Texture/Graphic Issues, Metallic Skin/Hair

[KT28]

In an attempt to make NWN easier to look at (see here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=16646), I installed Neverwinter Nights on a Windows 7 virtual machine (with VMWare Fusion) on my Macbook Pro, which has a retina screen and is way easier on the eyes than my old Windows laptop. This worked almost perfectly - in fact the game seems to run better on my virtual machine; the game is perfectly smooth and the colors look better - except for one major problem, which is that the textures are all messed up. Skin/hair has a metallic sheen to it and some objects are blocky and weird looking:




I ran the 1.69 critical rebuild, which seems to be the usual advice for texture problems, but unfortunately this did not help. I'll be eternally grateful to anyone who can advise; I'd be stoked if I could play NWN on my Mac, the retina screen is like 10x easier to look at.

(and possibly a second question - does anyone have any experience running NWN natively on Mac if the VM proves difficult? I haven't looked into this yet)

[KT28]

The wonderful DM Spyre helped me fix this! In case anyone else runs into this issue, all I had to do was turn off "Environment Mapping on Creatures" in my in-game Advanced Video Options. Super simple and instantly fixed all the issues.

Full explanation:

For whatever reason, environmental mapping is breaking as graphic cards update.
It’s pretty much doing this:
Enabling this setting allows the color of reflective surfaces (e.g. metal) to be affected by the color of the surroundings; the colors from the environment get mapped to the reflective surface. This is a more realistic rendering of metallic armor, but takes more computing power.
This option also affects transparency in some cases, as there is significant overlap between the coding that makes something reflective and the coding that makes something transparent. When objects are incorrectly made transparent, toggling this option sometimes corrects it.
You can always turn it back on and you shouldn’t have the skin issue any more - and if it does come back, just turn it off.

Now I'm off to go play NWN without eyestrain.

Edit: spoke too quick, the blocky white trees/objects are still a thing. Still trying to figure that one out.

[MalKalz]

Toggling the environmental mapping off then back online seemed to have fixed the first issue of metallic skin - I did that through trial and error after reinstalling the game. However, the second issue seems to be a texture issue with a driver.

I’ll take a look today to see if I can find any solutions.