This is fantastic! I made a note of it a while back, because I wanted to use it for something, and that use has come. I'm planning to use this mesh with a modified texture for a Zora Sword in my mod Relics of Hyrule Here's a picture of what I have going so far: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/Images/475105
Quite a unique design. I'm liking it! But i would like to give you some advice, if i may; try to keep the amount of vertices somewhere below 5000/6000. I know a model with 10000 verts looks much better than one with 5000. But the lower the amount of verts, the friendlier it is on the game. =] Also, the _EM.dds should be grayscale, where white is full gloss and black is no gloss at all. I always found textures quite tough to grasp, but other than the rgb environment map you seem to have a good grasp of them.
Keep it up! These things will only get better over time. =D
Well this one has over 30k faces :3 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/36221/? and its one of the reasons why i started modding (looks sexy as fk <3) dont get me wrong mate i appreciate every tip i can get so thank you
About the _em.dds can it be that this entire texture is not necessary if i use a Cubemap with the Shadertype in BSLightingShaderProperty set to 1 or do i have a big brainfart here lol?
That does look great indeed! Well, i'm no expert myself, so im not exactly sure what the max amount of verts is that skyrim can handle, but as a general rule "less is better" works pretty well. Good question. Afaik the EM is also added to the normal map's alpha channel, so it might well be unnecessary, but i have never tried this or thought anything of it. I learned my tricks from peeking at the work of alot of other modders (Jaysus and insanity among others) to try and unravel their modding voodoo. They include the EM's, so i just followed their example. =3
I do think that if you dont include an EM, you should also disable the SLSF_Environment_Mapping flag. Otherwise it will look for the map in the texture folder but won't find it (because the nif doesnt contain the path to it) and have some funky display issues.
And i must admit, i posted my previous comment under the assumption that you were quite novice at modding... Looking at your files i realize i was gravely mistaking... My apologies for that.
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I'm planning to use this mesh with a modified texture for a Zora Sword in my mod Relics of Hyrule
Here's a picture of what I have going so far:
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/Images/475105
But i would like to give you some advice, if i may; try to keep the amount of vertices somewhere below 5000/6000. I know a model with 10000 verts looks much better than one with 5000. But the lower the amount of verts, the friendlier it is on the game. =]
Also, the _EM.dds should be grayscale, where white is full gloss and black is no gloss at all. I always found textures quite tough to grasp, but other than the rgb environment map you seem to have a good grasp of them.
Keep it up! These things will only get better over time. =D
About the _em.dds can it be that this entire texture is not necessary if i use a Cubemap with the Shadertype in BSLightingShaderProperty set to 1 or do i have a big brainfart here lol?
I do think that if you dont include an EM, you should also disable the SLSF_Environment_Mapping flag. Otherwise it will look for the map in the texture folder but won't find it (because the nif doesnt contain the path to it) and have some funky display issues.
And i must admit, i posted my previous comment under the assumption that you were quite novice at modding... Looking at your files i realize i was gravely mistaking... My apologies for that.