[Skyrim LE] [Help/Request] Bow with "Neon" glow

[FennyPearce]

I'd like to preface this by saying I attempted to create a mod like this myself, but with my limited knowledge of pretty much every tool required to make such a mod, I haven't succeeded. I'm also making this in LE Skyrim because I'm tired of AE & SE mods getting ruined by Beth's updates.

I tried to take one of the game's bows (First Elven, then Glass) and re-texture it in an attempt to give it that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon neon bow look. However, the colors are always dull/normal, without any glow. Now yes, I realize there are a couple mods that add glowing bows, but they just aren't quite what I'm looking for, and besides they are for SSE. I'm essentially asking if there's anybody who can make this bow for me or at least point out what I'm doing wrong?

 

The steps I took are as follows. Remember - I am a complete noob at this. I found very few tutorials regarding texturing weapons, and 0 about glowing weapons or armor or anything.

 

1. Unpacked Skyrim - Meshes & Textures. Obviously.

2a. Opened the glass bow textures (glassbow.dds) in Photoshop (I followed the same steps for the Elven bow hence why I only mention Glass). Added the color I wanted for the 'neon' effect, and made a glassbow_n file out of it too, and also glassbow_m. (in the case of Glass it was called _envmask but from what I can tell it seems to make no difference, as I tried both.)

3. Copied glassbowskinned.nif and imported it in NifSkope, where I added the new textures. So far so good.

4. Added the loose files in the game's Data folder, replacing the glass bow (I tried creating it as a seperate weapon in Creation Kit but this is way faster, especially since I don't mind replacing the vanilla glass bow right now just to test all this).

5. Boom. It works... but it doesn't glow. The colors are there, but they're dull. Except the bowstring. For some reason the bowstring always has a very, very faint 'glow' actually, regardless of what I do to it. You have to squint really hard but it's there. (It's fine if I don't add a color to it)

 

2b. I tweak the colors to add a glowing effect (Outer Glow) to them. I even make a new envmask DDS file with different brightness tweaks. Regardless of whether I make the other DDS files for it or use the previous ones, there's hardly a difference. Even then the new bow ends up with dull/dim/normal colors anyway. Except now there are faint traces of that color all throughout the bow.

Going off a few tutorials I watched, and the Dark Nemesis Ebony/Eternal Shine for SSE I examined in order to create the _m/_envmask file, I take the glassbow.dds file I made and make it black & white. Regardless of whether I make the colored parts stand out more or not, I get the same result.

 

Basically, all I can do is recolor weapons and armor. (I assume it works like this for everything else).

 

 

Edited November 6 by FennyPearce