Shadering a noshadered Leaderhead in 10 steps | Nitram15's Guide

I keep them in spoiler, to easier read.
Open it, and learn!



Thank you,
Nitram15.

Thanks for this! I'll be sure to look it up for my next LH.

You're welcome!

So, I can do this without going to Blender? I'll sure give it a try. This sounds faster than what Ekmek's tutorial said.

No, you don't need to go Blender. This is my method. I recognized that, Ekmek's method isn't so easy, and I thought, I use the same as the simple shadering, but this time, with noshadered nifs.
The result is the same. But, with this method, we can make Leaderheads, what are shadered, but based on a noshadered leaderhead. This is makes easier the Leaderhead making.

Interesting... I remember I played around with lots of these settings, but my experience was that a shader that was gone, remained gone forever. Nice to see you figured it out!

Yes, I upgraded the shadering, to my easy method.

WOU! Thank you! But how can I shader part from unit. It doesn't have shaders?

Units, haven't got shaders. You need to find /create a normal map texture (NRML.dds) and environmental map tex. ENV.dds what will be create a good-looking shader.

Then the method ^^.

To Create,becouse will be eror.

Never gave it a go myself, but from what I read I believe that shaders for units work different then shaders for leaderheads. For example, usually the TLeaderheadShader or the TLeaderheadShaderNoSkin is used for leaderheads (the former if a skininstance is available for the mesh in question, the latter if there is none - otherwise errors related to the animation can occur). As the names of the said shaders suggest, those are meant to be used with leaderheads. Don't know for sure, but if you try to apply leaderhead shaders on units, the game might even crash or it might produce glitches or simply doesn't work and the unit remains unshadered. Still, I think there is a shader (maybe even more then one) that works with units, too, but it could be that not all texture maps are needed. Stil, shadering can cause the game to slow down on weaker machines. As the use is limited anyways (unit are small and therefor details don't play a major role anyways), I believe it is not a good idea to overly shader units... Should be enough to get the units specular when wearing armory or swords etc. In contrast, the nrml map is, for example, to improve surfaces rich of details. Details, that are too small or too many to model. Think of fur or hair for example. To me it actually makes no sense to apply that feature to a unit as you wouldn't see these details anyways. Even more, too much details could decrease the quality of a unit as this could make it blurry for example.
Also, I believe the case is similar for buidings as well. I remember at least one reported trouble caused by shadering buildings...

Nitram, did you ever checked this? Any experience with shadering units or buildings?

cool3a2 said:

Never gave it a go myself, but from what I read I believe that shaders for units work different then shaders for leaderheads. For example, usually the TLeaderheadShader or the TLeaderheadShaderNoSkin is used for leaderheads (the former if a skininstance is available for the mesh in question, the latter if there is none - otherwise errors related to the animation can occur). As the names of the said shaders suggest, those are meant to be used with leaderheads. Don't know for sure, but if you try to apply leaderhead shaders on units, the game might even crash or it might produce glitches or simply doesn't work and the unit remains unshadered. Still, I think there is a shader (maybe even more then one) that works with units, too, but it could be that not all texture maps are needed. Stil, shadering can cause the game to slow down on weaker machines. As the use is limited anyways (unit are small and therefor details don't play a major role anyways), I believe it is not a good idea to overly shader units... Should be enough to get the units specular when wearing armory or swords etc. In contrast, the nrml map is, for example, to improve surfaces rich of details. Details, that are too small or too many to model. Think of fur or hair for example. To me it actually makes no sense to apply that feature to a unit as you wouldn't see these details anyways. Even more, too much details could decrease the quality of a unit as this could make it blurry for example.
Also, I believe the case is similar for buidings as w ell. I remember at least one reported trouble caused by shadering buildings...

Nitram, did you ever checked this? Any experience with shadering units or buildings?

Click to expand...

This isn't really true. TLeaderheadShaderNoSkin_20 is WORK on lhs, what are using a unit part. What I am said, that is true. Also, you can shader buildings too, IF the building has got a Normal Map Texture, an Environmental Texture, an Environmental Map Texture, and a Specular Map Texture. This is the same, with the unit shaders too. About the animation: This isn't true too. Shader can't deform animation, you can deform it in Blender + NifScope only. Unit parts, can't deform anim, when you assigned that to the right place. Like in cybrxkhan's Merkurios LH. He was used the Nubian Unitset, and his helmet is great! And the game can't crash when the shader is messed. There are two bad thing what can happen: 1) When you click a different lh, then your, your LH will copy the shader of that different one. This isn't problem, but when you click on a LH what is using Gold_ENV.dds, it will be very bad-looking. 2) The shader won't be nice "white light", the shine will be pink, because you haven't got the ENV, ENVMASK, NRML, or SPEC.

I checked this before, and I have got exp with unit shadering. But it isn't so popular.

Hope, this help you.

That's not what I meant, nitram, but it could be that this is what Den meant initially, though. I was talking about shading units, not about shading parts that originate from units and shold be used for leaderheads. If you try to shader a unit and use the result as unit, I'm pretty sure you run into trouble if you blindly follow your tutorial (which as is will work for leaderheads, but not for shading units). What you are refering to, is using a part from a unit, let's say a helmet, then add it to a leaderhead and shader it. If you are using the result as leaderhead, what you said is true and then shadering it makes sense.
Same is true for buildings. As said I read an ask for help where a modder wanted to apply shaders to buildings (and use that as building) and ran into troubles. And from what I remember, I'd say it indeed crashed the game for him.

On the other side, I'm 100% sure that applying a TLeaderheadShader to a mesh that has no SkinInstance will cause problems related with the animation. It's not that the part will be deformed (of course the shader itself is not related to the animation, it's just about appearance), but for some reasons those parts won't move correctly. I've seen that when working on Árpád. At the very beginning, Zervers Árpád had no shader or at least not all of its parts. I tried to apply a shader to the helmet via 3dsmax, but got the said troubles. I later figured out that the helmet did not have a SkinInstance, but instead was attachd to the head bone directly (that will work as if the part has a SkinInstance, but is rigged to the headbone only). Next, I noticed that there is a shader called TLeaderheadShaderNoSkin (and the name says it all, I suppose) as well and after applying that, all my problems were gone. I spent some time to figure that out and I made sure that all my changes were restricted to shader the helmet to exclude any other reason. So the problem was definately cnnected to the shadering process. I can't tell you what happens if you apply a NoSkin shader to a mesh with SkinInstance, though. I sticked to the method to apply the ordinary Shader to meshes with, and the NoSkin shader to meshes without SkinInstance. Since that, I never got any troubles again and as I believe there is a reason why there are two shaders, I'll keep it like that. Also, I can't explain why the shader causes said troubles, but it seems that it is messing up the coordinates of the mesh. I remember that in Ekmeks tutorial was a similar problem and I think its solution is described in his troubleshooting section, too: it was solved by removing a child of the SkinInstance. I suppose that the NoSkin shader got used there on a 'Skin mesh'. From what I remember that even caused deformations - the leaderhead looked like a shattered mirrorpicture.

When you speaking about units, you found the wrong thread. This thread is for LHs.

Sure I know this is about leaderheads, but shading units isn't much different, I suppose. So that topic isn't so off here. And Den asked about shading a part of a unit, that's why I started this. He did not mention for what he wants to use that part. I understood it as shading units, but now that I re-read it you could be right when assuming he meant 'shading a part of a unit and then use it for a leaderhead' as he mostly deals with leaderheads, AFAIK.

Okay.

IgorS said:

So, I can do this without going to Blender? I'll sure give it a try. This sounds faster than what Ekmek's tutorial said.

Click to expand...

Has anyone tried this out? I did this initially and got black splotches or other graphical errors.

Also this tut didn't ook at the materials property that is different between nonshaded and shaded. adjust that and then let us know if the black splotches appear or not 9sometimes it would crash the game).

I tried this, and it works. (Look at my Khosrau I LH)

hmmmm. I think this applies only to LHs done with 2.49 then because the indices maps don't appear with LHs done prior to that.

Ekmek. My method is usable. And of course it is for 2.49 Your method is saying for earlier version. My tutorial isn't a simple shadering, I teach people to shader LHs, without any Blendering.

I'm sorry, when my tut is smarter than your's.