Specular Highlights?

[Tarius]

Not many people wanna keep the original textures me included. So, I dont see a point in trying to bring them up to speed when they simply arnt good enough. I think there is nothing wrong with going with similiar but current textures that are only based on the old ones but have nothing to do with them. This eliminates any copyright worries.

If you want a texture artist, I suggest you all try and approach connary - if you can find him. He is talented and I am sure he still has his compendium that he had worked on but never released after that whole fiasco from youtube.

[sirherrbatka]

At least darknut made some high-res textures with the same style as vanilla http://btb2.free.fr/img/mw/darknut_2f.jpg

[HiPhish]

The problem is that the specular maps are actually the alpha channel of the vanilla textures, so thats why I need to include them in the download.

Ah, I see. In that case I'd just upload the other maps until the specular map can be separated. using the alpha channel could be counter-productive for PR, the alpha channel is not really intuitive, and people might be put off even before the feature is properly introduced. Then the PR team will constantly have to correct people that separate specular maps are now possible and that the previous implementation was just a placeholder.

[PeterBitt]

Not many people wanna keep the original textures me included. So, I dont see a point in trying to bring them up to speed when they simply arnt good enough. I think there is nothing wrong with going with similiar but current textures that are only based on the old ones but have nothing to do with them. This eliminates any copyright worries.

If you want a texture artist, I suggest you all try and approach connary - if you can find him. He is talented and I am sure he still has his compendium that he had worked on but never released after that whole fiasco from youtube.

Guys after the 29485th dude mentioning how awfully blurry and disgusting the vanilla textures are, I think I got it.
I have no problem keeping this mod for myself if I am the only one appreciating the vanilla look, or at least understanding the value of having a comprehensive texture mod for the vanilla textures.
Keep complaining and I am going to do the connary and remove all my work like a mad child (nah of course not)

Given your critique about vanilla textures, I think should be allowed to make clear how I feel about texture mods in MW, as everyone loves me because of this opinion:

1. Inconsistency - Cobbling together textures from various different authors that neither worked together nor sticked to the vanilla design must end badly, no way anything closely as harmonic and consistent as the vanilla texturing can come out of that.

2. Craftmanship - The vast majority of texturers for MW simply are no professionals or artists. Apart from MaKom's faces and very few others I honestly dont remember many texturing project to involve hand painting! Please understand that this is a basic skill a texturer needs to possess, if thats not the case and all textures are just diletantishly edited photographs, its like a coder that doesnt know the programming language and only does copy and paste.

3. Technical stuff - Many, many texture replacers do all the possible mistakes: some use insane texture texture sizes (I even saw many textures as blurry as a 256 texture scaled onto a 1024 space), some have bad or no mip-maps at all, bad dds settings or even wrong file type, they blindly focus on microscopic detail (easy to do with photographs) and ignore all that hand painted detail the vanilla textures have from a distance (requires the skillset of a texturer). Most of the textures are far inferior to vanilla textures when looked at from a distance with heavy tiling and that ignored detail and color variety that makes the textures look flat and repetitive from a distance. Colors are seemingly picked at random and the recoloring process is often done wrong, as people use a function that no one should use and basicly reduce all color information in their photographs to a single color instead of recoloring individual colors. Coloring is one of the major things that make vanilla MW look so great to me, believe me when I say that basicly every texture mod is not resembling that characteristic coloring properly.

4. Different Tastes - They all have different tastes! How on earth should something look harmonic when everyone who worked on it clearly creates his stuff to his own taste? There never was a art director to manage this, so everyone kept interpreting Morrowind on his own. I for one see MWs art direction as something so really unique that it NEEDS to be kept alive. I can not stand people replacing fantasticly characteristic, hand-painted vanilla faces with photo-faces. We all have different tastes, but to me these people are what makes Morrowind Morrowind: http://static1.nexusmods.com/15/images/ ... 270062.jpg
They dont look like LotR, dont look like cheesy daggerfall-ish erotic fantasy avatars, they truly look unique and rough, just like the whole game! I never understand how 10 years players can not see that amazing character in design.

5. Artistic Value - As impressive as a single texture might look because the photograph is good, where is the fun in that? I mean why do people release unedited photographs from the internet and say they are the author, when its clearly the photographer who deserves the credit? How many mods are there that replace the hard stuff like armors, weapons, creatures and stuff with something really well crafted that is done from scratch? Not many, I can tell you that. But there are sure a ton of architecture and ground textures as they are easily replaced by those free textures from the internet that are already properly tiled and require nothing more to do than converting them into a dds (what some dont even do) and uploading them to the nexus.

Its easy to see blurryness and complain about that. I can overlook that, but I can not overlook the faults that our high res replacers possess.
Call it blasphemy, but I never got all the fuzz about connary, I dont feel like he did much better than the other ones. Westly for example did much more impressive stuff, he does hand painting you know (not to my taste but good nonetheless).
There are some textures for MW that are good, its just that they dont fit the game in my mind and are not comprehensive and consistent.

Now I sure got a lot of friends with this popular opinion, but somehow I just cant accept people bashing the vanilla textures all the freaking time! It must be allowed to speak against that right?

At least darknut made some high-res textures with the same style as vanilla http://btb2.free.fr/img/mw/darknut_2f.jpg

You mentioned how artificial parallax maps look on vanilla textures, please have a close look at that detail in Darknut's textures

Ah, I see. In that case I'd just upload the other maps until the specular map can be separated. using the alpha channel could be counter-productive for PR, the alpha channel is not really intuitive, and people might be put off even before the feature is properly introduced. Then the PR team will constantly have to correct people that separate specular maps are now possible and that the previous implementation was just a placeholder.

I might do that, but propably after 0.28 release. I dont want to cause to much confusion with those blurry textures, maybe someone else will come up with something nice and sharp.

[wheybags]

I would use your mod

[Okulo]

Now I sure got a lot of friends with this popular opinion, but somehow I just cant accept people bashing the vanilla textures all the freaking time! It must be allowed to speak against that right?

Of course. What do you think this is? Reddit?

I don't think people are bashing the vanilla texture's flavour, though - just its low detail. I don't quite see the problem you have with having the same texture but in more detail... With some exceptions, that is. Looking at Skyrim's ground, the grass is still flat. It's painfully ugly.

[Tolchock]

PeterBitt, that was a very interesting read. Thankyou for your work -- I, for one, use many of your mods already (I love Modern User Interface and A Strange Plant in particular). It would be great to see what you do with the vanilla textures. After going down the 'replace ALL the things' route, I agree with your concerns about stylistic consistency and quality. I would certainly use the mod you have proposed. That said, it would be great to have vanilla-style, professionally made textures in high res -- one can dream.

(What Morrowind really needs, I think, is more assets and better level design. Some of those tombs/caves, in particular, feel really generic, cramped and not 'lived in'.)

[Chris]

I don't think people are bashing the vanilla texture's flavour, though - just its low detail. I don't quite see the problem you have with having the same texture but in more detail...

IIRC there was a project that tried to create hi-res versions of MW's textures using some kind of imaging algorithm with real photos. The way it worked is that you'd supply a bunch of real images of something and the program would learn what the object was like, then you could feed it a low resolution image and it'd reconstruct missing detail from what it learned. The results I saw were very good and extremely faithful to the original textures.

Unfortunately I think the project stalled. At least, I haven't heard anything about it in a long while. But perhaps someone could try to start it up again.

[PeterBitt]

Of course. What do you think this is? Reddit?

I don't think people are bashing the vanilla texture's flavour, though - just its low detail. I don't quite see the problem you have with having the same texture but in more detail... With some exceptions, that is. Looking at Skyrim's ground, the grass is still flat. It's painfully ugly.

Well at bethesda forums modding section not many people like to hear such a opinion
Well if someone does manage to recreate vanilla textures in high res that would be just great, I am just a bit pessimistic considering the huge amount of texture files in Morrowind.

IIRC there was a project that tried to create hi-res versions of MW's textures using some kind of imaging algorithm with real photos. The way it worked is that you'd supply a bunch of real images of something and the program would learn what the object was like, then you could feed it a low resolution image and it'd reconstruct missing detail from what it learned. The results I saw were very good and extremely faithful to the original textures.

Unfortunately I think the project stalled. At least, I haven't heard anything about it in a long while. But perhaps someone could try to start it up again.

Oh yes this one was amazing, just what I want. Unfortunatelly he did indeed cancel the project and I believe he was not willing to share his method. A shame as the flora he finished looked just like I imagine the not downsized vanilla textures would look like. You are the coding gurus, maybe someone could do something similar!
From what I understand this wouldnt work for faces and maybe even armors, creatures and alike, but it would definitely be a huge help for the texturers if all those rock, wood and ground textures would be processed like that.
I found the thread: http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/117655 ... d%20%20vhd

Thanks wheybags and Tolchock!

[SquireNed]

It looks like the VHD was essentially upscaling with details. A more skilled texture artist could probably actually do a similar thing more easily using masks, but the catch seems to be that there's no automation. This isn't necessarily horrible, but it means a pretty long release time.

It looks like the moss example could have actually been recreated using some clever noise/circuit rendering in the GIMP, but I am neither clever enough nor do I have a good enough computer to work with the layers and resolution required to do that by-hand. I'm not sure exactly what his automated method is, but I'd think it's probably one of the most labor intensive methods if it requires so many library images.

One method that could be considered for a fake HD texture is using a form-recognizing and bicubic upscale together; Fattal's method looks promising, although the talk about "licensing" on their site seems a little dangerous for use. Overlaying a bicubic/nearest neighbor scaling over that at a very low transparency adds in the granularity that the Fattal upscaling seems willing to throw out in various points.