Making shiny, reflective textures

[Razorwing]

This is a repost of information from Vagabond's Armoury forum. Nothing of it was written by me (Razorwing).

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As posted by VagabondAngel:

The mesh itself must be set up to use the environment maps provided. Open in NifSkope and select NiMaterialProperty - change it to read EnvMap2. Make sure the mesh material colours are set to white for Diffuse and Ambient and black for Specular and Emissive.

Then select NiTexturingProperty and in the Block Details window, change the Apply Mode from Apply Modulate to Apply Hilight.

For a good shiny metal finish, a dark diffuse base texture is needed. Black for steel, some blue hue for silver, etc... If you use colour, make sure its also very dark and not high contrast as this will translate to over bright cartoon-like appearance in-game when environment maps are applied.

The alpha channel of the normal map controls the specular level of the virtual reflection. White will be like a mirror if the diffuse base is dark enough (if it isn't, the result will look more like plastic than metal) Black will have no reflection at all (cloth, dull metal etc...)

Normal map detail should be strong but not too deep or detailed otherwise you will get interference patterns when viewed in-game. That's about it for shininess. I used that effect on my Katanas if you want to download them and have a look.

Additional info:
There are two available environment map material settings - EnvMap and EnvMap2.
[indent][/indent]EnvMap will apply the two stock environment maps in both exteriors and interiors. So needless to say it can look odd indoors if your shiny armour is still reflecting the night sky in your living room.
[indent][/indent]EnvMap2 will apply the environment maps in exteriors and the stock reflection map in interiors (single point source reflection). This one is the one to go with for armour and weapons in general.

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dzastreux asked:

Does it mean you have 2 textures in NiTexturingProperty?
The DarkTexture links to another texture?
How does the final result merge them together?
I somtimes saw this kind of things in a few .NIF from a few mods (never in vanilla game) but I don't understand the way it would works?
Might you tell me/us more about this, please?

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RedFender replied:

All VA means by that is that your diffuse texture should be dark, he isn't referring to the DarkTexture node in NiTexturingProperty.

And if you're interested in Oblivion's shaders there is a partially complete list of them on the Oldblivion site, it has a description for the envmap shader. sorry if you already knew that.