SSE Unique Meshes & Textures for Tempered Armor & Weapons

[LogicRock]

I found a thread for oldrim that dates back to 2012 asking about having unique meshes & textures for different levels of tempered items. One person said it's theoretically feasible. Here's the post: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/687087-tempered-textures/

 

The premise is the models and textures look "nicer" and "cooler" as the weapons and armor get tempered to higher levels. Base levels look similar to vanilla in their aesthetic, and progressively look better and better up to legendary.

 

For example, start Daedric armor without the glowing effects, and otherwise close to vanilla appearance, then tempering it adds the glow back, removes battle damage, gets environment mapped, such and such.

Metallic armors can start from looking normal and get shinier and more polished as they level up.

 

Iron armor starts looking pretty cruddy and rusted and then gets polished and shiny.

 

I have been looking through the creation kit and figured out how to change .nif paths and such. To my current knowledge, it looks like I will need new mesh and texture folders for each tempering level. For example, here's what I did for Blades armor:

 

 

Same sort of file structure for textures too.

I'm thinking I should change the default path for armor to the "base" folder as you see here. This way people can't mistakenly overwrite the base models and textures.

 

I just need some pointers regarding getting the tempered items to change file folders. I see the tempering recipes and the "created item" thing shows the armor. Now, this part is confusing, because it looks like I'd have to make a new armor/weapon and have the tempered recipe create that item, which would have the new meshes and textures. But if that's the case, how does the tempering buff apply to that?

 

 

It's been years since I used the creation kit so forgive me for being ignorant of the details. Any help is appreciated. I'll do the work myself and if I get it to work I'll show a proof of concept video.

 

 

EDIT:

 

Ive learned a bit since yesterday. I think it could work. I’m trying to take inspiration from how the Stormcloak and guards armors work.

 

Ok so I know that I can use the original mesh file paths and have texture sets similar to the guards armors. Although, .nif files contain the data for making shiny and reflective armors, so if I keep it to one .nif that one will have to share shininess across all tempered levels.

 

One idea is to use more .nif files for more customized appearances. But how would that effect performance?

 

Does the game use more data by loading two different .nif files from two different folders, even if their geometry is the same? The .nifs aren’t even 500kb but each nif would fetch different textures.

 

Imagine this:

 

Seven NPCs or mannequins are dressed in full Blades armor, each one has a different tempered level. And each tempered level has different textures.

 

Now, at that point, would it kill performance if each tempered level also used a different .nif file? Or would it make no difference?

Edited December 21, 2021 by LogicRock