Hi, I’m Quinn from Bloodmoon Mods - we (usually) make texture mods aimed at (mostly) Au Ra (scales) - and today I’m gonna teach you how to apply an alpha mask to your normals because if you don’t do it your normals aren’t gonna work.
PLEASE NOTE I AM NOT OFFERING SUPPORT FOR THIS TUTORIAL. DO NOT DM ME ABOUT IT.
I would write a tutorial on how to do this in Penumbra if Penumbra had functionality for adding an Alpha Overlay. As of right now (8/19/2024), that functionality doesn’t exist, so we’re using TexTools (or a photo editing program. Mostly this is for TexTools). (If you don’t care about lipstick you can just invert the alpha in Penumbra and that works too - load your normal, hit the “A” by “invert” and u win)
Because of the Dawntrail Visual Update, normal PNGs no longer work for:
✧ Face Normals (across the board. It works for literally no one.)
✧ Body normals on TBSE
✧ Female body normals that have scales
✧ All normals for Hroth, Male or Female
What normal PNGs do work for:
✧ Non-Hrothgar female BODY normals that do not have scales (and ONLY non-Hrothgar female BODY normals that do not have scales)
Because the game uses different channels to read skintone and lipstick now. I’m not gonna get into how they work for Hrothgar (my brain is small and someone can probably explain it better than me; this page might update when we figure it out) but for everyone else, the face alpha now tells the game where to apply your lipstick.
The way an alpha works (on the face) is by making your skin transparent so the game knows where the lipstick goes. This is why normals appear invisible if you preview them - barring the lips. The lips being visible is the “mask” - the white portion on the alpha that tells the game “lipstick goes here”.
(This principle is also true with TBSE bodies and Hrothgar - just with body hair and not lipstick)
Major Praline wrote a REALLY good guide on how to understand the new face maps. (You can click this sentence)
Things that can happen if you DON’T apply an alpha mask:
✧ Your face will become lipstick coloured (just. Generally)
✧ Your scales won’t match the body (on Faces)
✧ Your scales will dye with your skin colour (on TBSE)
✧ You’ll be really really really oily, for some reason
Scales dyed the same as skin; lipstick applied to whole face
Lipstick applied to entire face. body normals are fine.
✨ By adding an Alpha Mask. ✨
I WILL NOTE I ONLY INCLUDED UNIVERSAL MASKS. Every face has very slightly different lipstick but I’m not doing all that ♥ I’ll get to it. but for now u suffer
Here’s a link to download alpha masks. These are also included in the Devkits for our mods, labeled “ALPHA MASKS [NORMALS ONLY]”. You’re gonna need these for the following tutorial.
I’m gonna show you how to do this in TexTools (my preferred way), and how to do this the half-assed way in Penumbra (you will lose your lipstick and baked-in body hair).
This is 100% possible to do in a photo editing program, following the barebone steps below:
✧ Load your PNG in Photoshop (or whatever other program you have that can see channels)
✧ Navigate over to channels
✧ Ctrl+click a random channel under “Channels”
✧ Hit the little icon at the bottom that looks like a rectangle with a hole in it
✧ It should be named “Alpha 1”. Name doesn’t matter but it’s not right anyway so
✧ Paste the provided alpha mask in this new channel.
✧ Save your new normal map as DDS, preserving transparency.
*NOTE: I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO PROPERLY SAVE SOMETHING AS A DDS DON’T ASK ME my alpha always stays on for some reason (your normal map will appear pink in preview in TT and Penumbra). I always export as TARGA (.tga) and convert it via TexTools anyway to use in Penumbra lmao I am NOT a professional. Make sure the alpha is invisible (toggle the eyeball off) before u export though bc it is a sacrifice to the TGA exporting gods
I can’t get Penumbra to read my exported DDSes no matter what I do, even if TexTools will read them so I’m not gonna tell you what to do. Ask someone smarter than me.*
Please, for the love of everything holy, check that the resolution of your normal map matches the masks.
ASYM UNIVERSAL: 4096 X 4096 ASYM AU RA: 4096 X 2048
NORMAL UNIVERSAL: 1024 X 2048 NORMAL AU RA: 2048 X 2048