Help with modeling

[Kalizar]

Hi,

I've been having a problem with NIFskope where models just don't get saved properly; whenever I try to load a model in the GECK, even if it's just replacing the texture and saving it as a new name, it just appears as the red exclamation mark error message. I'd really like to get into retexturing creatures for my mods, and maybe even get to do some stuff with weapons, but I just can't do that until I get NIFskope to work. I have Windows Vista, if that matters.

 

This same thing happened when I tried modding oblivion; even when I didn't edit any aspect of the mesh, it showed up as an error when placed in the world, so it's definitely a problem with NIFskope saving in general.

[blue_fox]

Have you done the archive invalidation?

[Kalizar]

Yes, I've done archiveinvalidation; I play with MMM on and various other mesh-adder-inner-mods. Unless there's some ArchiveInvalidation for NIFskope itself, I'm clear on that department.

[pkleiss]

EDIT: If you are getting red exclamation points, that means the game cannot find the mesh specifed in the object its trying to render.

 

If you are just making a new texture for an existing mesh, you don't need to save a new mesh from Nifskope. Instead you make a Texture Set object in the Geck and apply that to a copy of the object you are trying to re-texture. You can create a whole new nif as well, but you will have to be extra careful to change all of the path / file names for the textures you are changing. A single mesh may have many BSShaderTextureSet Nodes and the new textures would have to be placed in every node that needs them. Then you have to make a new object in the Geck and point its model to your new nif.

 

Perhaps its worth repeating the process at this point.

 

Creating a new texture for an existing mesh using Geck Texture Sets:

 

1- Open you mesh in Nifskope and expand all the BSShaderTextureSets and make note of all the textures, those you want to change and those you won't be changing as well. (the .dds files).

2- Extract all those textures from the textures BSA file.

3- Using GIMP (or whatever) make your changes to the textures and save them as new dds textures that generate mipmaps and use DXT1 (no alpha) or DXT5 (with alpha) compression.

4- Create a new Texture Set object in the Geck. Make sure to insert all textures used by the mesh. In Nifskope, the texture set may have had a diffuse (.dds), a normal (_n.dds), a glow (_g.dds), emmisive / environment (_e.dds) or an environment mask (_m.dds). Your new texture set needs to point to these files as well. In the case of just changing the colour of a texture, you will just make a new diffuse texture, but you still need your texture set to include all of the other textures you saw in the mesh from Nifskope. You will have to extract these files from the BSA as well so that you can point your texture set slots to these files. Then you can delete them (just don't delete your new textures). Note that the order that textures appear in Nifskope IS NOT THE SAME as the order of the texture slots in a Geck texture set object.

5- Make a copy of the original Geck object that you are making the new texture set for and give it a new ID. Click on the 'Edit' button next to the model path/file. From there, right click in each slot that has text, select 'New' and add your new texture set. You may have to add your texture set to several slots. As you add the texture set objects to the slots, the preview window should update the model with the new textures.

6- Save your new object, place it in the render window and test it out in the game.