Help with Swapping, Hiding, Deleting, Disabling Textures from my favorite texture pack

[Apexcode1990]

I'm not a fan of the retexture for most skull and bones provided by Skyland Bits and Bobs Clutter Overhaul, Trolls and Human skulls and skeletons. Is there a way to Hide/Delete the textures from this mod? I prefer the vanilla textures for these specific Items, everything else is done very well in my opinion.

Could someone please tell if its possible and if so how can it be done?

[xkkmEl]

It is not always easy.  1st step is finding the texture files you don't want, then deal with them.

To find the texture files, you should:

1. find the corresponding objects in the CK or in xEdit and check if they use texture overrides or texture sets; if they do, note the filenames referenced.
2. find the corresponding objects in the CK or in xEdit and open the meshes/nifs in nifskope; note the texture file names referenced.

Once you know which texture files, determine if they replace a vanilla texture, or are entirely new texture files, by checking if the same from exist in the vanilla BSA files.

• If the texturesets reference new files, use the CK or xEdit to change them back to the vanilla filename
• If meshes reference new files, use nifskope to change them to the vanilla texture
• Otherwise, tell MO2 or Vortex to ignore the new file so the game reverts to the vanilla file

You can also be optimistic: directly tell your mod manager to ignore the mod texture files and hope that's enough.  You'll know it didn't work if the objects appear uniformly purple.  You still need to correctly guess which mods to look at, and which texture files to disable within the mod.

If you are unfamiliar with the CK, xEdit and/or nifskope, you'll obviously need further instructions to get it done.

[Apexcode1990]

On 2/28/2025 at 9:55 AM, xkkmEl said:

It is not always easy.  1st step is finding the texture files you don't want, then deal with them.

To find the texture files, you should:

1. find the corresponding objects in the CK or in xEdit and check if they use texture overrides or texture sets; if they do, note the filenames referenced.
2. find the corresponding objects in the CK or in xEdit and open the meshes/nifs in nifskope; note the texture file names referenced.

Once you know which texture files, determine if they replace a vanilla texture, or are entirely new texture files, by checking if the same from exist in the vanilla BSA files.

• If the texturesets reference new files, use the CK or xEdit to change them back to the vanilla filename
• If meshes reference new files, use nifskope to change them to the vanilla texture
• Otherwise, tell MO2 or Vortex to ignore the new file so the game reverts to the vanilla file

You can also be optimistic: directly tell your mod manager to ignore the mod texture files and hope that's enough.  You'll know it didn't work if the objects appear uniformly purple.  You still need to correctly guess which mods to look at, and which texture files to disable within the mod.

If you are unfamiliar with the CK, xEdit and/or nifskope, you'll obviously need further instructions to get it done.

Thank you for your reply. Using Nifskope, CK, and xEdit is beyond my knowledge scope unfortunately, The only thing I currently know how to do is find the Form Id of an object through informative console mod in game and set an initially disabled flag in xEdit to deal with some minor conflicts. I think being able to tell M02 to "ignore" a certain texture shouldn't be to hard for me to grasp if you're willing to elaborate further on the process? 

[xkkmEl]

In MO2, I double click on a mod which brings about a popup.  One of the tabs in this popup allows you to manage conflicts.  In this tab, I can right-click any of the mod's asset files and tell MO2 to disable or enable that version of the asset (the menu entries are called "hide" and "unhide").  It also tells me which other versions of the asset exist.  That's pretty much the gist of it.  Vortex and other mod managers will have similar utilities.

Sometimes, it's easy to guess which asset needs twidling (in your case, it'll have a filename "texture/....dds").  Sometimes the names of the assets are obscure and you'll have to go with trial and error.  Sometimes, an asset is used by multiple objects... and so enabling/disabling the asset could affect objects you did not intend.

Since you have "More informative console", you may still want to try nifskope.  When you click on an object, the console will tell you which nif model you are looking at.  Nifskope presents the model as a tree.  All the textures are referenced in tree nodes called "BSLightingShaderProperty"; finding those nodes is not difficult; just expand tree nodes until they appear.  This will help you identify the texture files you are interested in if they have obscure names.  Note that the textures in the nif can be overridden by records in the CK/xEdit but that's generally not the case.  In any case, inspecting a nif file with nifskope will not be harder than what you've been doing with xEdit (modifying a nif file on the other hand!).