Mod:Creation Kit/Diffuse Map

A diffuse map contains the color information of a surface. Often also referred to as albedo, especially in the context of PBR workflow.

Aside from the color information stored in the RGB channels, a greyscale alpha channel can be used to control transparency/opacity, where black is fully transparent and white is fully opaque. Note that using transparency in game is more complex than simply adding it to the diffuse.

Diffuse maps are located in the Data/Textures directory tree and are suffixed with "_d" (e.g., Data/Textures/Clothes/VaultSuit/VaultSuit81_d.DDS). When the diffuse doesn't need alpha or only needs 1-bit alpha, they are stored in the BC1/DXT1 compression format. If more than 1 bit of alpha is needed, the diffuse is stored in the BC3/DXT5 format. Note that block compression is lossy, so the image stored can vary from the original image.