Guest Workshop: Texturing Characters (GIMP) By Mannimagnus

[Mannimagnus]

Texturing Characters

A tutorial detailing how to avoid common problems such as shiny skin, tattoos not showing in game and others

By Mannimagnus

Many times have I created textures for one of my characters, or for a race mod, only to have problems such as shiny skin, tattoos not showing up, and on one occasion, black skin. I've searched for a tutorial that helps avoid these problems and I have found none. That is the purpose of this workshop.

This workshop assumes you have a basic knowledge of GIMP. If you do not, then I recommend reading DarkRider's Retexturing Oblivion Workshop.

You will need:

1: GIMP

2: DDS Plugin

3: Normal Map Plugin

Look out for these during the workshop:

Smarty, Smarty knows lots of neat little tips to make things easier for you.

:!: The alert sign, ignoring it's warnings could make things go wrong for your textures.

First, your base texture

There's many texture resources for use, which one you use depends on what your character/race is aimed for, male (Vanilla or RM) female (Vanilla, R F, FF, TGND, HGEC) good or evil, you want to make sure your face, ear and body textures all match in tone, so it is good to use resources that are the same from the start. For this tutorial I am going to be using my personal favorite, Dustinflan's Head 06 Texture.

Step 1: Customizing your texture

We want to make something new, so we have to change our texture. The changes you can make to your texture range from a basic colour change, to hair, tattoos, scars and piercings. The more you do, the harder your texture will be to get right. We'll start with a basic colour change with a tattoo. Go to Colours>Hue-Saturation and change the skin tone, I am going to make mine look like one of my Forgotten:

Then, go to Colours>Brightness-Contrast and modify the contrast +5:

Now to add the tattoo, for this I am going use a Daedric A, S and V in Morrowind (Almsivi) style:

Paste the tattoo(s) (Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste) you are using into your texture and position until happy.

Smarty says, going to Select>Select By Colour and clicking outside the border of the canvas will "anchor" your tattoo, this applies for any layer pasted into your canvas, after doing this go to Windows>Dockable Dialogues>Layers, right clicking on the background and flattening the image will merge all the layers together, this will ensure that any layers you paste into your canvas will appear ingame, it will also allow you to generate mipmaps when saving.

And there you have it! Our texture has been customized! Time to save, compression BC1/Dxt1 with mipmaps generated.

Step 2: Creating The Normal Map

Now here comes the tricky part, normal maps for skin must be very particular, otherwise the results ingame will look like you are made out of plastic.

Go to Layer>Transparency>Add Alpha Channel:

Follow that by again going to Layer>Transparency>Colour To Alpha and colour it to black:

Now go to Filters>Map>Normal Map:

Now, there's a few things we have to change here, first check wrap, then change the filter, for smooth skin you can use 5x5, 7x7, or 9x9, for rough skin you can use 3x3 or 4 Sample, personally I want very smooth skin, so I am going to use 9x9, once you have those settings done, you should have this:

Looks good, yes? Unfortunately in game this will look like plastic, why? Because it has very opaque areas, to make it look real, we have to do some texture surgery. Select your eraser, now see the bar that says opacity? We're going to change that, instead of 100 set it to 75, now we are going to "erase" our whole image by wiping it down with the eraser.

Smarty says: To make your eraser very large click the black circle that by default is your brush, select the biggest one (Circle 19) then drag the scale bar beneath it all the way to the right, maxing out your eraser, see how big is it now? This will make it much easier.

:!: Warning! This all must be done in one click! Do not let go of clicker the whole time until you are finished erasing!

Now, you should have something like this:

See how big my cursor is? As smarty said this will make it much easier, now keep the warning above in mind, you must click once and drag that big cursor over the whole image, don't let go until you have finished erasing, the reason for this is that if you click again you will damage your normal map's directional data, if that gets damaged then your normal map is useless. When you are done you should have something like this:

Can you see the outline of your texture in the map? What we did is only erase the plastic reflection while preserving the direction data of the map, so now we will have a nice smooth map ingame that doesn't look like plastic! Now it's time to save once again, you can save it as either BC2/DXT3 or BC3/DXT5, I use the latter myself, generate mipmaps and save your normal map making sure it has the same name as your previous saved texture with _n added on at the end e.g. ForgottenFace.dds and ForgottenFace_n.dds, this is very important or your textures may appear black or pink in game.

You can see a normal map made exactly the same way in action in this screenshot of mine:

That's it! I hope this tutorial comes in handy for anyone making characters and/or race mods.

Happy Modding!

-Manni

Edited July 16, 2011 by Mannimagnus

[donnato]

Manni...this is so cool. You`ve done very well, thank you.

[Mannimagnus]

Thanks Donn! Your very welcome, I hope it helps and I couldn't be happier if it does.

[ResolveThatChord]

Excellent work. If more modders took the time to make tutorials as clear and instructive as this, then our modding community would be larger and richer indeed.

[_echo]

Since the normal map filter isn't with GIMP stock, you should include a link to where it can be downloaded

[Mannimagnus]

Thank you Chord!

Done Echo.

[_echo]

[Arion]

Super tutorial Mannimagnus

One thing you might consider is instead of using the spoiler tag , just post the image itself. Clicking the spoiler tag brings up this giant picture and then when you hide it its easy to lose where you were. With an image it will expand it and you only have to click the image to shrink it back and continue on.

Thanks for making a much needed tutorial ..