How do I remove the gloss from edited armor?

[KozzieH]

Well .. as you mabye see on the picture, it has way to mutch gloss, and of course, I do not know how to remove that xd

I've tired decrease the Saturation and the Lightness in Photoshop, but it still shows way to mutch gloss >.<

[Philipp_]

You have to save your DDS file in DXT3 format.

[thetruestarr1337]

Remove Alpha, then it works

[Hybrid~]

Originally Posted by thetruestarr1337

Remove Alpha, then it works

doh >_> That's what I'm doing,removing the alpha but the gloss keep staying O_O

[mulletman]

the alpha layer has already been saved to the database. only way i believe to do it is find a set that's either not been edited and remake it or find a set that the alpha layer was never saved.

I believe there's a way to strip the alpha layer off but i have never tried.

[castor4878]

this issue has already been answered a lot of time.

the gloss on armors is *always* due to invalid alpha channel, where invalid means most of the time missing.

so save your DDS file alpha channel information and do not destroy (fill-in with FFh) that channel.
I repeat: *do* keep the alpha channel.

regarding your specific edited, and corrupted, files, simply edit an AG files & copy/paste the alpha layer (keep the RGB ones for your tailored colors).

[KozzieH]

Ouhm .. i cant find any alpah o.o

[mulletman]

Originally Posted by castor4878

this issue has already been answered a lot of time.

the gloss on armors is *always* due to invalid alpha channel, where invalid means most of the time missing.

so save your DDS file alpha channel information and do not destroy (fill-in with FFh) that channel.
I repeat: *do* keep the alpha channel.

regarding your specific edited, and corrupted, files, simply edit an AG files & copy/paste the alpha layer (keep the RGB ones for your tailored colors).

sweet thnx I'll have to give that a try next time I do an edit

[KozzieH]

Originally Posted by castor4878

so save your DDS file alpha channel information and do not destroy (fill-in with FFh) that channel.

Well.. Im using nVidia to save my .dds files o_o

[Klaries]

Originally Posted by KozzieH

Ouhm .. i cant find any alpah o.o

Deleting the alpha channel to fix the gloss is a bogus solution that's been floating around for years. But it's a proven fact that you do not want to even touch the alpha.
In simple terms the alpha is what determines what parts of the textures are visible or not - ******** with it can make the entire texture look like a glossy mess in game regardless of the claim that it's a fix (personally I've tried it and it didn't improve the gloss situation in any of my numerous attempts).

You need to save the .dds in the proper format when the nVidia window shows up. Depending on what the texture is for you will want either DTX3 or DTX5.

[castor4878]

As a complement of the valuable information provided by Klaries:

The nVidia plug-in is (indeed) the most frequently used tool (actually I don't know any "paint-tool with native DDS support).

Still, this plug-in manages several formats, some with an alpha channel other without (all these formats belong to the DDS / DXT specification, or S3TC "S3 Texture Compression").

To make things even easier, the shaiya client seems to use the alpha channel for different purposes (the DirectX engine allows several kind of renderings).

Basically:
- when drawing weapons, the alpha data are used as a mask to define which part is drawn and what is not drawn.
the mean reason of such use comes from the way the 3D objects (including weapons) are drawn, they are a set of small triangles connected to each other, assuming that it is very hard to draw fine details (meaning for instance small spikes that bristling the weapon) without using a very important number of triangles and thus large amount of data and significant time of computation; to avoid that, an alpha mask is used, the details are drawn on "large" triangle but they are clipped with the alpha information (the points of the triangle whose alpha is 0 are not drawn)(note that the color stored in the weapon record (the ITM data) is certainly used together with the alpha data to compute the clipping mask, I didn't success so far to generate the exact same effect than the client, I didn't spent days on it neither)

- when drawing gears, the alpha data are used to create smooth reflections with ambient light (mainly the sun); the texture of the gear can contain fine details but they are drawn flat to the gear (no relief). the alpha channel is so used to define the intensity of the reflexion, meaning of the brightness of the gear, simply because that gloss is not the same, for instance, for the torso and for the shoulders. if the alpha mask is fully filled-in with 00s the gear will have no reflexion at all (if used as a clipping mask, the gear won't be drawn), if the alpha is fully filled-in with FFs the gear will shine horribly.

The format of the DDS files (the DXT format) is:
- DXT3 for gears, because DXT3 offers sharp alpha (smooth transitions)
- DXT5 (or DXT3) for weapons

none should use DXT1 since it does not contain alpha data (and may be your files were saved in this format).