The problem with this game's original textures is that they vary tremendously in quality. Some of the textures are actually quite good and the reason they look terrible has to do with very poor specular and normal map textures which are really low resolution or are simply prepared in a way that's less than ideal. The ME2 full body armors are examples of this. They are really good textures but their normal maps in this game are garbage. Their specular maps are hit and miss.
Some textures are pretty simple. You can upscale it, run a few filters against it and get great results. Others, you can tweak a bit, blend some other textures such as metal patterns etc. onto them and get a decent result. Other textures are so bad that you effectively have to build a new texture and you only work over a layer of the original and use it as a map. Some of the ones I have done didn't take a whole lot of work to improve. They responded very well to new specular or normal maps and simple upscaling and a few filters being run on them. Others like the N7 Defender are almost entirely new textures where nothing remains of the original texture that hasn't been modified in some way. My M8 Avenger is an entirely new texture. If there is 5% of the original texture on that map I'd be surprised. My Revenant is the same way.
Another issue comes down to how the texture is laid out and how bright it is. Ashley and Liara's main FemShep style armors are pretty easy to work with despite the poor quality of the original textures. However, the Defender armor was a massive pain in the ass to do. I'm still not happy with it. That thing is an absolute mess in terms of quality, darkness and the layout of the thing. Parts of it are symmetrical while others aren't. Some textures have alpha channel layers in the specular map which require editing to remove specific properties. The Defender armor is basically 100% reflective by default, even in places where it shouldn't be.
Hi. I just wanted to say I love your texture mods. Just when I'm about to start a new run for ME3 you release all these awesome textures and they look amazing. Do you think you could make some retextures for the Cerberus troopers, if it's not too much trouble ? And thank you for making these :)
I'm very flattered, but I'm still figuring out how to do armours. At the moment I'm trying to do the Phantom, but so far I'm not very satisfied with the result. Smarteck has done some great retextures of some of the Cerberus guys, though, including the assault trooper. His pack also contains a texture for the Atlas, which I didn't like, but the rest are very good: https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffect3/mods/35
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Some textures are pretty simple. You can upscale it, run a few filters against it and get great results. Others, you can tweak a bit, blend some other textures such as metal patterns etc. onto them and get a decent result. Other textures are so bad that you effectively have to build a new texture and you only work over a layer of the original and use it as a map. Some of the ones I have done didn't take a whole lot of work to improve. They responded very well to new specular or normal maps and simple upscaling and a few filters being run on them. Others like the N7 Defender are almost entirely new textures where nothing remains of the original texture that hasn't been modified in some way. My M8 Avenger is an entirely new texture. If there is 5% of the original texture on that map I'd be surprised. My Revenant is the same way.
Another issue comes down to how the texture is laid out and how bright it is. Ashley and Liara's main FemShep style armors are pretty easy to work with despite the poor quality of the original textures. However, the Defender armor was a massive pain in the ass to do. I'm still not happy with it. That thing is an absolute mess in terms of quality, darkness and the layout of the thing. Parts of it are symmetrical while others aren't. Some textures have alpha channel layers in the specular map which require editing to remove specific properties. The Defender armor is basically 100% reflective by default, even in places where it shouldn't be.
Do you think you could make some retextures for the Cerberus troopers, if it's not too much trouble ? And thank you for making these :)
https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffect3/mods/35
Thank you for your submitted pic.