A Guide to Nifskope Shader Flags that isn't completely f*#@ing useless?

[Omny]

Title says it all- I'm trying to do some modding with Nifskope and I want to know what the capabilities of the shader flags are so I can use them for interesting effects. At the moment I'm trying to see if I can make a texture appear visible even through solid objects, similar to the "Equal To" setting for Z Test Function in Effect Shaders on the GECK.

Trouble is, even after years of messing with it I still only have a rudimentary idea of what maybe five or six of them actually do, while the rest are a total mystery to me.

I tried looking up the definitions of some of them, but the most I found was this documentation on Nifskope, and much to my annoyance, almost all the definitions for shader flags listed are just... their name repeated, like so:

Shadow Frustrum: Shadow Frustrum

Tree Billboard: Tree Billboard

Vertex Alpha: Vertex Alpha

Like, okay... what the hell does any of that actually mean? This is the most useless documentation I've ever seen, who wrote this? I mean some of it seems self-explanatory, but I've been burned by assuming things before when modding. So does anyone know where I can find an actual explanation for these?

Honestly, this is one of the most frustrating parts about modding for me: I want to learn more about what this stuff does, but half the time when I try to search for something, I either end up getting answers that are vaguely written, deleted, outdated, or have never existed in the first place. You would think that these modding tools that have been around for nearly a decade would be more thoroughly documented.

[roadrunner12]

That document is simply for the NIF plugin for Blender, not for NIFskope itself, so is assuming you're already familiar with the terms. Open source stuff like this is often notoriously badly documented. A lot of the functions in NIFskope are defunct, never used, or only used internally, which is why there's is little information about them out there. For some of them, I don't think anybody really knows what they do. NIFskope isn't really a modding tool per se, it's more used for editing models that were created in a proper modelling studio, exported to NIF format, and then getting them into a Gamebryo-based engine game like Fallout or Skyrim.

Have you tried the site below? It's not perfect, but slightly better than the one you linked to and at least gives some working examples and is the best source I've found for this in relation to Bethesda games.

https://wiki.beyondskyrim.org/wiki/Arcane_University:NIF_Data_Format#Shader_types

If you want to get into modding at this level, you really need to know some stuff about how meshes, materials, and rendering pipelines actually work: not stuff that's specific to certain games or even NIFskope itself, I mean generic knowledge that's required for all 3D modelling. If you learn, for example, how to create a model from scratch along with its associated materials in something like Blender or Max first, then most of the options in NIFskope should already make some kind of sense. I suggest you look up the terms you're struggling with directly and do some general reading on the topic rather than looking for information related to a specific tool or game engine. There's loads of documentation out there for things like shadowing, environment mapping, parallax, verticies, alpha channels, billboards, frustrums, etc. with relation to rendering and 3D games.

Edited March 25 by roadrunner12