Omg! A few years back I tried to do this, but all the upscaling software was too complicated for my brain. When I thought I figured it out, for some reason they ended up black.
Hello! So the original mod references a dozen or more textures, and it pulls data from different sections of them for each outfit. This is because it began as a "mashup" mod combining elements from different outfits.
Specific to glove_sock.dds and glove_sockDARK.dds, which are used for the regular and dark arm and leg wraps specifically, the model doesn't pull from the whole texture, only two sections of it.
Here's the original glove_sockDARK.dds for you to see what I mean:
First, notice that it's built on the textures originally included in Skyrim for the Jarl outfit.
Second, notice the blurry new texture that's been pasted in the middle: that's the arm and leg wrap texture. glove_sock.dds is exactly the same as this - they just darkened it to make the dark version.
Except, look down at the bottom to the right - they excluded a bit of leather from the darkening. That's because it's used for the arm band, and would look weird if it was darkened.
From this it's clear that the model is only using those two parts of the texture. So when making my alternate textures, I only created stuff for those two areas. The rest I filled black.
Hence the texture I made:
A professional texture artist working with open permissions could probably do a better job. Unfortunately, I'm not a professional texture artist, and the mod has closed permissions - you can't use the original assets in any way, which is why I had to make these replacement textures from scratch. Hope this all makes sense!
Yeah, I feel you. I avoided using them for ages, and then a few days ago I went "Hell with this, surely it can't be that hard to fix them?"
Then I saw the closed permissions, and winced. I reached out to livtempleton, got no reply, and finally gave up and did it the hard way.
I honestly suspect someone would have fixed this ages ago if the permissions were open. As it is, you have to do a lot more work - you can look at the original textures, but you can't use them as a base, which means to make a template before I even got to texturing I ended up literally counting pixels to figure out where the borders of the used sections lay. That was tedious and painful. I then had to do it all over again for the weird alpha channel, which I probably didn't need to, but I didn't know enough about texturing to say for sure.
What's really funny is that, in retrospect, I needn't have done all that - these two specific textures are direct modifications of textures bundled with Skyrim, and so my understanding of the licensing terms is that you can't change the license to prevent future modders building on them. The rest of the textures that they made themselves, sure, they can restrict those, but not ones that are based on work that's part of Skyrim. So if I'd been thinking clearly, I could have just directly modified those two textures, then pointed to the sections of the EULA that make clear you can't rework Skyrim's textures and re-license them if anyone complained.
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Thank you for this one! You've made my day
Specific to glove_sock.dds and glove_sockDARK.dds, which are used for the regular and dark arm and leg wraps specifically, the model doesn't pull from the whole texture, only two sections of it.
Here's the original glove_sockDARK.dds for you to see what I mean:
First, notice that it's built on the textures originally included in Skyrim for the Jarl outfit.
Second, notice the blurry new texture that's been pasted in the middle: that's the arm and leg wrap texture. glove_sock.dds is exactly the same as this - they just darkened it to make the dark version.
Except, look down at the bottom to the right - they excluded a bit of leather from the darkening. That's because it's used for the arm band, and would look weird if it was darkened.
From this it's clear that the model is only using those two parts of the texture. So when making my alternate textures, I only created stuff for those two areas. The rest I filled black.
Hence the texture I made:
A professional texture artist working with open permissions could probably do a better job. Unfortunately, I'm not a professional texture artist, and the mod has closed permissions - you can't use the original assets in any way, which is why I had to make these replacement textures from scratch. Hope this all makes sense!
Then I saw the closed permissions, and winced. I reached out to livtempleton, got no reply, and finally gave up and did it the hard way.
I honestly suspect someone would have fixed this ages ago if the permissions were open. As it is, you have to do a lot more work - you can look at the original textures, but you can't use them as a base, which means to make a template before I even got to texturing I ended up literally counting pixels to figure out where the borders of the used sections lay. That was tedious and painful. I then had to do it all over again for the weird alpha channel, which I probably didn't need to, but I didn't know enough about texturing to say for sure.
What's really funny is that, in retrospect, I needn't have done all that - these two specific textures are direct modifications of textures bundled with Skyrim, and so my understanding of the licensing terms is that you can't change the license to prevent future modders building on them. The rest of the textures that they made themselves, sure, they can restrict those, but not ones that are based on work that's part of Skyrim. So if I'd been thinking clearly, I could have just directly modified those two textures, then pointed to the sections of the EULA that make clear you can't rework Skyrim's textures and re-license them if anyone complained.
Ah well, at least this way avoided an argument.