okay, twice more, (after a long break due to my boneheaded failure to keep track of the disk) I have attempted to import a model into oblivion. the first time, I applied a phong material onto my model in softimage xsi, I got the same result as last time; the flower could not be found. second time, I applied a modified phong material, with the texture on it, and exported it into nifskope. I found the purple flower, set texture paths, and showed it the name of the texture like in almost every tutorial, I didn't see the texture but, undeterred, I exported it to oblivion, this time it was purple! a nice shade, and i believe, a step up from gray, but not looking like the door it was supposed to. the object has been triangulated the object is one mesh it has been uv mapped modeled in xsi exported as wavefront .obj imported to nifskope never saw the texture appear in nifskope I'm pretty sure the the .dds with the colors is a texure I have a normal map any suggestions to my problem?