No Luck with Material Swap - Tried Everything.

[SkyEmerald]

Hi guys. I don't understand where I've gone wrong. I got it to work once, but never again.

 

I'm trying to do a simple texture swap for a prewar dress and have done the following. (Everything in the CK is correct as I have tested with various other vanilla BGSM files and the swap works fine - as long as it's not with my texture. So that leaves a problem with my dds file or my method of making the BGSM).

 

1. I edited the Prewar.dds file with the texture I wanted and generated mipmaps on export.

2. Then used Material Editor, placed dds file in the diffuse & normal sections and saved as BGSM.

 

As I said, everything in the CK works, and other swaps for things like frames have been successful using just the above. I just can't figure out what is going wrong with this dress! :(

 

Any help would be much appreciated. <3

[JonathanOstrus]

The way you described is a replacer not a material swap. Unless you made some sort of object mod and material swap record. Or a new armor item with the material swap record. Otherwise it sounds like you're doing it right. What is the result you're getting? An all purple outfit?

[SkyEmerald]

The way you described is a replacer not a material swap. Unless you made some sort of object mod and material swap record. Or a new armor item with the material swap record. Otherwise it sounds like you're doing it right. What is the result you're getting? An all purple outfit?

 

Hi there, I'm just seeing no change at all. It just stays as the default texture... almost as if the dds file is the original one, but it's not...it's the edited one. It's really strange and I'm clueless.. :/

[JonathanOstrus]

Ok lets try this again.

1. Are you trying to make a new clothing item with your new texture? Or are you trying to override and replace the original texture using the vanilla object?
2. What did you change? You said you edited your own texture dds file. I assume you used your own custom name?
3. You mentioned editing the bgsm as well. Was that also saved with a custom name?

[SkyEmerald]

 

Ok lets try this again.

1. Are you trying to make a new clothing item with your new texture? Or are you trying to override and replace the original texture using the vanilla object?
2. What did you change? You said you edited your own texture dds file. I assume you used your own custom name?
3. You mentioned editing the bgsm as well. Was that also saved with a custom name?

 

 

Okay so :)

 

1. I tried to make a new prewar dress (as in standalone retextured one), so I found the dds file for the original prewar dress and changed the texture, called it FancyPrewardress and exported it as dds file.

2. Then I opened Material Editor and made a bgsm file by pointing the defuse texture and normal texture to the FancyPrewardress.dds and called the file something unique also.

3. All files are in the correct folders (texture, material) and all the steps in the CK are correct - as I said, I tested using vanilla bgsms.

 

So, not sure what is going wrong here. :/

[Guerlot]

Not seeing it in your steps above but, did you do the Custom Swap in the Model of the Dress? In CK, when editing your custom dress. You need to click edit next to the Model path (.nif file), there is a drop down in there with Custom Swap as an option. Then, double click on the original bgsm file. type the name of your bgsm file and you should see a proper folder directory, then go select your bgsm file.

If it appears pink, no worries, CK may not have loaded your new texture yet. Reloading CK will fix it.

 

Also. if you have done the above, it could be the way you edited the .dds file. Keep in mind these files also have Channels (RGB and an Alpha) that could overwrite the actual regular layer. Need to check that in photoshop as well.

[SkyEmerald]

Not seeing it in your steps above but, did you do the Custom Swap in the Model of the Dress? In CK, when editing your custom dress. You need to click edit next to the Model path (.nif file), there is a drop down in there with Custom Swap as an option. Then, double click on the original bgsm file. type the name of your bgsm file and you should see a proper folder directory, then go select your bgsm file.

 

If it appears pink, no worries, CK may not have loaded your new texture yet. Reloading CK will fix it.

 

Also. if you have done the above, it could be the way you edited the .dds file. Keep in mind these files also have Channels (RGB and an Alpha) that could overwrite the actual regular layer. Need to check that in photoshop as well.

 

Well, the strange thing is, I have managed to get one of my retextures working but the other crashes the CK. Dress 1 works fine, appears in preview after changing model path (nif), but dress 2 crashes the CK as soon as I attempt to change the model (nif). I made the bgsms in exactly the same way. So that leads me to believe there is a problem with the dds texture file itself. Perhaps you are correct about the channels (RGB / Alpha), is there a specific channel it has to be? Perhaps I accidentally got one right and the other wrong! And by regular layer, you mean it has to retain the natural outline of the dress?

 

Thanks for your help btw! Much appreciated. :) :)

[skubblebubble]

make new dress item in CK: mynewdress

make a new MSWP record for this dress. mynewdresspolkadot

- in the mswp record, have the original bgsm swapped for your new one.

 

Now, in the newdress clothing item, choose edit for the nif path, and now under the swaps dropdown, you should see mynewdresspolkadot.

choose it, and it should work.

 

(use better names than what I did for this of course)

:)

[SkyEmerald]

make new dress item in CK: mynewdress

make a new MSWP record for this dress. mynewdresspolkadot

- in the mswp record, have the original bgsm swapped for your new one.

 

Now, in the newdress clothing item, choose edit for the nif path, and now under the swaps dropdown, you should see mynewdresspolkadot.

choose it, and it should work.

 

(use better names than what I did for this of course)

:smile:

Heya :) Thanks for this :P It's weird, this technique works fine for one of my dress retextures, but with the other dress retexture, the CK crashes. I might try remaking the second texture again, maybe I did something wrong somehow. I'll post what happens after remaking the texture, hopefully I can figure out what happened and not make the mistake again!

 

Thanks again :)

[damanding]

You might also look at the dress in Nifskope and make sure that it has the material file path in it. If they didn't set up the nif file with a material path to begin with it won't even let you do a material swap in CK, it'll just point to its default textures.