Red Channel: stores the reflection to the light information.

This information is stored in the RGB channels (see picture Specular maps and RGB Channels for an example of a specular map in Fallout 4) Specular maps contain two kinds of information: reflection to the light and glossiness of the different parts of the armour.

merge down the black layer onto your original texture and then generate the normal map.

before generating the normal map, add a black layer to the texture and merge it with the texture using a % of opacity (like 50%, or 25%).

make the normal map a little more transparent: if you are generating them from the textures, you can try the following:.

make your textures a little darker: for example, don't paint white parts in white but in a light grey.

Note: If your textures look too shiny in game and you want to make your textures less shiny: Make sure that the Generate mipmaps flag is selected when saving it.

Save it with the same name than your texture file + the _n.dds extension and choose the BC5 compression as shown in picture Saving the dds file - BC5 format.

Press the OK button and the image will show now a blueish look: this is the normal map.

modify the scale value to add more or less deep to the normal map (I usually set this to 3 or 4).

select a filter (I usually select 3x3 but you can try different filters and see which one works better for you).

select the Wrap flag and change the value of Height source to Alpha.

pressing 3d preview you will be able to see in another screen how the changes in the parameters give more or less deep to the normal map.

A window will pop up like the one shown in the Normal map window picture.

Select Colors -> Color to alpha and then select black or 000000 as the source colour.

You can create the normal map from the texture you've just painted, to do it this way just follow these steps: Once you've painted the textures you'll have to create the normal maps that are the image files that will give your armour a sense of volume.

Make sure that the Generate mipmaps flag is marked when you save the textures. If they have transparency save them as DTX3 or DTX5. If the images don't have transparent parts you can save them with DTX1 compression. Once you've painted the armour textures save them as dds as this is the image format that the game requires. Their name usually ends wuth the _d.dds extension. You can immport the UV map image file you saved earlier into GIMP and use it as a pattern to paint the textures: this way you will know at any time what part of the sword you are painting.ĭiffuse maps contain mainly the colours of your armour. Next step is to paint the textures: to do this you can use a program like GIMP.

Color swap fallout 4