Gloss, Specular, Shine... how?

[MentalElf]

Again, the tutorials in the wiki are saving the noobs
from disaster!

The base texture is DDS 1 type, no alpha (had that wrong).

The _n.dds texture is DDS 3 type, containing alpha (had that wrong).

Working with it now to improve things, thanks.

MentalElf

[noremorse]

Originally posted by MentalElf
What parameter on the "_n.dds" map controls how much
gloss? Is it brightness? More bright = more gloss?

Thanks in advance,
MentalElf

The alpha channel controls all of that. Black= no effect, white= 100% effect.

It must be saved as a DXT3 (explicit alpha) in order to use the alpha the correct way. The base texture doesn't need to be saved as anything higher than a DXT1 (no alpha) if it isn't a transparent texture. If it is, save it as a DXT3 (explicit alpha).

[tibmaker]

Aye, in the normal the alpha channel is the specular. And Bethesda does make use of a separate gloss map, I think they put _g at the end of their extension but it is only on a few certain things.

[noremorse]

Yes, the specular channels. I am not sure what the gloss maps are really. The "_g.dds" maps are the glow maps.

[TheImperialDragon]

Gloss can be controlled in NIFskope.

Originally posted by Razorwing
The gloss can be controlled in NifSkope, but I haven't experimented successfully with that option.

Let's take "Oblivion\Data\Meshes\landscape\clams01.nif" for example. Open it in NifSkope and unroll the NiTriStrips tree, letting you see the block "10 NiMaterialProperty". You'll probably recognize the name of the block, "1 - Default", and like the name suggests the block holds data set up in Max's material editor. Doubleclick the palette icon and you'll get a popup window letting you affect various material editor settings. Among others, Gloss. Presumably Bethesda set these things up in Max using the real exporter's shader, but since we can't, we have to use NifSkope.

Gloss and specular often go hand in hand. It's quite possible you need a normal/specular map first to be able to affect the glossiness.

I've never been able to successfully use any other texturing technique than color/opacity maps in an Oblivion model through 3D Studio Max. I've experimented a lot on that, and nope, only the color map settings and opacity settings can be exported directly from Max. The opacity is only possible to export with Civ4, not NifTools. Well, you *can* export a bump map with Civ4, but the model will lack height and look worse, so there's no point.

Specular effects can be achieved by messing around with the opacity of the Normal map (_n). More transparent seems to reflect less light, while completely opaque seems to reflect a lot of light.

Glow maps (_g) control if the object glows, like seeing the light beyond the windows in houses, or the glowing red areas of the Daedric armour.

[Razorwing]

Specular and gloss are closely connected, so it stands to reason the gloss setting works off of the specular map. The bricks in the attached screenshots shows the difference (as seen in max), with the brick nearest the viewer having full gloss and the farthest having none.

I guess you could say only using specular gives a wet, glistening effect while using gloss gives a steel-like effect. It levels out the spikes in the specular map, I guess.