Retexturing Tutorial

[sof76]

I've been toying with the idea of reskinning some armor models for myself, as none of the armor sets that shipped really suit my character, but I've had some trouble figuring exactly HOW to do this.

 

I downloaded the NIFtexture program that I know worked for Morrowind (not from experience), but I'm not sure how to get the actual NIF files from Oblivion to it, if that's even possible.

 

Once I can get at the actual texture files I'll be good as I'm quite proficient with Photoshop. However, that's really the only area where I have any idea what I'm doing.

 

If it's a simple process, I would appreciate it if someone could post their own tutorial, and if not, refer me to a good one.

 

Who knows, if someone helps me out and it comes out decent enough, I might even upload it here.

[deadguy]

there is something posted by Vortex that can help you here called the new equipment tutorial, basically it has a couple tools and some instructions that can help get you started skinning.

 

1. you will need a .bsa unpacking program such as TES4BSA which is a command line extraction tool

2. you need a .nif viewer like nifscope with a nif.xml file that lets you edit Oblivion .nif files

3. you need a plugin for photoshop to view .dds files

 

use the extraction tool to unpack "oblivion - textures - compressed.bsa" and "oblivion - meshes.bsa" into a temp folder, use the .nif viewer to open whatever object your mod will use and in the Block List (thats what its called in nifscope) find the target for the textures and change it to something you want for your mod (ex. "textures/wood/woodpost01.dds" to "textures/wood/moddedwood.dds") and copy the original target texture along w/ the _n texture and rename it to the modded name (ex. "moddedwood.dds" and "moddedwood_n.dds") the _n texture is the normal map and you usually dont have to mess w/ it. then open the new texture up in photoshop and do your thing.