Hi! I was wondering when converting s4 to s3 how do you make the multiplier and specular? Thank you for your time!
Hmm, okay, how to explain it without taking too much time...
All right. While many people prefer to re-bake a multiplier on Blender (and you can find bake tutorials VERY EASILY), I actually REALLY LIKE the painted-on wooden texture of many EAxis objects, so I extract a diffuse from my object of choice:
(as I told in a previous post, I actually extract two, a high contrast one for the mask, a low contrast one for the multiplier, and I make the mask FIRST.)
PNG is fine; I only had to extract a diffuse in DDS once, because EAxis screwed with the alpha.
I make my mask (it’s basically selecting different colored parts and filling it with color channels, that’s for another time), then I add it as a new layer over my multiplier diffuse:
See the bottom right corner? Two layers!
But before playing with the magic wand, I go to Layer 0 / Background Layer / whatever it works on your image editor, and I desaturate the multiplier. In Photoshop, it’s Image > Adjustments > Desaturate.
My multiplier layer looks like this now.
While it LOOKS like it’s finished, now I need to check if the average color of a certain part of the texture is middle grey, or RGB 128, 128, 128 (some people go for 133-133-133 to avoid flat blacks, assuming the risk of getting overblown pure white recolors, but that’s a matter of TASTE).
For that, I’ll reactivate my mask layer and use the magic wand to select the red channel, THEN I hide my mask layer again. Do not forget to set tolerance as 0, no anti-aliasing, not contiguous.
If you do it right, your selection will look like this
Now it’s just a matter of using the eyedropper tool to click on a not very bright, not very dark part of the selection and see if it’s 128-128-128 or very close to it (126 to 130 is an okay margin).
In this case, it’s a little too dark, so I go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and I fiddle only with the Brightness slider until getting close to my result (you CAN use the eyedropper without applying the changes, just look at the upper right corner to check the new value. For this selection, I used Brightness +38.
(Some textures, especially when too light, need to be darkened by Adjustment > Curves, but that’s more of an outright Photoshop tutorial than just fiddling with stuff. Practice, practice, pratice...)
All right, it looks like this now, with only the part of the multiplier that will be affected by the red channel brightened:
If your item has only one channel, then save your multiplier, it’s finished (and you really didn’t need to paste the mask as a new layer to help with the selections, since a one-channel mask is fully red, but it’s good to get into the habit)
For every other channel, press Ctrl + D to deselect everything, reactivate your mask layer, select the new channel, repeat everything. But IMPORTANT: different channels WILL require different Brightness values UNLESS you got a monochromatic diffuse, and not every item comes with a plain swatch.
In this case, my second channel needed an adjustment of Brightness +28, just to prove what I just said about different channels, different values :)
Since my example only came with two colors, I save it as PNG for now. I only convert to DDS when it’s over 1024x1024 or I’m pretty sure that the DDS compression won’t fill my texture with artifacts. Even multipliers with transparent or translucent parts work with PNG just fine.
You’ll NEED a finished multiplier first. Yes, really.
The fastest way is to select everything, go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast, and hike the Brightness to +100 or +110 and up the Contrast a little.
Than you go to the Channels tab of your Layers window and add a new Alpha Channel by clicking this button:
You’ll have a brand-new Alpha 1 channel that’s fully black. That’s fine, keep it that way.
Select the RGB channel, you’ll see that your specular will have a faint red tint - no worries, that’s just to show that your Alpha is also active.
Now, you’ll have to save it as a DDS, no ifs or buts:
ALWAYS keep the Alpha Channels option ON, or else you’ll have an item that’s always shiny because no alpha means a fully white alpha, which means the game will force the brightness of the original, hyper-brightened texture ALL THE TIME. Black alpha, and it means things only get shiny if you add a shiny pattern in CASt.
In the next window, choose DXT5 compression.
And that’s... the basics. Checking if it gets noisy, if it needs more adjusts after you import it to TSRW, etc, are matters of practice, getting familiar with your image editor, and developing a good eye for subtle color changes. But the necessary parts are those that I explained, and they’ll work great in 95% of the cases!
(the other 5% are for when you need a translucent part in Phong Alpha shader to not be recolorable because Phong Alpha overlays SUCK, when TSRW messes with your textures no matter if it’s PNG or DDS and you’ll need to save a texture as 8.8.8.8 uncompressed DDS and replace it with S3PE, and all sorts of... annoying issues)
Also credits for @enable--llamas for finally showing me a way to make speculars that WORK.
This is a tad slapdash, but hope it helps!
