How to make a texture glossier with the GIMP?

E

eardstapa

First time out of the vault
I know how to do basic DDS editing with the GIMP (I don't have Photoshop), but one thing I haven't been able to do is make things glossier/shinier.

From some basic research, it seems like you need to edit the alpha channel or the normal map in order to change the glossiness, but I'm not sure how to do this with the GIMP.

Could someone link me to a tutorial or just give an overview of the steps? Any help is appreciated.
 
I don't think this is possible. After some searching, and asking on the Nexus forums, it seems that in order to make something glossy you need to:

- open the mesh in NifSkope and increase the "glossiness" entry under NiMaterialProperty
- open the relevant *_n.dds texture file, select the alpha channel, and make the target area white (lighter means more reflective/glossy, darker means less reflective/glossy, so white is really shiny and black is matte)

In the GIMP, when I tried editing the alpha channel by adding different types of layer masks, it seems that all I was able to do was "erase" parts of it with a black brush. I wasn't able to paint with arbitrary values.

However, in Photoshop the editing process was very straightforward.
 
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