Custom armor mesh doesn't want to be textured

[Osprey88]

I've exported a new armor mesh from blender but it seems that no matter what I do, I can't get a texture to show up in nifskope. Furthermore, it shows up invisible in construction set. What can cause this?

 

I exported it as being parented to the normal skeleton.nif, using both the default and a number of different options via the exporting menu.

 

edit: texture problem fixed, now trying to figure out why the mesh is appearing invisible

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

Do you have it UV mapped and everything?

 

Are the alpha chanels in your textures set up propperly?

[Osprey88]

The UV mapping isn't sensible, but it is unwrapped. I'm just using a consistent texture to test it - at this point, I did get the texture to show up in nifskope by messing with some things in Blender, but it's still showing up invisible ingame/in CS.

 

edit: just to clarify, the mesh itself is showing up invisible - the texture works presumably works fine.

[Nexus Set]

You have to specify the texture location in nifskope. Look for the NiSourceTexture Property of the mesh in nifskope and direct it to the location of your DDS texture file.

[Osprey88]

It appears I've already fixed the texture problem - I figured out that I had to specify that the mesh had a texture in blender - just adding the nitexturingproperty in nifskope alone didn't cut it. Right now, the only problem is that it's showing up invisible ingame/in CS. If somebody is particularly good with modeling here, let me know and I can send the .nif file - at this point I'm quite lost.

[Khet]

Hmm, is it showing up invisible while added to an NPC/Player? If I remember correctly, equipment needs to have a world model mesh/texture, not just an equipped mesh.

 

As to how you go about doing that, couldn't tell you. I only tried making my own mesh once before and failed miserably at it. Since then I haven't touched anything dealing with meshes that weren't already set up for me.

[Osprey88]

I never made a world model - figured that wouldn't affect the biped model at all. Let me go try that.. hopefully it'll work.

 

update: I tried using a normal game mesh's world model. The world model worked fine - I added my armor to the render window and it showed the game mesh's world model without any problems. Tried to put it on an NPC - same problem, invisible mesh.

[LHammonds]

I can verify that you cannot add a texture after the NIF is created. The texture must initially be created and associated to the model in the 3D modeling program prior to export.

 

If that is done correctly and you still have problems in-game, then it must be the format or path to the texture file.

 

#1 - Texture must be in DDS format. Also, make sure the texture is in a power of 2. e.g. 256 x 256, 256 x 512, etc. Reference: DDS Files, DDS Tools

 

#2 - Make sure the texture path inside the NIF is not hard-coded and correctly pointing to a DDS file that exists in the "Data" folder. Reference: How to fix hard-coded texture paths in NIF files

[Osprey88]

Everything seems to be in order.. but now that I think of it, the tutorial says that this problem can be caused by missing normal maps. I DO have a normal map in the same folder as the base texture, but do I have to do anything special in nifskope to tell it to use the normal map? I thought it was automatic.

[Osprey88]

Alright. I just got it to work, and I haven't the faintest idea how I did it. It had something to do with the skin partition though - for some reason the default settings on the nif exporter for blender don't do crap for getting a mesh to work.