Derrax

The original mask doesn't use or need vertex colors; yours has them checked on. So toggle 'em off. Second and more important thing: This mask uses tangent space normal maps (easy to see since they're blueish). Unlike the rainbow-colored object space normal maps you'll find on player bodies, these require the mesh to have the property "Has Normals" to be set to YES. Export it out of 3dsmax with normals. Or you tick the property to YES in nifscope and then update the tangent spaces from within there, though no guarantee it'll look nice. Also check your skinning, seems like you skinned part of one horn to the clavicle or so.

Might help if you'd put your broken *.nif somewhere - like mediafire, dropbox or so - and link to it so others can take a look :pirate:

Yush, just this thing uses the NiAlphaProperty, which I've seen behave all weird without vertex colors present for those fur-patches on various creatures. That and look up the ShadowMere's nif file, for instance, and check out the vertexes around the eyes - they'll have a reddish tint and some vertexes are fully red. On the regular horses, vertex colors are set to white, but also enabled in the game's original files.

Well there you go x] That is a totally washed-out specular map. Darken it, a lot more than it is right now, it's too bright overall. Select the content of that alpha channel, paste it onto a new regular layer. Add a levels- adjustment layer and try dragging the black value to .. Iunno. 180?ish? Mid-value to 0.78? Something like that, you really need to get rid of most mid-greyish parts. Then copy the alpha channel from it's regular layer, delete it, and paste the darker stuff back into the alpha channel. Experiment!

http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/1966/spechelp.jpg Get the idea now, sergyu? :thumbsup:

You have a bunch of nodes floating around in your *.nif file that aren't linked up to anything- nodes no. 107-111 You might want to remove them - they're at the bottom of the file. Another thing I notice is that some of your NiTriShapes have the property arrangement flipped. You want to have the BSLightingShaderProperty listed before the NiAlphaProperty, not the other way around. The game seems to need that order of the nodes. Also your custom mesh has textures assigned to it in the BSShaderTextureSet that are specified as .jpg. Obviously you need to convert them to .dds and fix the filename in those paths. Additionally their paths seem to be incomplete. For instance, you point to "horsearmor01.dds". The path should be "textures\actors\horse\horsearmor01.dds" if you plan to place the textures in that location later on. Also, none of the meshes in your file has the property "Vertex Colors" set to 'yes'. You need to set that to yes on all NiTriShapes; you find that property on the NiTriShapeData node.

He means to darken the alpha channel of the normal map that you created. In Photoshop or your image editing sofware of your choice, look at the channel palette and check out the alpha channel that you'll see along the red, green and blue channels. As you know, the game sets the intensity of the specular hilights by reading the Alpha channel that's stored with the normal map - if you have that white or comparatively speaking rather bright grey, you'll wind up with what you see happening right there in your case - uniform glossyness that's not very realistic. Make it black and you disable the specs, darker if you just want less of them. Even better would be if you make a custom specular map for your edited texture. Or just copy the alpha channel from the original normalmap and paste that into the one of your modified texture.

Guys, the amount of RAM that an application can address is not only limited by the operating system you use / the amount of RAM that you've got available, but also if the executable itself is 32-bit or not. In the case of Skyrim, the game's executable is 32-bit, so the 4GB switch is the best you can get on a 64-bit operating system. It CAN'T allocate more memory than that. :U The only way you can get the game to make use of 8GB or more would be to recompile the executable so it's a 64-bit one, and since Bethesda is the only one with the sourcecode of the game to accomplish that, you won't get the game to use that additional memory no matter how many flags you try to set on the current 32-bit app.

Genital talents now, hmm? That's something I haven't heard yet x]

jwcurry, the original sizes of all the bird's nest textures are 512 by 512 pixels - they're square textures. I don't know how you come to the conclusion that their size must be 1023x512 pixels.. Maybe you made a mistake after you had imported them? To make it work, make sure that the texture you're saving out is SQUARE just like the one you got from the game, so 512x512 or 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 or if you really think it's necessary, 4096x4096 pixels. Not 1023 or 4092 or any strange numbers in the dimensions or anything like that. As for why your texture is off, the game is mapping the wrong part of your texture to the mesh because the texture is not falling into the UV texturespace of 0-1 (your texture is wider than it should be, if I take your initial post as still valid).

I don't see how the horse textures are different from any other textures in the game.. Since you specifically ask if he created a horse texture with 'em before. All you want is to export them from Photoshop using the nvidia plugin, with the settings DXT5 with interpolated Alpha, 2D Texture, Generate MIP maps. You should be good to go then, so give it a try! PROOF: http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/8940/proofay.jpg

Hm. I have success in skinning separate meshes to the same skeleton and have them show up in the game - did you make sure that your new things have UVs, a dismemberment node and got a BSLightingShaderProperty copied onto them from one of the meshes in the original game file? Not sure if the way you edit the meshes is the right one or not, but I do that below the skin on the Edit Mesh node that is already in the scene. It does not screw anything up(at least has not done so for me so far as long as you're just appending new meshes or reposition the vertexes of the existing ones); newly appended meshes will get a default weighting based on the closest bones which you can then tweak by hand.

f*** yeah!! If you wouldn't be a guy, I'd want to have your kids now :D Works indeed so I can attach new things to them! Which throws up a whole bunch of new problems because I'm essentially trying to attach a new mesh that has it's own separate textures, which isn't working out all too well, but I'll get somewhere in due time as I can see what the heck I'm doing now :D As for the werewolf morphing sequence (relevant to other modders, too!): The game does not morph directly to the malebodywerewolf_1 - mesh. It morphs to an intermediate one (that FX mesh - Which does not have eyes or teeth since it's never seen from the front, as you can't move the camera during the transformation sequence! So no point modding that) and then quickly toggles to the malebodywerewolf_1 without any morphing once the animation sequence is complete, so any new mesh additions pop in place at that time as well. No issues so far :] So this is good news for anyone who is interested in modding werewolves as well as you can freely do whatever you want to the malebodywerewolf_1.nif without screwing anything up.

It would certainly be helpful if you'd mention WHAT mesh you're having trouble with :P

Yeah that's because of the assigned renderer in 3dsmax. Keep in mind that the plugin is very much a work in progress at the moment anyway, so glitches are to be expected. Anyway the solution to your issue is going into your Render Setup (F10) and make sure that the Default Scanline Renderer is assigned to your scene. Chances are you have set it to MentalRay or iRay at the moment. MentalRay doesn't play well with the shader and crashes. The Default Scanline renderer doesn't, neither does Vray (won't work with that, but won't crash)