Comparing Texture Overhauls

[DEADLY9996]

Hey folks,

 

Whats the current, quickest way to compare Texture overhauls, I have Vortex that shows the conflicting files, and obviously i can open the mesh with Nifscope and see the texture, but no matter what i do i can't open two Nifscopes and compare different textures on the same mesh side by side, it just seems a little.. lacking in this day and age unless i'm doing it wrong... i can set two different folders, and a copy of the meshes in each, but regardless it will just load one set of textures.

 

 

Any help would be much appreciated!

[LarannKiar]

10 minutes ago, DEADLY9996 said:

Hey folks,

 

Whats the current, quickest way to compare Texture overhauls, I have Vortex that shows the conflicting files, and obviously i can open the mesh with Nifscope and see the texture, but no matter what i do i can't open two Nifscopes and compare different textures on the same mesh side by side, it just seems a little.. lacking in this day and age unless i'm doing it wrong... i can set two different folders, and a copy of the meshes in each, but regardless it will just load one set of textures.

 

 

Any help would be much appreciated!

You can open multiple instances of NifSkope but if you'd like one of them to render the mesh with another texture, you need to edit the texture or meterial path of this mesh in NifSkope.

Depending on how the .nif is structured, it should somewhere in ( Block list >> NiNode >> BSTriShape >> BSLightningShaderProperty >> BSShaderTextureSet >> something.dds ). Check ( Header >> Strings ) for .bgsm paths too.

[DEADLY9996]

8 minutes ago, LarannKiar said:

You can open multiple instances of NifSkope but if you'd like one of them to render the mesh with another texture, you need to edit the texture or meterial path of this mesh in NifSkope.

Depending on how the .nif is structured, it should somewhere in ( Block list >> NiNode >> BSTriShape >> BSLightningShaderProperty >> BSShaderTextureSet >> something.dds ). Check ( Header >> Strings ) for .bgsm paths too.

 

I remember NiNode from years ago but Nifscope seems to have changed a bit since,  NiTriStrips >> BSShaderPPLightingProperty >> BSShaderTextureSet 

but there is nothing there, i can't find the path to the texture in question.

 

 

 

...You know what, i just found out it's in a different box.. it was all symbols on the top bar yesterday until i turned them off, which i now see "block details" at the top which opens up a small box with the path to the texture.

 

So i shall give this a whirl and let you know if it works!

Cheers!

[DEADLY9996]

Heyo so thats working for me, just another quick question for anyone in the know, since i'm going through meshes to compare overhauls, is there a way to filter out meshes with no texture? as in those that come up white (as i'm singling out the overhauls only so don't have all the game textures loaded.

[Karna5]

Out of curiosity,, Deadly, what exactly are you comparing with regard to texture overhauls. If you want to see which will look better in game, you really need to check it in game and not through external browser because a well made 1k texture can look better than some 4k textures in-game.

For instance, some 4k terrain textures I've seen don't look three dimensional. They look simply like photographs on the ground.

[DEADLY9996]

Nifskope shows the texture on the mesh, and not just the texture that would be "flat" comparing textures that way unless you know exactly what you're looking at, like a ground texture, would otherwise be seriously hard to compare that way.

[DEADLY9996]

OK so i found an easier way to compare textures in nifskope.

 

Set both folders for the different texture overhauls in resources, then move them up/down and save. However you need to close the box and repeat, just seems so... early 2000, you would have thought they would have made it a little better.

[DEADLY9996]

So i came up with a way to run two different textures in NifSkope simultaneously, i tried Sandboxie, but that was a nope, changes in one window still altered the other, so i eneded up using a Virtual Machine, installing Win11 on that, and running Nifscope seperately that way... what a ball ache Windows has become to install offline..

 

So i have two texture overhauls in two different windows that i can compare without flicking back & forth. I did try two different versions of NifSkope, but when i loaded one of the two versions, when i tried opening the *other* version it would just open a new window of the version i had open...

[worm82075]

On 4/27/2024 at 8:47 PM, DEADLY9996 said:

 you would have thought they would have made it a little better.

Why? Nifscope is designed to modify meshes not compare them. What you are using it for falls outside the scope of the program's intended purpose. That is not a bad thing considering I have been using Nifscope for many years to build entire meshes, 3 vertices and 1 triangle at a time and that too is beyond it's intended purpose. I was using it to do this before the tooltip index popup was introduced and was manually numbering the vertices in order to efficiently make new triangles. I got lucky though and happen to be around during active development 6-8 years ago and had you or someone else been around then that was using the program as you are they might have made concessions to make this easier too.