Texture and Normal Map sizes

[Dante2904]

I have no clue where to ask this, but the STEP community seems to have much better technical advice than Nexus.

 

My first mod attempt...hair... I don't think apachii hair is lore-friendly nor can I find hair mods other than AOF that is suitable for my STEP installation, so I am attempting to rebuild the vanilla textures and normals accordingly. BTW, color adjusting is a beast to match vanilla theme :( - I don't want hair to "pop" nor be unnoticeable, very hard to balance.

 

What are the proper/most efficient sizes to export for the textures in-game? My RAWs are 4096x4096 and im working in 3ds Max (visual review), Zbrush (painting), and PS6 for minor adjustments and dds conversion. I do not think exporting 4096s is of any use at all, but I use 4k for fine details and renders.

 

Eventually I want to actually remesh the vanilla hair (same style, more detail, minimal poly counts). That requires a lot more experience and knowledge though, so I am just working with textures atm.

 

 

WIP shot - I dont know why max nitrous drivers won't display high res :( these are 4096 but viewport display is stuck at 512 unless I revert back to d3d which is slow.

 

Interestingly enough I am having a really hard time figuring out which texture goes to which hair mesh - there has to be a easy way to find out what is mapped to what.

[Aiyen]

Since it is models that need to be looked at up close I would say 2k. 4k is always too high, just use too much memory compared to quality.

Try with various compressions so you stay below 5Mb per texture file. Depending on how many compression artifacts you get then just increase the compression.

 

I know some people are going to scream about 1k textures etc... but for stuff that you are going to look at up close then 1k is cutting it really close in terms of quality at that view distance. At least that is my opinion!

 

Looking forward to seeing your work as it unfolds! I also think that hair is the current eye sore of the character mods.

[Dante2904]

Thanks Aiyen,

 

I exported as 2K into Skyrim/WB and it looked pretty nice, but still a lot of tweaking to do. I am really just working on Hair02 and Hair15 atm in order to establish a workflow.

 

The 2K textures with DXT5 compression comes out to 5.33MBs each :( for normal and diffuse. Can I remove the alpha channel from the diffuse? I haven't seen anything that says it needs to retain that channel for diffuse textures. - note: NO, that seems to be the actual alpha, i didnt realize the hair had transparency ingame until I didn't have it lmao.

 

There were MAJOR issues with spec because spec is stored in the normal's alpha (thats way new to me lmao). Though the normal map doesnt appear to do anything for some reason and finding a spot in-game to take screenshots that is well-lit = stupidly difficult for some reason.

 

The images below are of me detailing hair in ZBrush from max and adjusting my remeshed haircap's (Hair02) UV layout. I doubt I can replace meshes anytime soon, that seems really difficult, but the meshes will all have my own revamps because they are just HORRIBLE (overlapping faces and unwelded verts... ZB don't tolerate those too well) so I'll eventually have to find a tutorial on how to import mesh replacers into Skyrim. The density on meshes aren't much different, just have been retopologized and some have had small adjustments or slightly more planes for detail. I would love to use about 2.5K polys per hairstyle, but I am not sure what the impact would be or even what the limitations are atm.

 

Disregard the face texture, that was a quick remake so I had something to look at lol. The hair is really shiny in ZB because of how I have it lit, but that spec wont take hold in Skyrim, so it wont be so wetishly shiny - and I dun wanna export my normal's alpha just for rendering my diffuse :(

 <-- My UVs and remesh, no testing in ZB yet, the idea here is to have cleaner diffuse warping and seems to work well in my revamps.

 

 <-- It isnt super noticable, but this is why I dont wanna use vanilla meshes - due to the way these import or just how crappy they may be all-together (idk), I can't adjust the uvs properly in any way, shape, or form that is efficient.

 

 No worries, I havent added dirt or dirt clumping yet, much more de-glamorizing to do lol. There is no normal applied to the face so no fine detailing; makes my light rig have her looking like plastic atm. - no plans on revamping vanilla skin textures/normals until I learn more about meshes though, that's just a render texture (not a fan of the nudes, so I need to adjust the undergarment geo for the "vanilla" meshes and Im not sure how to get that back into skyrim yet).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edit: New WIP - adjusting spec, opacity, and normals. Lots of work to do on braids and saturation. Assuming everything is properly setup and I do DX compression correctly, this should be what it looks like in game, but I am far from done and nowhere near compression stage (these are not the 4k RAWs, these are 2k).

 

 

quick composite of a bunch of shots in-game trying to find out what needs work - alphas... i just cannot use the vanilla alpha at all heh, didn't want to build a new alpha :( but it is going to be required. There is just not enough detail in it to look decent. I am not sure how much to tweak the spec, but it's not quite popping like I expected, only REALLY noticeable in the flagon with Sapphire.

[Aiyen]

5.33Mb is what you can get from DXT5 compression. It is still fair. You can always try to make a 1k version then it should be about 1.33Mb. If quality scales well when downsizing then no reason not to do it. No point in having large resolutions without any reason for it.

Overall it sounds like you got your work cut out for ya! :)

 

What you have done so far makes what I have done in texture editing look childish hehe. But we all have to start somewhere!

[Dante2904]

I am losing a lot of detail in the diffuse map's alpha when I compress as 1k, but it's because of the texture space being horribly used - I have to remesh these, every single one of them, just unusable geo/UVs.

 

However, the haircap won't be flat like it always has been anymore. The original file's alphas were using the hair ends pattern as the roots and the UVs weren't even sitting properly on the alpha's detail.

 

This is far from done - its just a shot of the haircap (no detailed strands), but I have been tweaking my alpha for hours and this is what I am talking about:

 

 

 

I will have to repaint the diffuse accordingly, obviously, but I think it is going to look pretty nice in the end. Still a lot of work to do on the alphas and I have a decent mesh tutorial I might can utilize (I can make primitive alpha or spline hair, it's not that, it is getting whatever I made back into skyrim). I still have a lot of alpha work to do, but the nice thing is that for any straight variants, I can just reuse the brush I am building.

 

The alpha there is an example of why I just cant stand the vanilla UVs, that seam should have been welded... so I am going to weld it and reUV/remesh all hairs and pray I can get the meshes replaced with mine.

[Vond]

What about the improved vanilla hair-meshes available here? https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/28491/

[EssArrBee]

It only covers five hairs, 3 female and 2 male, so far. I'd say it's one to watch when it is more complete.

[Dante2904]

Hes not using the vanilla meshes either. At this point I think I should prob just use my own meshes because there is a really strong correlation between my meshes and my textures. 

 

From what it looks like, hes using the same textures with new meshes - kinda like what I am doing but im spending mucho time on the alphas, thats whats causing those jagged edges in each of the strands.

 

I am currently redesigning the haircaps based on where the hair's part exists (visible roots), then rebuilding the planes over that - I think this will have the most realistic/immersive impact. Note that I am just doing layout on this atm, I do styling in ZBrush.

 

 

It appears that you cant use greyscale alphas, I havent confirmed, but I think I can only go 000000 or ffffff. Still very early in first phase, but once the first hair mesh is complete with the texture file, the rest shouldnt be too hard.

 

If I can figure out how to add new styles (sorta like apachii, and apply them to npcs), I want to use the curly and frizzy hair variants that don't seem to be used. Those will require additional non-vanilla meshes. Of course Ill be recreating those textures as well, but sad that we dont see many (if any) NPCs or hairstyles that use those maps.

 

At that point I might have to find a partner, because I don't want to use CK at all. 

 

Animating these is a dreamshot and something for another time, but man I wish I could lol (simple in max, prob impossible in skyrim).