New Wall Textures for a Prison (question)

[Jalex19]

Hi guys, relatively new to the F3 modding scene - I'm coming from Crysis and UT3 modding background. Mostly in F3 GECK I've been creating little dungeons to build my familiarity. Now I am looking at doing a prison for my mod.

 

Nothing in the Fallout 3 esm really suits what I need for my prison. I like the textures of UtlRm assets but it seems like OffRm are the best equipped geometry wise, to fit cell bars and the like (german townpolice).

 

Since I know very little about modeling, and nothing about using Nifskope I thought that it would be easier for me to create new textures for OffRm assets rather than try and make completely new walls.

 

Obviously I need to create a new item, so as I don't mess up existing assets in the game. I'm hitting a brick wall :wallbash: when attempting to do this thought and don't exactly know how to proceed. I've read some of the stickies but I'm still a bit confused.

 

For example, how do I create a new unique wall based on OffRmWall01.NIF?

 

I can see Bethesda has done it with OffRmWall01 - > OffRmWall01b and then replacing the carpet with a TXST? file. My first roadblock is just trying to duplicate the item (say I want to make OffRmWall01c) I can't find a way to do that, other than rightclick-> new, but then when I try and reference OffRmWall01.NIF as the model I cant, as it is greyed out. I tried a workaround by extracting the model from the BSA archive and it seems to work, however this seems like a waste of resources if I am referencing a model already in the game. Is there anyway to get this done without creating more files?

 

When I finish that step I assume I will need to create my own TXST files to retexture the walls? Or am I going about this completely the wrong way?

 

Any advice / tutorials you can point me to are greatly appreciated !

[BadPenney]

GECK doesn't seem to let you reference NIFs that are in the mesh.bsa. so I usually extract the one I want and create a texture set for it with new textures. Sometimes GECK will accept NIFs that have had textures applied to them in NIFscope, but usually it seems to want texturesets from what I can see.

[Pax1138]

You can create duplicates of things just by changing the name. When you press OK, GECK will ask if you want to create a new item or rename the old. Just choose OK and you'll have a new item free of all burdens to the vanilla game.

 

Also, the TXST entries refer to the list of Texture Sets in the main list under Miscellaneous. Here it is better to right click and add a new one. Your new textures (and normal map textures) will be in .dds format. There's a plugin on the Nexus that allows you to open/edit DDS files in Photoshop; if you don't have it, I think there's a way to make Gimp read dds files too.

 

Hope that helps get you down the road (probably to your next roadblock. Doh!)

 

-Pax