A few questions about when we should *not* use mipmaps:
Should we avoid mipmaps on any textures used exclusively in first person when the NIF specifies a different third person/world texture? Mostly thinking about guns.
Do effects like explosions or flames get mips?
Should weather/climate textures get mips? Sun, clouds, sky, moon… I have a hunch that mips on third party sky assets give rise to the “grainy” sky issue ppl have.
To answer all of this, we have to first ask: What are mipmaps and their purpose? Mipmaps are a series of pre-computed, smaller versions of a texture image. Their purpose is to provide a more efficient way of rendering textures at different scales and distances within a 3D scene. Now that this out of the way, we can answer all your queries with this criteria: 1) Do they have a texture? 2) Is it plausible for them to appear at a different distance and scale?
For effects and decals, yes!
For weather and climate textures, it might not appear plausible at the first glance that you can view these skyboxes at different distances. However, you can! Take for example, the view from the Lucky 38 or a high-rise villa in the Sierra Madre compared to a ground level view.
For first person textures, it gets a little more complicated. 90% of the time, you probably won't see your FP mesh at a different distance, but it might occur in some animations, such as a 'tossing away' animation. It's generally still a good practice to generate mips for FP textures; it makes them flexible and future-proof, allowing FP textures to be reused for other things without having to go through the trouble of generating mips all over again.
Thanks for this absolutely indispensable guide! I have a question, which is do you make all your models from scratch? Or do you use anything from the base game models? Obviously we have no high poly models. And the vanilla meshes are some sort of crime against nature as-is. Mesh reconstruction of the vanilla models takes a lot of time. It's faster to remodel a lot of things. However, I'm curious what your general workflow is regarding the modeling portion. No need to go into explicit detail, just a high level overview would be helpful. Thank you though, this is amazing!
Honestly, it really depends! First I have to determine how salvageable the mesh is (most aren't). I'd usually start from scratch if:
1) the textures have significantly much more details, especially implying a silhouette unlike the mesh. You can see this in the telephone, whose rotary dial wasn't even modeled but painted on 2) The curves and edges are far too sharp, and fixing them by beveling would take longer than simply starting from scratch. The telephone, again, is an example
Usually, i'd only use parts of the original mesh as a starting point for a large surface area, such as the organic-shape of the suburban coffee table, or a flat surface such as the TV, and even then, I'd dupe (duplicate) that face and seperate it as a plane, and go from there for an accurate mesh size. Hope that helps!
This has been a huuuuge help since starting to use Substance Painter. The environment masks always end up being the trickiest but now I'm glad there's explicit instructions for RTR support. This guide, and you, are awesome!
Yep, although i might model in 4.0 and just handle the .nifs in 3.6 due to all my addons being on 4.0 lol. I hope to create a companion video guide for this one and texture creation 101 as well.
dope, i created a weapon from scratch in blender 3.3 and tried to export with bare niftools made by korma but either i missed something or it was not possible, it would be really cool of You if You'd make that guide
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Should we avoid mipmaps on any textures used exclusively in first person when the NIF specifies a different third person/world texture? Mostly thinking about guns.
Do effects like explosions or flames get mips?
Should weather/climate textures get mips? Sun, clouds, sky, moon… I have a hunch that mips on third party sky assets give rise to the “grainy” sky issue ppl have.
- For effects and decals, yes!
- For weather and climate textures, it might not appear plausible at the first glance that you can view these skyboxes at different distances. However, you can! Take for example, the view from the Lucky 38 or a high-rise villa in the Sierra Madre compared to a ground level view.
- For first person textures, it gets a little more complicated. 90% of the time, you probably won't see your FP mesh at a different distance, but it might occur in some animations, such as a 'tossing away' animation. It's generally still a good practice to generate mips for FP textures; it makes them flexible and future-proof, allowing FP textures to be reused for other things without having to go through the trouble of generating mips all over again.
Hope that helped!1) the textures have significantly much more details, especially implying a silhouette unlike the mesh. You can see this in the telephone, whose rotary dial wasn't even modeled but painted on
2) The curves and edges are far too sharp, and fixing them by beveling would take longer than simply starting from scratch. The telephone, again, is an example
Usually, i'd only use parts of the original mesh as a starting point for a large surface area, such as the organic-shape of the suburban coffee table, or a flat surface such as the TV, and even then, I'd dupe (duplicate) that face and seperate it as a plane, and go from there for an accurate mesh size. Hope that helps!