Armor and Dyes

Vandellia

There seems to be a total lack of consistency when it comes to coloring armor. I can understand and perhaps accept that perhaps a color would look different when placed on cloth then it does on leather the it does on armor, However The same color used on different styles of armor can go from make your eyes bleed bright to 100 year old sun faded paint look. A few armor types i love the look of, yet I can not find any color that i can apply and make it look acceptable. Yes this,maybe a simply a cosmetic issue it is still important.

Ertosi

This is due to the various armor, costume, and hat items having very inconsistent albedos (aka diffuse maps). An albedo that is too dark or light will affect all colors applied to it by darkening or lightening them. Even worse is how many clothing items have colors applied to their albedos because those base colors will be added to any player-chosen colors applied to them, which often makes certain items just look awful no matter which colors you apply to them (unless they are colors similar to what was left on their albedo). Proper albedos have all player-colorable zones completely desaturated to avoid this issue.

Similarly many costumes have very unrealistic specular maps which makes them far too shiny/glossy.

A more subtle bug concerns the various monster helms vs their related Style pages which have completely different color maps from each other. This means the different color zones affect different spots of the items and in some cases means some zones on one are uncolorable on the other, despite them being the same items. A great example is the Iceheart set in which the Monster Mask and Shoulders you can color the ice, but when using their related style pages you cannot.

Having worked on textures like these for some other games, I find these kind of bugs particularly sloppy. ZOS, if you need help fixing them, hit me up as I live in your hometown. This khajiit has skills if you have coin.


As a design choice, I always found it odd ZOS only went with 3 player-colorable zones per item when color maps can easily handle 6. So many items would have been much more fun and customizable had they been broken into additional color zones. This part isn't a bug, it just feels like wasted potential that would have been so very easy to have added in.

UntilValhalla13

Yeah that always kinda bothered me when trying to match dyes. I would try to dye one piece purple, (for example), and the same color on a different piece is like dark grey. Don't even get me started on the bloodroot forge dye inconsistency. XD