SSE Help making a custom weapon mod

[Grindafane]

Hi! I am very new to modding but I made a sword and shaded it in blender and now i want to put that sword into Skyrim, how do I go about this? I have gotten the model of the sword into nifskope and i am pretty sure i can figure that out the rest of the way I've found enough guides on that, but i have absolutely no clue how to make the dds textures. Is there a way to export the shading that i've already done in blender to a dds format? Im guessing not but that would be awesome! If not, How do i make the texture? and what platform should i use?

[scorrp10]

Are you familiar with texture baking in Blender?

My workflow is I bake the textures into image textures - Diffuse, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, and save those images as .png.

Then I use Adobe Photoshop. If there are transparencies, I add them as alpha channel on the diffuse. Specular (Roughness) goes in as alpha on the Normal. Metallic becomes the environment map.

I use Nvidia texture tool plugin in Photoshop it to export to .dds

[Adventurer1111]

You can use Gimp (free graphics software) with a .dds add-on to adjust the texture. At a high level you can Export the texture file as a .png from Blender then the .png can be opened in GIMP then export to .dds. You will want to scale image down I usually use 1024x1024 (has to be even numbered) and this is a low scale so it takes less memory.

 

I export with BC3/BX5 which includes transparency and generate mipmaps for texture and normal files.

 

Good luck with your mod!