I want to get started quickly with modding as there is much I wanna do... ;)

[Pellape]

So which tools are best for editing the textures with? textureediting must be the most common modding existing, is it not?    Lets make life easier than it already is then or more complicated. That is a matter of your choice for the proper tool for every different stuff we need to edit. Well, what I mean is, that there are easy tools to use and tools that are extremely hard to learn and that is a fact but still, nothing is impossible.

Gimp from https://www.gimp.org/ is a free tool for manipulating pictures and I have used it since 1996 when it was version 0.96 if I recall correclty.    It has plugins for the DDS format and also simple tools for making normals.

The plugins are found here: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-dds/

The normal map editor is found here: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/

We can make nomalmaps by hand in Blender too as I did that during the week as a school project as we where forced to make it.    was it fun?  Well yes and no...     Useful?  Well yes, extremely useful if you manage to make the right normals for the right stuff as it sure makes life easier to make them by hand, mostly, well what other way is there?  Mostly the pictures has the right lightning so the bump maps are easy to make but not always. It is a way to present what is whilte and what is black in a real picture with color codes and mostly, most textures have the right light set.

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Commersial editors?

Now we talk about the real hot stuff, how to make the impossible possible with the Adobe suit and this is not free stuff, as it is extremely expencive, well at least for a student like myself but I do have an student account for every Adobe program ever created. Why is there so many Adobe programs and why cannot one single do it all?  Adobe buys other companies solutions and they do not remake them just make them better and sell them separately to get as much dollars as possible to their company.    It is not wrong, as then you only get what you pay for and nothing else. Lets say you only need photoshop? Why pay for Substance Sampler when you will not use it?

Photoshop: This might be the worlds most advanced editor, now with inbuiilt AI even but it demands that you have the right hardware or it will be impossible to even install. I did try to install the Adobe Suite installer even at my old HP from 2007 and that did failed completely. You need a new CPU and a new and advanced GPU. The buttons fr shortcuts differ from gimp. They look the same but are not the same to use, so I have a pure hell trying to learn how to use it. It sux and it is so darn frustrating to get the stuff the way I want it with this bloody tool. It has DDS import/export, and even an inbuilt damn good normal map editor right now but Adobe wrote that the normal map editor will no longer no supported so they will ditch it. Why ditch such a cool editor?  I bet they will make it into a separate product.

Normal maps can even be made online and I used that tool as well for Oblivion and Skyrim. That is all you need honestly, ever.

https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/

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I make a new post as i need a short break anyway

[Pellape]

UV editing. What is UV anyway?  We do have 5 coordinates basicly inside a 3D object, not 3. The object it self has 3 coordinates + angles. lets count: Coordinates, angles well, you get the picture, it is unrelevant anyway for making graphics. U and V is the coordinates inside a picture. x, y z is the coordinates for a 3D object and the angle. in which direction the front is pointing. That is all you need to know.

Both NifSkope and Blender has cool and nice UV editors and I learned to use them when I remade some nasty UV that Bethesda made in Anvil harbor or rather, all Beth UV is nasty as they do cheat. So how do they cheat and make UV maps and their textures the way they do? Well it is not their way as it is a common way of making the stuff this way, it is global and we also learn it in school. Best tools for making UV and textures today must be Blender combined with Substance painter and substance sampler.

Substance painter will bake the UV for you and you only need to paint the 3D stuff directly on the surface of your grey 3D object. You do not need to care about how the actual texture will look like in the end as Substance painter sort that out for you, It is not free and I do not know the price. i use my student license anyway.

Substance Sampler can make the 3D maps, that we use in painter, so there you make them from scratch, from photos or what ever source you might have. i take a lot of photos that I use and the best tip is to take the photos when the sun is behind the clouds, well a cloudy day or they are useless in games or in 3D at all and i learned this the hard way when i started with the anvil harbor as my wooden boards where to bright to fir in game at all, bright and reddish and ugly. Light is everything when it comes to good pictures and good textures. Light, reflections, roughness, well you name it. It is all illusions anyway and has nothing to do with the reality, I guess. I work so much with these tools that I really mix up what is real and what is not real. is the elephant really pink? Yes it is, when it is covered with pink stuff. What is not real is that Dumbo can fly with his ears as that requires their ears to be at least 17 meters long and hard as rocks or steal    Then they can fly as well.

Time to get dressed up, going out in the rain with my 3 dogs. Damn i hate it and now when I am old as I am, I do have ache in my bloody old legs and limbs. i do suspect i will get lame within a few years and it does not matter if I walk the dogs, stretch my legs or whatever i do, they still ache as hell.     See ye all laters.  i do hope i did not frighten you off the forum with all these info? I do suspect the list is fairly complete now about all tools needed for modding Starfield. i might have missed something, well yes, I will later peek at my papyrus scripts that i managed to make a year ago.

1. Reselling stuff per auto from a chest

2. Moving the Dvemer horse to the player.

All that is needed to to rename the variables I guess, or name the different variables in the same way as they where in Skyrim but does it matter which as it will take the same amount of time anyway. I love to optimize my work as I m a lazy bastard after all 

Edited December 9, 2023 by Pellape

[Pellape]

All known ini settings so far

https://stepmodifications.org/forum/topic/19019-starfield-default-values-for-all-known-valid-ini-settings/

[Pellape]

The current state of  Nifskope when I run it at my computer right now. It does open the BA2 archives and browse the meshes and show some structure of the NIF itself but thats it, no graphics yet

Not a single pixel in the right window. Well one day there will be at least a single pixel     meanwhile we should play the game as it is...    Are we in a hurry really?  No way    I will build a base anyway now  today, a new base...     That will be fun.

[aurreth]

Double click on the nif, then change to the Block List tab.  That will make things show up on the right window.

[Pellape]

Well I just tried that on a couple of objects and the only thing I could see is when I clicked on a couple of NiNodes, the so called Empty in Blender... 

Well I am still in no hurry as we need CK before I can do anything useful with my old meshes anyway...  

It can also be so that we should unpack the ba2 first with another unpacker and then load the nif into NifSkope?   I try that tomorrow and we see if I can see anything else than a green spot, the NiNode origin....

Edited December 18, 2023 by Pellape

[JaeDL]

If you want any help getting started with xEdit, hit me up on Discord! It's an amazing tool!

[Pellape]

Cool. Thanks. I have been using it time to time for both Oblivion and Skyrim and did some minor editing in it for Starfield, so I am fine at the moment. What I want is to have CK and start to build a cool base, make a new faction and add some quests.

The Blender importer/Exporter has been available at Nexus for some time. https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/4360

Blender: https://www.blender.org/

Edited January 13 by Pellape

[bf109mmm]

I can help you solve the invisible mesh problem. In NifSkope, click options, then settings. Go under Resources and add these shown below. Under Archives, you can just click auto detect.

I too want to start modding Starfield, but the tutorials so far are non existent.