Imports:Custom Character Race and Normal Map (displacement map)

Ever wondered why your custom race has seams all over or why your character looks flat in game?

You must have noticed the vanilla characters use grayscale normal maps, but however you try, turning a normal map into a displacement map just does not work right.

This is because Kenshi uses GGG+R system instead of RGB+A. This system is unique to Kenshi and no information of it is available online.

The greyscale image of the green channel serves as a bump map and the red channel on alpha determines the shaders.

What you need to do is:

) Create a normal map like you do. Tweak it until you have no seams. Never mind it being flat.
) Open the normal map in a sophisticated image editing software, that is able to divide the RGB into different channels and able to create an alpha mask using an image.
Copy the Red channel image to a separate image
Copy the Green channel and paste it over the original Red and the Blue channel (total overwrite)
Combine the image (RGB channels). You have now a grayscale image.
Create a mask, or however your image editing software does it and create an alpha channel using the copy of the Red channel you made earlier as a mask.
Export to .dds or open it in Gimp to export as .dds if your software does not convert to .dds. DTX5 and mipmaps on.

The red channel being the alpha is important. Kenshi uses the black and white data on the red/alpha channel as the shading map. Without it, the texture looks full bright.

Black = hollow White = bump