hi, thank y'all for responding, i mostly just make retextures so i'm a little bit out of my depth here lol @madmongo: this is what glassesblackrimmed.nif looks like in nifskope (sorry about the terrible colors) -- it seems to be all one mesh and the lenses are just alpha channel in the diffuse. as you can see it just mirrors the two halves of the glasses http://i.imgur.com/GW0Zq9z.png i don't know a dang thing about uv mapping i was able to locate the uv map, but this is pretty much as far as i got http://i.imgur.com/HwYIiUC.png the next steps seem to be duplicating those coordinates and mapping them to the proper parts on the mesh -- i'll search around and see if i can't figure out how to do it in nifskope, but i may need to grab blender and try it there @raywatson65: i've been able to change the transparency/add details to the diffuse itself (base and alpha), luckily, although the dropped item mesh doesn't read the transparency and it seems to be a problem with the vanilla files (i was able to make the lenses semitransparent in glassesblackrimmed.nif by tweaking values in the nialphaproperty subnode, but glassesblackrimmedgo.nif has different nodes and i'm not too concerned about the global item anyway)