May I offer a piece of critique? I really like the lock retexture, but I don't like the darker ring around it now. I can't tell what it's supposed to be. Is it a shadow? Is it a depression? It just looks odd. I would like it if it still had the 3D silver ring, or if the outer ring was completely gone -- but the half-way sorta-gone sorta-not just seems odd to me. Any chance we could get an optional download with the silver ring from vanilla still there, and perhaps another optional download with all traces of the outer ring gone? Just a request, I don't mean to be hyper critical. I love it when modders take mundane things and make them interesting. Really nice work!
Honestly I tried forever but couldn't figure out where that extra texture is coming from...I think it's from the vanilla lock. I've tried spec maps and doing different cutout alpha channels but I can't seem to get rid of it...if you know where I can find that file I would love to get rid of that thing I hate it too
It's the normal map lol. You need to provide a normal map - that's where the fake ring around the lock is coming from as well as the holes and bunch of other stuff not actually in your diffuse. The mesh also is playing a roll in this.
okay looks like the mesh itself has some detail that you can't get rid of just by fixing the normal map. also, the SMIM mesh has an even more pronounced ring. these are the meshes i could find: meshes\_byoh\clutter\house_crafting\lock01.nif <--- this has absolutely NO mesh detail fyi meshes\interface\lockpicking\lockpicklock01.nif <---this is similar to the SMIM mesh with a bit of detail but it's not nearly as deep
if you want to use this texture, basically you're gonna have to change the mesh, since your texture just isn't compatible with the mesh. your diffuse would look okay on the BYOH model but it's not gonna look good on the interface mesh, since it's drawing fleur-de-lis shapes on screws and has no diffuse texture for the actual physical ring. the ring should obviously have a different material since it represents a distinct object. if you're not planning to provide a new mesh that's built for your texture, i would recommend working within the constraints of the existing mesh. you could even just grab the smim texture and place it on a temporary layer above your texture, so you can check it while you're working to see if your texture fits the edges of the shape. regardless of how nice and detailed it looks on a 2D plane, in-game it looks like there's a rendering error or something, so it's definitely worth fixing
you're missing the normal map, idk if that's unintentional or what but you can see it pretty clearly in the screenshots. in other words the bumps from the vanilla normal map are still showing even though the intended topography is totally different
Yea, the odd thing is even when I used a map, it looks exactly the same. It didn't follow the name structure (with the _n.dds) like textures normally do...do you know where I can find this normal map file?
Edit: nevermind I was looking at the wrong place...I did try the map but it looks really bad and better without the map oddly
Actually I just tried with normal map and it looks too glossy and kind of ruins the look - oddly enough my design looks way way better without the map so I'm going to keep it as is for now.
So, It is shiny because you need to add an alpha channel to your normal map. If you still don't quite grasp what that is, take a look the vanilla lock's normal map. You will see how it has a pink overlay. That's the alpha channel. That's what you need to add over your own normal map to keep it from being shiny af but keeping all the detail of your diffuse. Your texture has a ton of detail that isn't coming through because you're using the vanilla lock normal map. That's why there's weird details - like the holes in places where there are no holes at all in your diffuse. Just friendly advice!
the naming scheme doesn't actually matter. that's something bethesda does but you can name a normal map anything you want. doesn't matter what the suffix says, that's really just for human readability. if you're trying to change the normal map by just replacing the blahblahtexture_n.dds file in your data folder, you're gonna end up wasting a lot of time.
first, find the mesh. i don't remember what it's called but you can get BSA archive extractor and use its search function to find it. unpack the mesh and open it with nifskope. expand the tree structure on the left column until you find BSLightingShaderProperty, then expand that to find BSShaderTextureSet. if you click that you'll see that's where all the texture paths are defined. so you can see what the normal map is called, but more importantly you can *test* different textures by just typing in a different path. i'm like 90% positive that those details are not in the mesh. bethesda started from a very high poly mesh built in 3ds max, then calculated the normal map from that mesh, then massively simplified the mesh, eliminating polygons and making it render a lot faster.
obviously the normal map has to be an actual normal map. a normal map is very different from a diffuse map, its channels are mapped to dimensions rather than to colors, transparency, or other effects. the purpose is to mimic actual 3 dimensional shading and lighting, but it only does this to save computational resources, not to avoid having to actually make a 3d model. it's of course possible to draw a normal map by hand, and you can inspect other normal maps to see how you'd go about doing that. it works better with more organic/chaotic textures than with something like this, though. in this case the normal map is not just trying to add texture to the surface, it's trying to mimic the topography of a more complex model. but your texture makes this a bit easier, you just need to get rid of the vanilla normal since it's adding all these shadows of little surface features that no longer exist in your diffuse. i would recommend reading a bit about normal maps so you get some idea of what you're trying to do. you're trying to 'paint' depth onto each channel to tell the engine where to draw shadows. this is a pretty easy one since there's not that much depth overall, you could probably get good results just automatically generating the normal from the diffuse. and if the results aren't what you wanted, you can open it with photoshop and use the eraser tool with a low opacity to sculpt it till you like it
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meshes\_byoh\clutter\house_crafting\lock01.nif <--- this has absolutely NO mesh detail fyi
meshes\interface\lockpicking\lockpicklock01.nif <---this is similar to the SMIM mesh with a bit of detail but it's not nearly as deep
if you want to use this texture, basically you're gonna have to change the mesh, since your texture just isn't compatible with the mesh. your diffuse would look okay on the BYOH model but it's not gonna look good on the interface mesh, since it's drawing fleur-de-lis shapes on screws and has no diffuse texture for the actual physical ring. the ring should obviously have a different material since it represents a distinct object. if you're not planning to provide a new mesh that's built for your texture, i would recommend working within the constraints of the existing mesh. you could even just grab the smim texture and place it on a temporary layer above your texture, so you can check it while you're working to see if your texture fits the edges of the shape. regardless of how nice and detailed it looks on a 2D plane, in-game it looks like there's a rendering error or something, so it's definitely worth fixing
Edit: nevermind I was looking at the wrong place...I did try the map but it looks really bad and better without the map oddly
first, find the mesh. i don't remember what it's called but you can get BSA archive extractor and use its search function to find it. unpack the mesh and open it with nifskope. expand the tree structure on the left column until you find BSLightingShaderProperty, then expand that to find BSShaderTextureSet. if you click that you'll see that's where all the texture paths are defined. so you can see what the normal map is called, but more importantly you can *test* different textures by just typing in a different path. i'm like 90% positive that those details are not in the mesh. bethesda started from a very high poly mesh built in 3ds max, then calculated the normal map from that mesh, then massively simplified the mesh, eliminating polygons and making it render a lot faster.
obviously the normal map has to be an actual normal map. a normal map is very different from a diffuse map, its channels are mapped to dimensions rather than to colors, transparency, or other effects. the purpose is to mimic actual 3 dimensional shading and lighting, but it only does this to save computational resources, not to avoid having to actually make a 3d model. it's of course possible to draw a normal map by hand, and you can inspect other normal maps to see how you'd go about doing that. it works better with more organic/chaotic textures than with something like this, though. in this case the normal map is not just trying to add texture to the surface, it's trying to mimic the topography of a more complex model. but your texture makes this a bit easier, you just need to get rid of the vanilla normal since it's adding all these shadows of little surface features that no longer exist in your diffuse. i would recommend reading a bit about normal maps so you get some idea of what you're trying to do. you're trying to 'paint' depth onto each channel to tell the engine where to draw shadows. this is a pretty easy one since there's not that much depth overall, you could probably get good results just automatically generating the normal from the diffuse. and if the results aren't what you wanted, you can open it with photoshop and use the eraser tool with a low opacity to sculpt it till you like it