Bizarre Black Surface Problem

[Eadwulf]

Right, so I'm doing a retexture of a sword, and I went through the standard procedure for doing so. I load it in-game, and this is what I get:

 

http://img694.imageshack.us/i/screenshot0c.jpg/

http://img412.imageshack.us/i/screenshot1gy.jpg/

http://img704.imageshack.us/i/screenshot2z.jpg/

 

As you can see, the entire surface is black. However, the normal map loads just fine. I've actually had this issue before (as have many modders), and it was just a matter of correcting the paths for the texture/normal map files. Well, the paths are entirely correct, as well as the alpha channels for the normals, but I'm still getting this issue. Everything loads fine in Nifskope, and the appropriate files are have been archive invalidated. I'm guessing this is an issue with this specific model, as I also did the texturing for the armour that my character is wearing in the screen shots, and as can be plainly seen, they're working just fine. I can't seem to find any documentation on this particular problem, and I'm starting to get a little frustrated with pointlessly trying to tweak things to no avail.

 

Any thoughts?

[Vagrant0]

When exporting, make sure that either you have vertex colors turned off, or that you have set a color for every vertex. Often, imported meshes will be exported with black vertex colors, which causes this appearance.

 

If it's not that, then it is a texture which is not being found or is improperly formatted.

[Eadwulf]

Doesn't appear to be a vertex colour issue; what formatting do you suggest for the texture files?

[Eadwulf]

Well, after some trial and error, I managed to find out that it was the base texture that was causing the problem. The devil's in the details; it needed to be in DXT 1 - no alpha instead of DXT 3 - explicit alpha. At any rate, it's working now, and I can continue refining this blasted texture.