Assigning New Weapon Textures

[ArdentFlame]

So what I want to do is rather simple, but I have yet to find anything on the Internet that has an explicit tutorial for how to do it, so here I am.

 

I want to assign textures that I already have to a new standalone weapon in the CK. It's a simple Laser Rifle retexture, I just want it to act as a unique weapon. Again, I have all of the textures needed.

 

I have experience doing this with Fallout 3, NV, & Skyrim, but the obvious difference with Fallout 4 is going to be all of the mods that there are for the weapon. Also, I can plainly see that Bethesda has changed the way they handle weapons in the CK since their prior games. Essentially, I need help finding exactly which CK objects will need to be duplicated and modified to create a new Laser Rifle with the new textures.

 

Thanks!

[ArdentFlame]

Update:

 

I've duplicated the original weapon file along with all of it's corresponding mod files. Then I assigned all of the newly duplicated mods to the duplicated weapon so that the weapon wouldn't be drawing mods from the original laser rifle. After that, I got all of my necessary mesh files, opened them in NifSkope, changed the path of each file to draw textures from a folder that contains all of the retextures, and then saved them.

 

What I'm stuck on now is how to use or get around the material swaps that have been introduced in the new Creation Kit. I can go into the object template of each individual weapon mod and reselect a mesh file, but the Creation Kit still pulls up the original BGSM (material) files for that individual weapon piece mesh.

 

If anyone could tell me either how to use the material swaps feature or how to get around the Creation Kit pulling up these BGSM files on my duplicated mesh files, that would be great.

 

I've done this sort of thing a lot with Skyrim and older Fallouts, but the new material swap thing is messing me up.

 

Also, if someone tries pointing me in the direction of how to use the material swaps, answer me this: what is the difference between a BGSM file and a .dds file? The .dds is the standard texture format for meshes, so I don't understand what the BGSM is or what it's for.

 

Thanks for any help you can offer!

[EmissaryOfWind]

A BGSM is a file that basically tells the mesh all of the texture, shaders, etc info. You can either duplicate the BGSM used by your mesh and change it, then point to that changed BGSM in your mesh (the path is a txt string in the BSLightingShaderProperty) or just remove that path completely in the mesh, so the mesh will use the textures and settings in its BSLightingShaderProperty.

[ArdentFlame]

Thanks, that clarification helped. I definitely did not know that removing the path on the BGSM would make the mesh use the default assigned texture on it. I decided to try using actual material swaps to see how well they work, so I successfully duplicated the necessary BGSM files and redirected their paths to the correct textures.

 

What I'm running into trouble with now is getting the model to use the actual material I swapped the original with. I see that there's multiple ways to try doing this. Most tutorials say to go into the object template and edit the compiled files on the top left (whatever that section of the object template is called). With a weapon with this many mods, this would be complicated task. Instead, I found that you can go into the each individual weapon mod, click its individual object template, and there you can add material swaps. I did this with every weapon mod (grip, rifle barrel, etc.) but the textures still showed the default ones in game. Anyone know why?