Good God, this honestly might be one of the best looking armor sets that I've ever seen on the Nexus. Absolutely fantastic work amigo, hope to see more from you in the future.
So a head's up; if the armor looks dull in your game compared to the image it's probably because you don't have the correct cubemap texture installed. The armor from this mod uses the cubemap 'steel_e.dds', which is not one of the vanilla cubemaps and it's not included in the mod download either. This cubemap is included in the mod Custom Cubemaps (and Metal Tutorial) which is mentioned by the mod author in the description, and without it the armor looks much duller and has no reflections. Downloading the aforementioned mod will apply the correct cubemap, making it look like it does in the image.
Another thing; this armor won't benefit from any dynamic cubemaps (either from ENB or Community Shaders) by default since it doesn't use a vanilla cubemap and the cubemap it does use isn't in the correct format to have dynamic cubemaps applied to it.
To allow this armor to use dynamic cubemaps you can either do one of the following methods:
1.) Using Bodyslide Outfit Studio you can load the .nif files for each armor piece and change the cubemap that gets applied to be one of the vanilla ones, I believe from there you should be able to export the .nif files and the armor should have dynamic cubemaps applied to them, I'm not very familiar with Bodyslide so forgive me if I'm wrong.
2.) Copy a cubemap texture that is in the correct format and rename it to 'steel_e.dds' and it will apply whatever that cubemap is to the armor. For example, I copied the texture 'sr_steel_e.dds' from the mod Dynamic Cubemaps - Metals and renamed it to 'steel_e.dds' and the armor received dynamic cubemaps. I believe any dynamic cubemap texture will work as (from my understanding) they're all essentially the same texture, a black 1 pixel image, but each with a different name, so it shouldn't matter where you get this texture from, but I'd shoot for one similar to the material you're looking for.
Note; using either of these methods causes the armor to look a little darker compared to how it looks with the intended cubemap. I believe it should be possible to mess with the armor further in Bodyslide Outfit Studio to get it looking closer to the author's intended vision, but I personally prefer the somewhat darker look.
Hopefully this helps someone, if I did a s#*! job explaining something lemme know and I'll try to reword it or explain more in-depth.
Awesome mod by the way Zytaku1604, I appreciate all the hard work you put into this mod and I've really enjoyed using it for my latest playthrough.
This is a tad bit late (because I'm kinda off Skyrim for now) but many thanks for this awesome explanation. I wish I had crafted a better cubemap myself but I'm pretty much a newbie when it comes to texturing hehehe. Thanks for enjoying my mod! :)
6 comments
The armor from this mod uses the cubemap 'steel_e.dds', which is not one of the vanilla cubemaps and it's not included in the mod download either. This cubemap is included in the mod Custom Cubemaps (and Metal Tutorial) which is mentioned by the mod author in the description, and without it the armor looks much duller and has no reflections. Downloading the aforementioned mod will apply the correct cubemap, making it look like it does in the image.
Another thing; this armor won't benefit from any dynamic cubemaps (either from ENB or Community Shaders) by default since it doesn't use a vanilla cubemap and the cubemap it does use isn't in the correct format to have dynamic cubemaps applied to it.
To allow this armor to use dynamic cubemaps you can either do one of the following methods:
1.) Using Bodyslide Outfit Studio you can load the .nif files for each armor piece and change the cubemap that gets applied to be one of the vanilla ones, I believe from there you should be able to export the .nif files and the armor should have dynamic cubemaps applied to them, I'm not very familiar with Bodyslide so forgive me if I'm wrong.
2.) Copy a cubemap texture that is in the correct format and rename it to 'steel_e.dds' and it will apply whatever that cubemap is to the armor. For example, I copied the texture 'sr_steel_e.dds' from the mod Dynamic Cubemaps - Metals and renamed it to 'steel_e.dds' and the armor received dynamic cubemaps. I believe any dynamic cubemap texture will work as (from my understanding) they're all essentially the same texture, a black 1 pixel image, but each with a different name, so it shouldn't matter where you get this texture from, but I'd shoot for one similar to the material you're looking for.
Note; using either of these methods causes the armor to look a little darker compared to how it looks with the intended cubemap. I believe it should be possible to mess with the armor further in Bodyslide Outfit Studio to get it looking closer to the author's intended vision, but I personally prefer the somewhat darker look.
Hopefully this helps someone, if I did a s#*! job explaining something lemme know and I'll try to reword it or explain more in-depth.
Awesome mod by the way Zytaku1604, I appreciate all the hard work you put into this mod and I've really enjoyed using it for my latest playthrough.