oh my god this looks so good... i've never played witcher and don't really care much about what i've seen of the characters enough to download it to my shite laptop but oh my GOD the little shorts i know you're not the one responsible for the mesh but thank you for bringing it the textural justice it deserves!!! it came out so well, it doesn't look overly busy pattern-wise or anything. i really need to find a way to make photoshop elements deal with .dll files, my SO would flip her s#*! if this came in red and black lmao
Thanks a bunch - I tried to get some more of the detail and flair from the Witcher 3 original but (like I did with the Triss DLC dresses) I didn't go crazy with ornamentation and bling. Partly it's just my personal taste, partly because the Skyrim engine really can't do the sort of rendering needed. I do actually intend to make some additional colorways (I have previews of a couple of WIP versions here) There's one there you may like
And if you're looking for an inexpensive way to handle .dds files, give Paint.NET a try... you'll need a separate plugin for it but that's true of every image editor that I've tried. Gimp also supports the format, but I hesitate to suggest it to anyone. Not the most user-friendly piece of software for all of it's power.
Not a dumb question at all - the answer is "sort of." This mod is only one colorway so far, and is really intended to replace either of the two mods listed in the description.
It'll work to replace any one color outfit in VicousSAAR's mod - the others will obviously be unchanged. You'd have to manually rename the meshes and use them to replace the mesh that belongs to one of the color options in that mod.
Textures are trickier - copy the whole texture folder from my mod into ViciousSAARs. Then rename the diffuse map (e.g. b_01_wa__shani_d01.dds >> Markath_d.dds) and move it to overwrite the corresponding texture in that mod.
There's only one color of textures in this mod - the default green and gold. So if you overwrite the Falkreath textures in your mod, when you put on the Falkreath outfit it would use my textures instead of ViciousSAAR's and the outfit would be green and gold. If you overwrote both the Falkreath textures and the Solitude textures, then both of those outfits would be identical: green and gold. Not sure why you'd do that though.
Basically if you like the colors added by the VS Witcher 3 standalone mod then just stick with that mod, or at most replace one color that you don't like with these. I may make different color and material variations in the future, but not enough to replace all of the options that ViciousSAAR's mod adds.
Sorry, but I don't actually make armor mods - I don't really have any talent at modelling or even porting armors from other games. If someone else brings the armor you're looking for into Skyrim though, I'll retexture it if I like it
I was always baffled by what kind of voodoo magic TW3 uses in its game shaders to make everything look so fantastic when the textures themselves are not that high quality. Same goes for more than just outfits - houses, objects, etc. Especially hair. Ported hair looks completely terrible outside of TW3.
That being said, this is definitely an improvement! The same should be done for most of teh ported TW3 stuff imo - aside from Oaristys Ciri Outfit, as she spent a lot of time overhauling that one too I believe. :p
I'm actually packaging up my edit of zzjay and Undeadgoblin's Standalone Witcher 3 Retextures right now - I've retextured the default Yennefer outfit and all seven variants of the Triss DLC dresses and default outfits. I should have them uploaded shortly.
I'm also just getting started on Ciri's default outfit, working through some ideas for materials and colors before starting the real work. Oaristys and Pfuscher both did good work on their versions of those mods, but I think there are a few areas that I can improve on... and I do have a few recolors of this outfit planned as well, including a black version piggybacking off of your recolor. That's actually the reason that I like working on the TW3 armors and clothes right now - the baseline material is terrific and the Skyrim mod community has already done a lot of great work on top of it. All I'm doing is polishing them up a little by comparison.
The end goal is to release one big omnibus mod that combines all of the Witcher 3 female armors and clothes (and probably the TW2 Triss sets), but who knows if I'll follow through on that. So far my tendency has been to retexture just the stuff that I use and move on to something else
As far as why the Witcher stuff looks so much better in the original game game, it's just down to the engine and the rendering system. TW3 uses what's called PBR - Physically Based Rendering - to simulate the way that light interacts with different materials. It's not so much that the Witcher textures aren't high quality, it's just that you can only really import about half of the maps that you'd need to get the full effect. There just aren't equivalent shaders or textures in the Skyrim engine to things like roughness or albedo or metallicity, so you end up having to approximate a lot of things with environment maps and normals and by baking some details into the diffuse that you'd rather have the GPU figure out. It's especially noticeable on things like Yennefer's velvet jacket - I actually gave up and made it tooled leather after trying about a dozen tricks to make it actually look like velvet. I'll take a stab at the "correct" look again but so far I haven't found a way to do it that doesn't look awful.
Haha speaking of my Shani recolor - I should probably update that. My texturing has improved quite a bit since my Skyrim days. But I'm so unorganized that switching between Fallout 4 and Skyrim seems like switching worlds to me, haha!
But, I've been thinking about coming back to Skyrim modding for a little to port some more TW3 outfits. Specifically some of Geralts nicer armors. I also have a Novigrad house mesh that I spent hours upon hours porting and never did anything with it - so I'll probably do that at some point too. XD
Anyway enough about me going off topic ahaha. But yeah the TW3 ports are very nice but they do need edited a little to match up with the TW3 quality. For example when I did my Cerys follower, I edited quite a few things about Cerys' armor texture that didnt quite match up with the original outfit, even though it was using the original texture. Thats another thing thats odd about TW3 - the colors in their textures dont usually match up with the ones you see in game, like Triss for example. In game you see the greenish/blueish part of her outfit (not sure what to call it lol) it appears blue, DEFINATELY some type of blue color. But the base ported texture is green. And not bluish green either - like literal plain green. It's quite odd.
And yeah I totally agree, you dont get access to all the complete assets for the outfits to work properly - I've actually been porting Olgierd Von Everec's armor for Fallout 4, and I had to go through quite a bit of editing and mesh cutting to get it to look acceptable. The jewels that he wears on his neck needed a enviromental map badly. So i had to cut them out of the armor separately. Also had to edit specular values and all that. I'll probably bring it to Skyrim at some point too, since I think the body types are still similar. :p
Anyways! Enough ranting hahaa. (Sorry I tend to go on for ages when talking about something involving The Witcher) I hope to see what you'll be doing in the future!
Believe me, I uderstand - TW3 is probably the most impressive game I've ever played and I have a tendency to rave about it at length as well. Almost as much as I complain about Fallout 4, in fact
So obviously I'd love to see some of the male armors brought over - as well as Iris's dress and veil. I just don't have the patience to learn how to do it all myself. Let me know if you need a hand with textures for any of it.
Thanks! I have a few other Witcher 3 outfits in the works that I'll be uploading as well, and a few non-Witcher sets that I'll probably tackle after those are done.
And yep, that's a character that I built using Enhanced Character Edit - my take on Lisette. I intend to make her a standalone follower at some point.
26 comments
i know you're not the one responsible for the mesh but thank you for bringing it the textural justice it deserves!!! it came out so well, it doesn't look overly busy pattern-wise or anything. i really need to find a way to make photoshop elements deal with .dll files, my SO would flip her s#*! if this came in red and black lmao
And if you're looking for an inexpensive way to handle .dds files, give Paint.NET a try... you'll need a separate plugin for it but that's true of every image editor that I've tried. Gimp also supports the format, but I hesitate to suggest it to anyone. Not the most user-friendly piece of software for all of it's power.
It'll work to replace any one color outfit in VicousSAAR's mod - the others will obviously be unchanged. You'd have to manually rename the meshes and use them to replace the mesh that belongs to one of the color options in that mod.
Textures are trickier - copy the whole texture folder from my mod into ViciousSAARs. Then rename the diffuse map (e.g. b_01_wa__shani_d01.dds >> Markath_d.dds) and move it to overwrite the corresponding texture in that mod.
Basically if you like the colors added by the VS Witcher 3 standalone mod then just stick with that mod, or at most replace one color that you don't like with these. I may make different color and material variations in the future, but not enough to replace all of the options that ViciousSAAR's mod adds.
And I really love your character too, hope to see her as a follower soon!
That being said, this is definitely an improvement! The same should be done for most of teh ported TW3 stuff imo - aside from Oaristys Ciri Outfit, as she spent a lot of time overhauling that one too I believe. :p
I'm actually packaging up my edit of zzjay and Undeadgoblin's Standalone Witcher 3 Retextures right now - I've retextured the default Yennefer outfit and all seven variants of the Triss DLC dresses and default outfits. I should have them uploaded shortly.
I'm also just getting started on Ciri's default outfit, working through some ideas for materials and colors before starting the real work. Oaristys and Pfuscher both did good work on their versions of those mods, but I think there are a few areas that I can improve on... and I do have a few recolors of this outfit planned as well, including a black version piggybacking off of your recolor. That's actually the reason that I like working on the TW3 armors and clothes right now - the baseline material is terrific and the Skyrim mod community has already done a lot of great work on top of it. All I'm doing is polishing them up a little by comparison.
The end goal is to release one big omnibus mod that combines all of the Witcher 3 female armors and clothes (and probably the TW2 Triss sets), but who knows if I'll follow through on that. So far my tendency has been to retexture just the stuff that I use and move on to something else
As far as why the Witcher stuff looks so much better in the original game game, it's just down to the engine and the rendering system. TW3 uses what's called PBR - Physically Based Rendering - to simulate the way that light interacts with different materials. It's not so much that the Witcher textures aren't high quality, it's just that you can only really import about half of the maps that you'd need to get the full effect. There just aren't equivalent shaders or textures in the Skyrim engine to things like roughness or albedo or metallicity, so you end up having to approximate a lot of things with environment maps and normals and by baking some details into the diffuse that you'd rather have the GPU figure out. It's especially noticeable on things like Yennefer's velvet jacket - I actually gave up and made it tooled leather after trying about a dozen tricks to make it actually look like velvet. I'll take a stab at the "correct" look again but so far I haven't found a way to do it that doesn't look awful.
But, I've been thinking about coming back to Skyrim modding for a little to port some more TW3 outfits. Specifically some of Geralts nicer armors. I also have a Novigrad house mesh that I spent hours upon hours porting and never did anything with it - so I'll probably do that at some point too. XD
Anyway enough about me going off topic ahaha. But yeah the TW3 ports are very nice but they do need edited a little to match up with the TW3 quality. For example when I did my Cerys follower, I edited quite a few things about Cerys' armor texture that didnt quite match up with the original outfit, even though it was using the original texture. Thats another thing thats odd about TW3 - the colors in their textures dont usually match up with the ones you see in game, like Triss for example. In game you see the greenish/blueish part of her outfit (not sure what to call it lol) it appears blue, DEFINATELY some type of blue color. But the base ported texture is green. And not bluish green either - like literal plain green. It's quite odd.
And yeah I totally agree, you dont get access to all the complete assets for the outfits to work properly - I've actually been porting Olgierd Von Everec's armor for Fallout 4, and I had to go through quite a bit of editing and mesh cutting to get it to look acceptable. The jewels that he wears on his neck needed a enviromental map badly. So i had to cut them out of the armor separately. Also had to edit specular values and all that. I'll probably bring it to Skyrim at some point too, since I think the body types are still similar. :p
Anyways! Enough ranting hahaa. (Sorry I tend to go on for ages when talking about something involving The Witcher) I hope to see what you'll be doing in the future!
So obviously I'd love to see some of the male armors brought over - as well as Iris's dress and veil. I just don't have the patience to learn how to do it all myself. Let me know if you need a hand with textures for any of it.
I'm also in love with that face. Did you make it yourself? If so well, hats off!
And yep, that's a character that I built using Enhanced Character Edit - my take on Lisette. I intend to make her a standalone follower at some point.