19b. A sidenote about scale settings. Linear Scaling is default so go to Gimp Settings, Row5 [Tool Alternatives] and change default Scaling to Cubic. (I will add this later to the Setting Tutorial)

20. Hit the [Scale] button now.The book is very blurred now so lets sharpen it a bit and we will assign the the [F] to the sharpener tool.

20a. Right-Click the Canvas
20b. Open the submeny [Filter] and next submenu [Improve] and let the mouse hover above [Make Sharper] and press the [F] key.

21. Press your new [F] key

22. I have never got confirmed if you can set how much or less you can sharp pictures at PS and I don't care much either really but here we can set the sharpening from 0 to 100 and for our pictures, textures and screenshots, I think 35 is absolute MAX and I lowered it a couple of months back to 30 so lets use 30

23. The quality was good before we sharpened but now it is excellent i think and the icon is finished.

24. Press the [A] key (Save as)

25. Name it BookExamleIcon.dds and save it wherever you want really. I suggest that you save it as DXT1 but it is up to you really.

26. Icons are usually saved at textures\menus\icons so you can put it there if you want to test it ingame

27. Be sure the mip mapping is unchecked. Icons will never be mip mapped and bookart inside books are never mip mapped nor normal mapped as far as I know

Checking the icon with DXTBMP

1. Start DXTBMP or doubleclick the BookExamleIcon.dds at your file explorer and tell XP that you wish to use DXTBMP as primary program to use when you doubleclick DDS. (Associate dds to DXTBMP if you don't prefer any other programs of course but DXTBMP is Superior really when it comes to those pure dds tools that I have tested.) The default path to DXTBMP is: C:\Graphics\MWGraphics\DXTBmp\DXTBmp.EXE but I installed mine to c:\program

2. What we see here is that the Gimp DDS plugin created an Alpha Channel automatic and it fits the picture perfect. There is not much we can do at DXTBMP, except exchange the Alpha Chanel, mirror the picture and save it with a real mip map as you see close to the right border but don't do that with the icon or CS will scream at you.

What is an Alpha Channel? For some of us it is very obvious but it is easy to use words here that we are used to use that maybe 40% understand and if i do, then you must ask me what it means and also tell me that I am a freak and an idiot that use such complicated words. *grins*

You see that the real DDS picture is not transparent at all, even if it looked like it at Gimp. The background is completely black here and we can change it to standard light purple if we want as that is most common but it doesn't matter really. Look at the Alpha Chanel at the Screenshot of DXTBMP and the black part will make the black at the ordinary layer to become Transpartent. If it was a DXT5, then we could have different grey scales at the Alpha channel to let it have different levels of transparency or opacity that is the opposite. Hard words to remember and I have called it wrong to somewhere at the tutorial. It seems we have to help eachothers to set a name for right thing really. I also think that we have a Alpha Chanel tutorial here at this forum made by Mr Dave. (I cant find it)

You that read the different tutorial at this thread. Was it good with the screenies? Shall I make the next with or without them? The next will be semitransparens and DXT5 and it will be shorter as I will try to not repeat some basics that i wrote in detail here as i will assume that you know how to make the icon and...

...how to map keys, scale, open the Layer window, settings, save dds, _n.dds and sharpen

Remark: Morrowind icons are (32, 32) and are saved at Data Files/icons

Semitransparent textures (DXT5)

Choosing a texture for this tutorial is not easy but I found one and we shall fill it in a new way that I learned last week. [Shift-B] is the fill bucket but do we need it? I am sure we do and I will often by old habit but... (Dragging something will fill everything which the fillbucket will not, but there is loads of different settings for this as well)

1. Make a new canvas with [Ctrl-N] and make it (256, 256)
Open the pattern window (Single click the icon below)

2. Choose the Bricks and drag them to your new canvas/picture.

Sidenote: We can grab and drop a lot of things at Gimp, like drag and drop a color instead of coosing the fill-bucket first. Very handy, if the Gimp main window is not hided behind another window somewhere and we are in a hurry ---> [Shift-B] instead

Our canvas should look like this now and I want to make one brick semitransparent, not that we usually want that but with this technique, your artistic ability will do the rest. I am sure there are more then one way to do this but...

3. Open the Layer window [Ctrl-L]

4. Press the copy button at the layer window TWICE and delete or hide the lowest layer. Well DELETE IT. I made up my mind. mark it and Press

5. I will refer to Top and Bottom layer now and I mean the 2 active layers now, not the hidden or hope fully deleted one. Hide the top layer with the button so we see what we are doing.

6. Activate the bottom layer.

7. Drag the Opaque (Opasitet) slider to 50.0% or something around there like this:

8. To make it easier to see what we are doing with the top layer as we will work with it now, we create a white layer between them

9. Have the bottom layer still activated and hit the new Layer button at the layer window.

10. Make it white

11. Activate the top opaque top layer now and make it visible by clicking where the eye where earlier
12. Now comes the harder part to cut out that brick that we shall make semitransparent.

Sidenote: Gimp sometimes CTS if it has to much stuff at memory and it crashed for me now. Don't have to many active windows and save often. I have all screenshots active + the tutorial bricks. *grins and kills gimp with help of Taskmanager*

13. Go to your Canvas/picture and hit [ + ] a couple of times (I pushed it 8 times I think)

14. Press or go to Gimp Main Window and click...

15. Activate your canvas and start go around your brick and put dots. Try to make small steps, which gives the best result but if you are in a hurry, make big steps. I zoomed out a bit to be able to create the next screenshot but you should soon have something that looks like this or similar.

16. Activate your gimp window and push this button to create a trail or loop around the brick. What is the right name? Well let the last points be a bit apart and not on top of eachothers.

17. Activate your Canvas and hit [CTRL-X] and it should look like this:

There is a loooose brick in the wall and it will soon fall apart.

18. Get rid of the white layer. Delete or hide it. Deactivate at your canvas by clicking [R] or again.

19. Are we finished? No we are not: Hit [CTRL-M] and merge all visable layers or we cant save as DXT5

Yeapp we are. Save as xcf if you want to keep all layers or as DXT5 dds if you want to use it in game with semitranparens. Not very usefull but who knows? A form of transparent brickwall window maybe?

Detailed Retexturing With NifSkope and GIMP

SickleYield — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:26:32 CST

Introduction

This is a relatively detailed reference tutorial. It's mostly aimed at making things easier for the modder who is tired of looking at retexes where everything is the same shade, including metal parts that shouldn't be. Hopefully, this will allow you to use GIMP and NifSkope to make better retextures with more color variety, higher contrast, and unique additional images. You may not need all the parts of the tutorial at once, but I hope this will serve as a useful resource. I've also covered normal and glow maps, since I haven't seen many resources for those.

Here is a link to another tutorial with more information on transparency than this one has:

GIMP

Important Preliminaries: The Modding Toolbox

1. You'll need a BSA unpacker in order to get at the default game meshes and textures. Get one here: TES4BSA
2. You'll need the GIMP, a powerful image editing program. You can use Photoshop, but GIMP is free and I will be discussing commands and features of that particular program. Get GIMP and the GTK runtime environment (you need it to run GIMP) here: The GIMP
3. You'll need a .dds plugin for GIMP to be able to open the game's texture format. Get it here: .dds plugin for GIMP
4. You'll need a normal map plugin for GIMP to be able to generate normal maps. Get it here: Normal Map Plugin

5. You'll need NifSkope in order to retexture game meshes. Get it here: NifSkope

Choosing the Mesh to Retexture

It's completely up to you. I'm going to use the Leyawiin cuirass for an example, because many mods involve new guard cuirasses. In this case, I open the folder with all my unpacked BSAs in it and open the folder called "meshes," then "armor," then something like "leguardcuirass." Then I should see two folders that say "m" and "f." Since I'm female, I'll start with the cuirass under 'f', but since the same texture goes on both it doesn't really matter. Double-clicking the mesh opens it in NifSkope.

You might see the mesh looking all white, even though the "nisourcetexture" node in NifSkope has a texture there. This is because the texture is in a different folder than NifSkope expects. Rename it to the correct one (BSAS/textures/armor/leyawiincuirass.dds or whatever) and the texture should appear:

Leave that window up on the screen, but don't save yet.

Opening the Texture with GIMP

Now click through the bsas folder until you find textures/armor/ and the leyawiin cuirass. If you set all your filetypes to open with GIMP when you installed the program, just click on it. Otherwise, if you click on it directly you'll get an error message. Right click and choose the option that says "open with" and "gimp-win-remote" to open the file with the GIMP.

Now we're looking at the texture in that lovely blue-gray interface so beloved of open source folks. You might get an error message complaining that the image is a volume map, but just click "OK" and ignore it.

The texture looks nothing like the mesh. There's a good reason for this, and it has to do with UV maps, which are a longer subject for another tutorial. Different parts of this texture are being placed on different parts of the mesh, and there's no connection between where they are in the texture and where they will be on the final project. Some bits of the flat texture will even be reused on more than one part of the mesh. That's why it's good to look at our project in NifSkope as we go, so we can see what we're doing.

Saving A New Texture and Mesh

Use File-Save As to make a copy of the texture with a new name, say MyCuirass.dds in the folder data\textures\armor\YourName. Be sure and type the extension or GIMP won't save it. I usually save with no compression and don't generate mipmaps, and that's always worked fine, but you may have your own preferences in this area. With a very shiny or transparent texture compression can be a good thing.

For more info on the .dds file format and what mipmaps mean, here is a useful section on the Construction Set Wiki: DDS Files

Now go back to your NifSkope window and change the texture path there to where your texture is, instead of the game one. When that's done, save the mesh as something new too, such as data\textures\armor\YourName\mycuirass.nif.

This is important, because if you mess up the original unpacked .nif and .dds it's hard to get them back without unpacking all the .bsas again.

Removing an Emblem: Rectangular Select, Cut, and Paste

Now back to our texture. I chose this one for a good reason - most of its parts are rectangular, so we can easily select them. Right now I'm going to use the rectangular select tool (press r, click and drag) to select the horse emblem on the cuirass front.

We're going to be using rectangular select quite a lot.

Now I use edit-cut to make the selection disappear. There's a hole in the texture now, with a grid showing behind it. That's no problem, because we'll fill it back in. Use the rectangular select again to choose a longer, narrower area on the left side of the hole, then alt-edit-c and alt-edit-p to copy and paste it. Now you can press m to move this selection over to cover up part of the hole. When it's where you want it, go to Layer-Anchor Layer to anchor it in place. Repeat with the right side, and if necessary top and bottom, to fill in the hole completely.

If you want to make this area look more continuous, take a look at the "wrinkles" painted on either side of the new blank space. If you copy them, then drag them down and diagonally, you can make it appear that they continue right down into the selection. This helps to make it 'fit in' and not scream 'Something else was here!' You can also use the smudge command (s key) to blend the edges, but do it sparingly or you'll have a very blurry texture. Remember, any tool you use can be resized in the main gray GIMP area. Click on the little round circle or the little black square, depending what tool you're using, and a drop-down menu will appear with all the possible brushes. There are also different sites where you can download new brushes for GIMP; a Google search will turn up many of them.

When this part looks satisfactory to you, save the .dds. Now go back to NifSkope and look at it. Your new cuirass now has no horse on the front. If you want to, you can easily cut and paste an emblem of your own design onto the cuirass, and you won't have to worry about it being the same shape as the one you cut off.

Isolating Parts of a Texture: Paste as New and Colorize

In order to make different parts of our texture look different, we could just use the rectangular select and color tools, but this method will give us a little more control.

There's a long, narrow piece running down the center of the Leyawiin cuirass. Rectangular select it and copy it. It might take a couple of tries to get that shape and that shape only. Feel free to zoom in and out using the "view - zoom" menus. “View – shrink wrap” can also be useful to avoid wasted space on your monitor.

Now go to Edit - paste as new. The rectangular piece is now in its own file that we can edit. On this new file, go to tools-color tools-colorize. Now you have three sliders, and the rectangle seems to have gone black. The sliders in front of you say something like color, saturation, and lightness. "Color" tells you what color the selection will turn, "saturation" is how intense the color is, and "lightness" is just what it sounds like. Play with the sliders until you get a color that interests you.

Other color tools will allow us to make a selection more than one color or change it in more than one way, but we'll do the simplest way first. If you want to make your color even more vivid, or perhaps a little subtler, you can also use tools-color tools-brightness and contrast. This one also has only two sliders and is very easy to use.

Once the new selection is a new color - I'll make mine red - go to select-select all and then edit-copy.

Now go back to your original texture and click edit-paste. The rectangle is back in your texture. Drag it back over to where you copied it from and paste it over the original bland one. Now anchor it and save the file. Remember, you can always press CTRL+z if something goes wrong.

Look at NifSkope again. That insignificant little strip actually covers several different parts of the cuirass, giving us a nice red lining peeking out here and there. This is why we need NifSkope when any retex program would do - we can see exactly what our changes actually do on the mesh itself.

Note: Parts of the Texture and What to Do With Them

You now have two files open, mycuirass.dds and the unnamed file with the pasted red rectangle in it. If you don't think you'll want it again, you can just exit the pasted one without saving it, and it will disappear forever. If you think you might need to make several different retexes of this cuirass in future, it's not a bad idea to save it separately. I sometimes do this when I know I'll be making several versions of something for a project.

Now let's look at our main texture again. Notice how it's almost all divided into neat squares and rectangles? All textures won’t be this neat, but in this case you can recolor any of these parts separately from the others. You can recolor just the cuirass fabric, and then paste a new emblem onto it. You can give it black metal parts or a shiny belt. This is the answer to all those bad retexes with bizarrely-colored metal on them - cut the metal parts off and tweak them separately.

For those parts that aren't strictly rectangular, here's another method.

Isolating Parts of a Texture: Erase, Color Select, and Fuzzy Select With Layers

If you need to copy a texture part that isn't quite rectangular, go ahead and select it in a large enough rectangle to contain all of it. This will mean it includes part of the rest of the texture, but that's all right, we'll fix it. Copy and paste as new again. Now press shift-e to bring up the eraser brush. Make sure it's a size you can use comfortably for the small section you need to erase. Now use it to erase the part of the texture you don't want. You can erase in a straight line by pressing down the left mouse button, then holding down shift and dragging the mouse. A line should trail out behind it. Click again when you're ready to create the line of erasure.

You can also use this with parts of a texture that aren't remotely rectangular at all. It takes longer, but it's sometimes worth it to get exactly the color effect you want.

If you want to select parts of a mesh that are mostly one color, like the yellow-gold parts of the archmage's robe, you can also use select-select by color and click on that color. Then click select-invert to select everything BUT that color, then edit-cut. Now everything but the yellow you selected is gone. This is also tricky, because any given texture contains many subtle color shades that may seem similar to you but very different to GIMP. In this case, remember that you can select more than one color by holding down shift and clicking away with the color selector.

Fuzzy Selection

You can use the tools-selection tools-fuzzy select to copy and remove parts of a texture that are oddly shaped, but this takes a little practice. (You can also bring it up just by pressing the U key). Remember that if you're using fuzzy select, you can hold down the shift key and keep clicking and dragging to select a bigger area. If you look at the main GIMP window behind your open file, you will also see a slider that you can use to make the selector more or less sensitive in what it picks up.

You can also use fuzzy select in another way in order to create very precise selections with absolutely ANY kind of outline. Here I'll use the example of the lips on the Bethesda facial texture, because I do a lot of race texturing. We'll try giving the plain old Bethesda face red lipstick. That will give it to both sexes, since there aren't separate facial textures for men and women, but never mind, we're not using it in a mod at the moment.

I first open the textures\characters\imperial\humanhead.dds file. This has me looking at a very compressed version of a human face. Save it as something like textures\characters\MyRace\myface.dds. Bring up the NifSkope window with meshes\characters\imperial\humanhead.nif. It already has the default texture assigned to it. Change the texture path to the path of your texture. You now have something that looks like the original Imperial face on the mesh.

Back to our new face in GIMP. Go to dialogues-layers and a little square will pop up showing the layers of your image. Right now there's probably only one. (If there are several, do image-flatten image to get rid of the mipmaps.) Click the button in the dialogue that looks like a piece of paper to create a new layer, and choose "transparency" when that option comes up. This layers dialogue will be very useful to us as time goes on.

Make sure and click on your new empty layer in the dialogue to make it the selected one. The selected layer has a dark bar over it. This is very important, because otherwise it's possible to have two layers visible at once and no idea which one you're working on.

Make sure your new layer is above the other one. There are two little arrows at the bottom of the layers dialogue that let you move a selected layer up or down. Each layer also has a little eye symbol next to it that appears or disappears when you click on it. This tells you whether or not the layer is visible. Make sure both layers are visible, but the NEW one is selected.

The picture doesn't look any different. This is good. It shouldn't yet. Look at the outline of the lips. They are not square, round, or any other shape that would easily lend itself to selection tools. Choose a paintbrush size and set the paint color to black. Now paint over the lips. We're painting in the new layer, remember, so you're not defacing the original texture. Make sure the whole outline of the lips is covered. This may take a couple of tries, because they're such an odd shape.

If it helps, the layers dialogue also lets you change the opacity of a layer. This means you can temporarily make your painted layer translucent in order to see that the edges are in the right place. Make sure you set the opacity back to 100% when you are finished.

Once you have your flat black lips, look at the layers dialogue again. Now make the main layer with the face in it invisible, so that only the new layer can be seen. It should have a blank grid in the background with a solid black lips shape on it. If it doesn't, you may have painted on the wrong layer.

Go to tools-selection tools-fuzzy select. Click on your lip shape until the whole thing is selected. (You can also use select by color for this.) There should be a moving dotted line around it. Click Select-invert. Now go back to the Layers dialogue. Make the lip layer invisible and the original face visible. Look at the texture again. The black shape is gone, but you now have a perfect dotted line outlining your lip section. Click Tools-Color Tools-Colorize. You should now be able to make this lip shape as vividly red as you please.

When the lips are the color you want, do select-none, then go back to the layers dialogue and delete the black shape layer. The delete symbol on the layers dialogue is on the far right and looks something like a mushroom, for reasons fathomable only to those who created it.

Save your new file. Look at it in NifSkope. You now have Imperials with lipstick.

If you think about it, you can discover many other uses for this sort of tool. Working with the layers takes a little practice, but it works much better than the select-copy-erase method I originally recommended when you're working with oddly-shaped areas.

More Advanced Color Tools: Hue/Saturation/Value and Color Curves

Hue/Saturation/Value

I use this sparingly, because often you can get results just as well with color select and brightness/contrast, but there are times when it's quite a powerful tool. You can use this to make changes to the entire picture, or use color select to make changes to just one color.

Let's start with the whole picture. Suppose we're looking at the Leyawiin cuirass again, and we'd like the parts we made bright red to be blue instead. Click on Tools-color tools-hue/saturation.

Now you're looking at a puzzling wheel of colors and three sliders under it. The wheel lets you choose a color to edit in the picture, based on what color value GIMP thinks each pixel has. Right now the wheel is set to "master," which means changes you make apply to ALL the colors in the picture. If we want to affect just red - the color I made the details earlier - click on the red color box, and the circle under it will be filled in.

There's a tiny checkbox in one corner of the dialogue that says "live preview." Make sure it is checked, so you can see what effect your changes will have before you make them "real."

With red selected, try dragging the sliders back and forth. "Value" makes the color lighter or darker, while "Saturation" makes it more or less intense. Turning the saturation to 0 will make all the red look gray, because it won't have any color any more, but it will still have a light/dark value. "Hue" is mostly what we want right now. Drag the slider until the red in the box looks nice and blue. If you have the preview checked, you can see the results on your texture.

You can also see why we have to use this tool carefully. Every single red pixel in the picture is affected, not just one shade. This can result in strange spots or effects that we don't want. Sometimes you can avoid this by using color select to select a specific shade and then using HSV on just that shade.

This also gives us another possible way to change around the entire picture's color scheme. You can click back to master and desaturate the entire picture down to 0, then use the selection tools (as in the above sections of the tutorial) to recolor it one section at a time. This isn't always necessary, but it can help when you've got an overly complex color scheme that doesn't easily lend itself to tweaking with sliders. I’ve used it to make, say, gold-colored Argonian body textures.

Remember, if you want to change everything BUT a particular color, you can click edit-select by color, choose that one color, and then click select-invert. Then do whatever you like. Play around with these things and you may be amazed what you can do.

Color Curves

This is a little more difficult.

I've pointed out one of the shortcomings of HSV, which is that it tends to recolor every shade of a given color. Color Curves lets us change shade by shade, but it's a subtle tool and it takes practice to make it work well.

To work on the entire picture, go to Tools-color tools-curves.

An exponential graph came up. Click on the little box that says "value" and you'll see you have several choices, including the colors and alpha. Just for an example, click on Red.

The curve looks the same. Now click on it. Small points appear. You can drag one particular point up and down to alter one particular shade of red, although the fewer points you have, the more shades are affected. When you drag upward or downward, the color becomes more or less intense, and dragging sideways (which is only slightly possible) tends to alter the shade. Try it and see what happens to your picture. Make sure you have "preview" enabled again.

With a light touch, this allows you to tweak around all the colors in your texture separately. The "value" graph affects how light or dark the colors are, and different parts of it deal with different hues. Dragging the "alpha" may not appear to make much of a change in your picture, but it will make it more or less shiny when you're looking at it in game, so be careful with this.

Again, this is one I use sparingly, but it can provide some complex and subtle effects if you know how to use it.

It also has another benefit: you can save each individual curve. This is useful if you're making the same changes to several different textures, say retexturing a whole suit of armor. Click on "save" and give your curve a useful name, like "leyawiinretexalpha," so that you can tell later where it belongs. Now if you click on "open" from this curves dialogue, it will bring up your saved curves and let you apply them directly to your texture. This can save a lot of time. Just remember that if you have separate curves for red, green, blue, AND value AND alpha, you have to save five curves. It won't save the entire curves dialogue for you.

Conclusion

Retexturing for Oblivion will usually involve things much more sophisticated than recoloring a guard cuirass and adding a new logo. We’ll get to some of those things in more advanced tutorials as we go along. In the meantime, you can now have any item in Oblivion in any color you want it to be. Make sure you add a normal map using this tutorial:

The GIMP

Or this shorter one:

Normal and Glow Mapping

Oblivion Retexturing

SickleYield — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:23:45 CST

This area is for tutorials related to texturing for Oblivion.

Tutorials:

Detailed Retexturing with NifSkope and GIMP

Oblivion Retexturing

Normal and Glow Mapping

Retexturing for Oblivion

SickleYield — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:21:22 CST

Retexturing Items for TES4: Oblivion

First, you will need the following programs and plugins for this tutorial:
Either www.corel.com - Corel PaintShop Pro or http://www.adobe.com - Adobe Photoshop - You'll need one of these in order to edit your texture. GIMP may also be used, I've heard.
The http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html - NVidia DDS Plugin: You'll need this to open and save DDS files in one of the above programs.
http://www34.brinkster.com/ghostwheel/ - TES4BSA - This is to unpack the mesh and texture files.
http://niftools.sourceforge.net/ - NifSkope - Be sure to download the newest version. This will allow you to preview a mesh and rename texture paths.
(Optional) The http://developer.nvidia.com/object/dds_thumbnail_viewer.html - DDS Thumbnail Viewer - lets you see a thumbnail of the texture in Windows Explorer.

This tutorial assumes that you have read the readme's for TES4BSA and NifSkope and have installed them and set them up correctly. This also assumes that you installed Oblivion in the default folders - if you haven't, then substitute your file path for "C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion" down below.

Once you have these, you can start your first texturing mod. Read on, intrepid texturer!

The first step you'll need to take to retexture an item is to unpack the BSA files. You will need approximately 3.2GB's of hard drive space in order to do this. The files you will need to unpack are located in the "C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data" folder and are called "Oblivion - Meshes.bsa" and "Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa". Run TES4BSA to unpack these - instructions on how to do this are included in the download. I won't go in to details, as the program may change in the future.

Once you've unpacked your files (this can take awhile, btw), the next step you'll need to take is to decide what to retexture. I have decided to retexture the "mushroomtoadstool01.nif" file, as I want a bluegreen-toned mushroom to use as a "Luminous Russula" mushroom. Open up the Nif in NifSkope (double click the nif file). You should see something similar to this:

This is how meshes appear in NifSkope. You will need to expand the + boxes in order to see the information on the mesh. Right now, however, most of that info is irrelevant. All you need to find is the texture information. Below is an image showing what you are looking for.

If you are looking at a different mesh, the location of the texture line will be different, but this gives you the basic idea of what to look for.

What you need to do now is find and open the texture file. The mesh gives you the path to the texture file, so now all you need to do is locate it and open it up in your graphics editor. How you texture your object is completely up to you, but for my mushroom I simply recolour the cap portion of the texture. You can see, below, the before and after texture. I'm afraid I wasn't terribly precise and didn't worry about its look - this is just for this tutorial

Now comes the part a lot of people are having trouble with - saving the textures. You need to be sure that the texture has the same name as the mesh, so when I rename my mushroom mesh "VixLuminous.nif", my texture will be named "VixLuminous.dds". Otherwise, the texture will not load. You can create new folders for your texture files, so long as they reside inside of the "Data/Textures/" folder you should be fine. For the main texture, I saved this as the images below show. Note that for alpha enabled meshes, you will likely need to save using the Alpha specific formats in the dropdown menu.

You need to make sure that normal maps are disabled while saving. It should look like this:

Now just save the file! There. Almost done - two more steps to go.

Most objects use a Normal Map as well as the texture. This, too, is something a lot of people are having trouble with. To create a normal map, save a copy of your texture file as you did before, but this time, add a "_n" at the end. In my case, the file will be called "VixLuminous_n.dds". Now, go to resave, only this time when you get the DDS format box, change the Save Format to "DXT5 (ARGB) Interpolated Alpha". Then, click on the Normal Maps button again, and recheck the box up in the corner. This will save it correctly. If you hit the 2D Preview button, you'll see a very weird texture that will probably be neon coloured. This is correct.

And now, the final step - apart, of course, from adding the new mesh to the game, something I won't be covering in here. You need to add your texture file to the mesh.

To do this, open up the mesh again in NifSkope, and go down to the texture path again. Edit it to point to your new texture file, and save. You will not, btw, need to point it tot he "_n.dds" file - it will do this automatically. If it shows correctly in NifSkope, you put the file path in right, if not, check your spelling. Otherwise... you're done! Hurray!

Normal and Glow Mapping

SickleYield — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:20:31 CST

Introduction

Oblivion is different fromnearly allother PC games at the date of this writing in late 2007 in the amazing graphics possibilities it offers. Unlike the last installment in the Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind, Oblivion not only offers the possibility of normal mapping but requires it on every mesh for functionality ingame. Normal maps help to give a texture more dimension and more of a 3d look that is very different from the flat, polygonal look of meshes in older 3d games.

Fortunately for us, with the normal map plugins available for GIMP and Photoshop it is very easy to make normal maps for Oblivion. You can also use a program like Xnormal, but I'm still learning that one myself and haven't written a tutorial for it yet.

Important Preliminaries: The Modding Toolbox

1. You'll need the GIMP, a powerful image editing program. You can use Photoshop, but GIMP is free and I will be discussing commands and features of that particular program. Get GIMP and the GTK runtime environment (you need it to run GIMP) here: The GIMP
2. You'll need a .dds plugin for GIMP to be able to open the game's texture format. Get it here: .dds plugin for GIMP
3. You'll need a normal map plugin for GIMP to be able to generate normal maps. Get it here: Normal Map Plugin
This tutorial assumes you already have a texture for which to make a normal map or glow map. Here is a retexturing tutorial on this site: Better Retextures in GIMP

Why do I Need a Normal Map?

Oblivion is different from Morrowind in that every texture needs to have a normal map. Otherwise your mesh may look black or pink ingame. The normal map can basically be any copied .dds that is renamed to the texture name plus _n, as in mycuirass.dds and mycuirass_n.dds, but that's not the best way to do it.

With a flat normal map, your texture will look flat. With a lumpy normal map, your texture will look lumpy. With a translucent normal map, your texture will be very shiny.

How Do I get One?

The easiest way to do this in GIMP is using the GIMP normal map plugin (download link at the beginning of the tutorial) so make sure you have it installed. Then open your original texture. If the plugin is installed correctly, you should be able to go to filters - map and see a list that includes the word "normalmap." Click on it, and you get another dialogue with sliders.

Again, make sure the preview is enabled. With the default settings, you should see some sort of purplish thing in the window (it won't show a preview of the whole file with this one). This is because the normal map doesn't affect the color of the texture, but it tells Oblivion how much the texture reflects light in order to make it look like it has depth.

The Copout Normal Map

If you just don't want to deal with this, leave the menu up top at "four sample," and the scale at 1, and set the conversion below to "max rgb."

Then click "OK." This should give you a usable not-overly-shiny map. Then save the result as mycuirass_n.dds, or whatever an _n.dds version of your texture would be. Make sure it's in the same folder as your texture, so the game can find it. You don't have to change anything in NifSkope for this to work, it just has to be in the right folder.

The Better Normal Map

Here are some useful techniques.

The Lumpy/Worn Look

To get a look wherein you can see every scratch on a sword and every dent in the armor, try using Sobel 3x3 and setting the scale higher than 1. (Increasing the scale makes the texture's highs and lows more pronounced.) Look at the preview until you get something that looks like you want it. You can use Sobel 5x5 for something really extreme, but I've seldom found that necessary.

This will give a very shiny look as well. If you want it to be dull instead, go to image-flatten image before you save the normal map. You can also save as DTX5 and set your alpha channel completely black. GIMP has a channels dialogue under dialogues - channels. Unselect everything except alpha and do a bucket fill (shift + b) with the color black.

Carved Runes or Bas Relief

If part of a normal map seems to be popping out when you want it to look carved in (or vice versa, for that matter), try checking "invert x" and "invert y" before you hit the "okay" button. This will affect the whole normal map, so you want to be careful in your use of it. Remember, you can cut and paste parts of a normal map just as you can with a texture, so if necessary you can cut off the runes, normal map them separately, and paste them back on.

Smooth and Shiny

Go down to the dropdown that normally says "alpha = unchanged" and change it to "alpha channel = height." Most of your normal map will seem to disappear, with only the highlights standing out. You can get a little more depth by increasing scale, but you'll most often use this one on things that need to be shiny or translucent more than they need to stand out. Some fabrics, gems, and the occasional sword blade or ultrasmooth armor use this setting.

Don't make the mistake of setting "height source" to "alpha" in the dropdown that's just above the "alpha=unchanged" one, as that seems to make everything flatten out.

Glow Maps

Do I Need a Glow Map?

Not every texture will need one, and in some they're a bad idea. In general, glow maps are what you use when you want part of a texture to be very shiny and glowing but not the entire thing. This is used on the glass parts of the glass armor and weapons, for example, which is what gives them their look of glowing depth. It's also used to make parts of the daedric weapons glow in the dark.

I use it myself on weapons and selective parts of armor that I want to look slightly unearthly. This is also a good way to make things show up even at night or in dark places. Fiery runes are another fun use.

How Do I Get One?

You don't need a special plugin to make glow maps, because a glow map is just a black and white picture made from the texture. The very simplest glow map of all is just the original texture that you've completely desaturated (see the Hue/Saturation/Value section) of all color. Then you save it as mycuirass_g.dds and make sure it's in the same folder as the texture and the normal map.

Of course, that won't look very good. The game engine reads the glow map as "white=glow a lot, black=not at all," and gray areas often look wrong. Notice, if you open the glass cuirass glow map (something like glasscuirass_g.dds in your bsas under textures\armor\glass), you see white swirls on black, with the swirls being where the glass parts of the armor are. This keeps the chain mail or leather parts of the armor from glowing, which would just look wrong.

What I usually do first is to select the parts of the texture I want to glow. This is easier than it sounds, since it's usually one color or one set of shades that can be chosen using Edit-select by color. Then I do select-invert to select everything BUT that color or area. Now I go to Tools-color tools-brightness/contrast. Turn the contrast all the way up and the brightness all the way down. Now everything non-glowing is black. Select-invert again to go back to your intended glow areas. Now do the same thing, but turn the brightness UP instead of down. This should make your glow areas all white.

Do Select-none, and now "save as." Name the glow map mycuirass_g.dds, or whatever your texture name is with _g on the end. Again, make sure it's in the same folder as the texture.

I've recently found out that you CAN use a colored picture as a glow map. This can be useful if you want something to be one color and glow a different one. Here's a thread on the Niftools forums with some useful information:Niftools Forum Thread

NifSkope Reminder

NifSkope will only display glow effects under certain special circumstances, so you can see those best in a playtest. Latest versions of the program do somewhat show the effect of the normal map, but not the same way a playtest will.

You may also need to change a materials setting on the mesh in NifSkope to make your glow map show up in the game. Look at the material setting on the glass armor for a good example using the EnvMap2 property.

That's all for now - hopefully more later as I become less ignorant about alpha channels.

SickleYield

Easy Rigging in Blender

raziel23x — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 10:42:42 CST

Introduction

Those who have tried adapting armor or clothing from one body type to another are very familiar with the phenomenon of clipping, in which parts of clothing or body parts stick through each other on movement in a way alien to both flesh and fabric. This can help you eliminate that. It can also be used to get instant vertex weights for your own custom projects from scratch, rather than having to set each vertex group's weight by hand (a tedious, time-consuming process).

Important Preliminaries:Your Modding Toolbox

To do this tutorial you will need:
The latest version of Blender, and a workingknowledge of the program. It's complicated.

3. NifSkope, a powerful mesh editor.

4. The Blender NIF scripts, which allow export of meshes from Blender in the right format for Oblivion. As of this writing I've achieved full functionality with Blender 2.45 plus the 2.21 NIF scripts and PyFFI 0.6.

Total Weight Paint Conversion

Open the file with your mesh in it in Blender 2.43 or later. Your mesh should already be at the origin in the middle of the view, but if not, make sure it is. If you've already done some weighting, I recommend deleting all rigging from your mesh first. This is best done in edit mode. Look for a little box that says "Bip01 Head" or another vert group name. Under it are buttons saying select, delete, deselect, et cetera. Click delete until all the vertex groups are gone. If you do that, save a new copy of your file in case of need. Import the .nif from which you want to copy the weights. Usually this will be a body file if you're making a mesh that shows skin, especially if you're doing it for a modded body. File - import - Netimmerse/Gamebryo. The two meshes should overlap. Don't move them.

Delete any skeletons from the scene now. You'll import another one to use for export later.

Go to edit mode. Select all vertices in your new mesh. Go back to object mode. Right Click on your new mesh. Now hold down shift and right click on the source mesh (the one you want to copy from).

Go to mesh - scripts - copy bone weights. A dialog pops up. Click the button that says "update selected." I use quality setting 3. You can use 4, but it takes longer and I haven't seen much of a difference in results.

Click the okay button.

Wait. This may be a long time depending on how good your CPU and memory are, especially with a higher-poly body mesh like Fantasy Figures (the one I usually work with). You can decrease this time by cutting unneeded polys from the body mesh - i.e. if you just want the lower legs, delete the thighs and pelvis in edit mode or separate them using the p key.
Your screen may show bizarre-looking spots or other artifacts during this process. Don't panic, it's normal.
When you can move anything on the screen again, SAVE your file right away. Then click on your mesh and go to weight paint mode in the dropdown that contains object mode and edit mode. You should see colors where everything was blue before. This means the script worked. You should also see the new vert groups in the edit mode dialogue where you originally deleted the old ones.

Delete the old mesh you copied from. Make sure you get its skeleton, too, in case you missed that earlier.

Delete the skeleton from your mesh and make sure your new mesh is highlighted. Now import a skeleton. I use the settings "realign bone tail roll" and "skeleton only, parent to selected." Reparent by right clicking your mesh and then the skeleton, then ctrl+p and choose "make parent to armature." Trust me, if you don't do this it's likely you'll get errors after export; Blender doesn't like it when you change weight paints on a mesh that's already parented and then exported as .nif. This was true with the old NIF scripts and it's so far apparentlytrue with the new ones, too.

Make sure you press ctrl-A before you export. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS PRESS CTRL A. DO NOT SKIP THIS. I am constantly getting questions from people who don't do this and thus get weird-looking meshes ingame.

Export and playtest. You're done!

Partial Weight Paint Converstion

This is somewhat more useful when you only want to change one vertex group or group of vertices to eliminate clipping. Do not delete any vertex groups from your mesh if you want to do this one. First, import the mesh you want to copy from. Leave it centered over your mesh. Select your mesh and go to edit mode. Select JUST the vertices you want to change weights on. I find the pelvic/thigh region interaction generally causes the most trouble for me with cuirass skirts and so on, so that's what I've selected in this picture. Go to object mode. Click first on your mesh, then click on the mesh from which you want to copy. Choose mesh -- scripts -- Bone weight copy. I use quality setting 3, but that's up to you. Press the "update selected" button BEFORE you click okay. This one may run very fast if you're only doing a few vertices. It's harder to tell if it worked, but you can usually see something like "vertex weights copied in .5504 seconds" if you bring up the little black Python window that's always running in the background when Blender is on. Export and playtest. The nice thing about this method is that it's much faster if you need to do repeated and more specialized tweaking.

Lesson Two: The Joy of NIF and The ol' Hack'n'Slash

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:32:49 CDT

Let's delete some objects!

Like in the Nifskopery tutorial, deleting objects can be useful to either add new objects where they were, or to just not have anything there at all. You'll notice though, that some meshes have everything all smashed together in one object, making deleting bits of it impossible in NifSkope. Well, we've got Blender, so we can yank that mesh into itty bitty pieces!

We'll start out simple and just remove something. We're bringing back our old friend, the Champion Armor mesh. "But wait!" you say, "I don't know how to import a mesh, Kikai!" Well, you didn't think I'd just leave you out in the dark, did you? Pffff :P

Let's Import a mesh!

First, run Blender (or you may even have it open from the last tutorial ;) ). Under File, find Import, then Netimmerse/Gamebryo (.nif) and click it.

You'll be staring at a drectory. This will probably be the default Blender directory for you, but for me, it's my development directory (which, might I add, is a mess). Now we need to go on a hunt for the file we want. I'm assuming you know where it is, but how do you get there from here? Simple, see that ".." in the upper left? That takes you back one directory. Click a directory opens it.

Of course, the file I'm going to be using for this is in a crazy directory in my Oblivion Files folder where I unpack all my BSAs to. Click on the mesh you want once to select it, then click "Import NIF" in the upper right.

We're now looking at the NIF Import preferences. Since the file we're importing is a skinned mesh (that is, it has a skeleton), we're going to want to select "Realign Bone Tail Only" and "Send Bones to Bind Position". Having these selected makes sure you don't end up with some crazy-ass skeleton that wont work in game when you export your mesh. Make sure none of the other buttons are selected.

Looking good? (Hint: looking like this screenshot?) Right! Click that Ok button! Get ready to hurry up and.. wait. Depending on the file, it can take a while to import it, but give it time. It should give you some indication of it's status in that rust-coloured rectangle with "www.blender.org 245" in it. That will change when you're running a script (which importing a NIF is) and have a status bar, plus tell you what it's doing.

Alright! It's finished--holy god those are some huge feet. Yeah, Oblivion NIFs are big in Blender. Use the scrollwheel on your mouse and the middle button to navigate around that huge sucker to get a better look at it. You can also use the 1, 3, and 7, or Ctrl+1, Ctrl+3, Ctrl+7 to get a back, front, side, top, etc view. Go ahead and play with them a bit to get used to it.

Yup, that looks like some Champion Armor. Well, let's get to editing this sucker!

The Ol' Hack'n'Slash

First, we need to decide what we want to edit. There are many objects in this that are already seperated and can easily be deleted, so we don't want to do those since we could do the in NifSkope just as easily. You can do them in Blender if you really feel like it, but that's not what this lesson is about. No, we want to delete bits of it that we couldn't before!

You know what? Lets get rid of all those spikes before someone gets their eye poked out. Right-click a mesh with some spikes on it. Let's do the cuirass first.

Now hit the Tab-key to go into Edit Mode.

Edit Mode is the magical place where dreams come true ...and you can delete stuff :P You could also add stuff, but we're not doing that here. We want to get rid of those dangerous spikes! Zoom in and pan/rotate around as much as you need to while selecting the very tip of each spike with Shift-Right click. Only select the tips. You'll see why in a few minutes.

Some of the spikes (like those on the sides in this picture) are poking away from the rest of the mesh. While you're rotating around, you'll notice more like this. This gives you an oppertunity to use border select. Hit the B-key and Left-click and drag where you want to begin your selection. Release the Left button when you've got everything in your border select that you're wanting. If you bungle this, you can hit Ctrl+Z at any time to undo what you just did. Likewise, if you misclick a vertex that you weren't wanting, you can hit Ctrl+Z (Or shift-right click it again to deselect it while keeping the rest of your verticies selected).

Got them all selected? Good. "But what good does just selecting the tips do?" you ask. Well, because I like being mean and having you click all of those spikes! No, the real reason is I'm using this to illustrate another wonderful feature that saves time in Blender when you're trying to select pieces of an object without selecting the whole thing.

As you were clicking around, you probably noticed that the spikes aren't connected to anything; they're just kind of there, poking out. This means they're individual little bits of the whole object, like little islands of verticies. You only need to snag one vertex on these islands and I'll show you why. Hit Ctrl+L.

:monocle: It selected the rest of the spikes! You just learned to select linked vertecies :) This is handy for deleting free-floating objects, such as a single pauldron if you only want one, or one glove if you're Micheal Jackson.

Let's get rid of these buggers, then! If you recall the first lesson, then you already know how to get rid of stuff. The X-key! This time, though, you get a selection. Selecting vertecies will delete everything (edges and faces) connected to those verticies.

I'm feeling safer already! Let's do it to the rest of the meshes in this object!. Hit the Tab-key again and right-click another object to select it. Repeat what you did for the spikes on the cuirass on all of the other objects. Some of them don't have spikes, so you don't need to touch those. You're free to use Shift-Right click, border select, and Ctrl+L as much as you like.

A kinder, gentler, less spiky Champion Armor.

Let's Export this thing!

Now that we have our hazard-free armor, we want to export it and use it in game! Hit the A-key to select the whole thing.

Now head to File, Export, Netimmerse/Gamebryo (.nif & .kf). Find a nice, snug, warm place to save your new mesh to and select a new name for it (so you don't overwrite the old one.. well unless that's what you want to do, but I don't recommend it.)

I think that's appropriate :P Click Export NIF.

That's the Export preferences page. Let's make sure we have everything setup how we need it to export this bugger. The following buttons should be selected:

Export Geometry Only (.nif)
Force DDS Extension
Stripify Geometries
Stitch Strips
Flatten Skin
Export Skin Partition
And finally, make sure Oblivion is selected.

Now rock that Ok button!

Like Importing, Exporting is destined to take a while, so you just need to wait and let it to its thing.

And there he is in Nifskope! We need to do a couple things here before we can move on to actually seeing this bad boy in action, though. Select the arms and expand the NiTriShpe.

See how the Material Property is named "skin.003"? All skin bits need to have that named "skin". Double-click it to edit, then hit enter once you're done.

Do this for all the skin bits.

Now that those are all sorted, save your NIF. It'll ask if you want to replace it, click OK (this saves over the NIF you exported from Blender, but that's fine).

Let's see what he looks like in game. Reference my Seperating Objects in a Mesh tutorial to see how to put something in the game!

Well, Daeinde isn't too thrilled with it, but at least he wont stab himself accidentally!

Main Page

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:22:59 CDT

Welcome to the Modeling and Texturing Tutorial Wiki

Where helping one another is key to creating a one stop shop for all your modeling and Texturing needs.

The creation of this site is to give the community a place to learn how to create 3D models for type of games that is out there today that deals with 3D Models. The popular Programs out there are Blender, 3D Studio's Max, Autodesk Maya, and Gmax. Also, Nifskope for simple editing of meshes outside of a 3D program.

This site is also for teaching users how to use the many different formats out there such as The Gimp, Photoshop CS, Paintshop Pro, and the many other programs out there to use to design textures for the Meshes for placing new items into the game. Also this site is designed to teach you how to use the many DDS exporter plug-ins and how to transfer each program type formats into the proper format be it for releasing them as a resource or to place into the actual game.

Blender

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:19:41 CDT

Weapons
Armor
Creature
Miscellaneous
Blender for the Beginning Modder

Blender for the Beginning Modder

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:18:17 CDT

Before I begin, I would like to point you to the Blender tutorials already avaliable. I'm only writing these because I was asked to and I'm going to go over Oblivion-specific examples. You will not become an amazing modeler from these tutorials. I'm only going to show how to do very basic things to meshes on your own.

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
- Probably your best source for learning Blender from the ground up

Here is a list of all the hotkeys: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Hot_Keys
- You'll need to learn many of these eventually if you want to become a more advanced mesh-maker, but I will mention all required hot keys when they are relevant.

On to the Lessons!

Lesson One: Introduction and Default Settings

Lesson Two: The Joy of NIF and The ol' Hack'n'Slash

Lesson One: Deleting and Replacing

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:13:54 CDT

You've got an armor piece that you really like, but ugh! Those pauldrons! They simply must go. We need some pauldrons that look more awesome to go with this outfit!

Champion Armor, putting the ugh in ugly!

First, we need to get rid of those nasty beige paudrlons. Select them on the model:

Now you have a NiTriShape selected in the Block List pane to the left, in this case it's called "Arms:0". Well, we want Arms:0 to beat it. Right-click the NiTriShape.

And click Remove Branch in the Block submenu.

Poof! They're gone! You now know how to get rid of unwanted objects in a mesh :) If you wanted to leave it how it is now, you could save the nif in /meshes/armor/champion/m and it would replace the ingame armor, but for this tutorial, we don't want to do that. We want to put some more awesome pauldrons on that sucker!

And what is more awesome than Daedric Armor? Seriously?

You need to open a new window of NifSkope now, which you can do by either going to File, New Window, or simply double-clicking on the mesh you're wanting. If you open a new window, to load a mesh, just simply click the Load button. You should now have two windows open, one with our altered Champion mesh and one with the Daedric Cuirass.

We want those tasty, tasty spiky pauldrons on our Champion armor mesh.
Like we did with the Champion armor, select the pauldrons.

Again, right click the NiTriShape selected, in this case it's called "UpperBody", then select Copy Branch from the Block submenu.

Now go back to your Champion armor mesh. Select the first NiNode called Scene Root. It should be numbered 0 in the tree.

Right click Scene Root and use Block, Paste Branch.

Hey, that looks a lot better---wait. What is that hole??

Damnit! Well, we need to cover that sucker up!

Let's find something to hide that um.. feature with. It's totally a feature and not a flaw. Stop looking at me like that.

There, that's better.

And while we're at it, lets get him a decent pair of pants and some shoes that don't leak!

There, now he's ready to go to Bruma and not freeze his butt off... and he'll be stylish while he's there! You can mix and match pretty much anything. I've used clothing and armor from various meshes in this. If you want to make this for yourself (but I'm not sure why you would, because it's kinda silly looking), I used the Champion armor (obviously), Daedric Cuirass for the pauldrons, Mythic Dawn Armor Female for the arms/hands, Lowerclass 02 pants for the pants, and Mythic Dawn Armor Male for the boots. Really though, just play around and see what combinations you can come up with :)

Lesson One: Introduction and Default Settings

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:52:39 CDT

The very first things you need to do are download Python, Blender, PyFFI, and the Blender NifScripts.

Python: http://www.python.org/download/
Blender: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
PyFFI: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=199269
Blender NifScripts: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149157&package_id=166219

Make sure to install all of these in the order I just gave. Once everything is setup and installed, run Blender.

Here's the window you'll be greeted with upon running Blender for the first time. This is the default setup for Blender and it will always load looking like this. There's a few things I hate about the default settings and I'm sure you guys will hate them, too, so we're going to change them!

First, hover your mouse over the top border under the File, Add, Timeline, etc. It should turn into a two-way cursor indicating you can drag this edge. Do so and drag it down.

Welome to the User Preferences window! Here we can change how Blender behaves and looks. The things I'm going to change here are in the View & Controls area, so click that button.

Now, the things I'm changing are the View Rotation, setting it to Turntable; I'm also going to set Auto Perspective. The last thing I'm doing here is changing the behavior of the middle mouse button. I've set it to Pan View.

The settings should look like this, now. You can also set it to snap to grid for moving objects, rotation, and scaling if you like.

After you've finished changing the settings, slide the Preferences window back to the top.

Now we're staring at three objects: a cube which is selected (as can be seen by the pink border around it), a lightsource (the black dot with a dotted line around it) and a camera (the triangular thing at the bottom). We don't want these since they'll just get in the way and we don't need them to edit Oblivion files, anyway.

Hit the A-key twice, once to deselect the cube, and again to select everything, while your cursor is in the 3D view screen. Now all three objects should have pink around them. Hit the X-key and you'll be asked if you want to delete the selected objects. Hit enter and they disappear :)

We've got everything how we want it now. There's no clutter in the 3D view and the zoom and mouse settings are how we want. We want to make sure Blender loads each time with these settings. If you were to close the program now, it would start up looking exactly like it did the first time.

To save the current settings as default, hit Ctrl+U. This will bring up a box asking "Save user defaults" Hit enter. Now every time you launch the program, you will have these same settings. If you want to change them, remember to save them again! You can also find the Save Default Settings command under File. You'll have to try it for yourself since I can't get a screenshot with the menus in it as Fraps apparently is ignoring them :(

Before I finish this lesson, I'd like to mention how to navigate in the 3D view. Click and hold your middle mouse button to pan around the 3D view. If you hold down Shift while doing this, it will rotate your view to a perspective view. This is handy when you're looking around a mesh and trying to see a hard to reach spot.

Nifskope

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:43:01 CDT

Nifskopery for the Beginning Modder

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:42:18 CDT

I've decided to make a series of tutorials dealing with NifSkope for those who don't really get all the technical jargon and just need a straight, consice description on how to do things. I will be using screenshots directly from NifSkope to show you exactly what to do.

Lesson One: Deleting and Replacing

Lesson Two: Seperating Objects in a Mesh and Getting your Mesh in Game

Lesson Two: Seperating Objects in a Mesh and Getting your Mesh in Game

Kikaimegami — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:40:50 CDT

Stuff you'll need:

A copy of NifSkope, which can be found here: http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope
A multi-object mesh (that is, a mesh with more than one piece in it. This will become more clear later)

Making the Mesh

To start, let's open up our mesh:

For this demonstration, I've chosen the Champion Light Armor because it has tons of objects to play with.

Now we have to decide which parts we want in our new mesh. Why not make some boots so you can wear those fashionable spiky boots with other stuff?

With this mesh, it's easiest to delete all the pieces you don't want. We're keeping the boots and feet (since they'll need to be there or your character will be feetless!). Select an object you don't want anymore and right-click the NiTriShape (or NiTriStrips) branch, then go to Block, Remove Branch.

It's gone!

Do this with everything you don't want to keep. You should end up with just the items you're wanting in your new mesh.

Now that you've got what you want, save it as a new file. Also, make sure to remember where you saved it to! It must be under the \meshes directory, but other than that, anywhere is fair game. I've saved mine to \meshes\armor\championlight\m\boots.nif

Getting Our New Mesh Ingame

Open up the TESCS and either load the mod you're wanting this to be included in, or load up Oblivion.esm to make a new mod. I'll be adding this to one of my random stuff mods. Don't forget to set your esp as the active file if you're adding this to an existing mod!

Once you've got everything selected, click OK.

Since this is adding to the ChampionLight set, I'll be using that set as the base for it. You can do whatever you like, even create a new armor set.

First, I go to the Armor category in the Object Window and select ChampionLight.

Since mine is based off the Champion Light Armor, I'm going to edit that entry to create my new object. Please follow this part very closely, because we are not going to save it over the Light Raiment!

1. Change the Editor ID.
2. Change the name of the object to reflect what your mesh is.
3. If there's a script there you don't want, change it to NONE or whatever script you're wanting on the armor.
4. Change the Weight, Health, AR, and Value to more sane numbers since this is only a piece of the larger object. You can also change or remove the Enchanting at this time as well.
5. Make sure checkbox for Playable is selected. Also, sine these are boots, we wont be needing that Hide Amulet check.
6. Under Biped Object, select only the body parts or objects that this replaces. Since these are boots, only Foot should be selected.

We're almost there! Now you need to change the Biped Models for the new mesh. We only edited the male version, so we only need to change that. If you want to go back through and make a female version of the boots, go for it! Just follow the same process but instead, open the female version at the beginning.

Under Male, click on Biped Model. In the menu that pops up, select your new mesh and hit OK.

Note that you may need to hunt a bit for your mesh, so I hope you remember where you saved it!

Once you've got everything setup in the Armor window how you like, hit OK. This box will pop up once you do:

Select "Yes". This is very important as you want your new object to have a new ID.
Now your new object is all setup nice in your esp :) Make sure to save!
Notice that we didn't change the ground mesh, so if you place it somewhere, it will have the same ground mesh as the original Raiment. You can select a new ground mesh, or make one yourself, but that's not in the scope of this tutorial ;)
If you want to test your new mesh in game, you can drop it in the testinghall cell and then go look for it when you launch your game.