How Do You Retexture an Imp?

[David Brasher]

Is there something unusual about the imp model that prevents it from being retextured like normal?

 

In the past I have retextured soul gems, weapons, armor, clothing, a dog and a bear. So I think I understand the procedure and am not making any really obvious mistakes.

 

I go to retexture my imp model which is a duplicated renamed version of Data\meshes\creatures\imp.nif

 

Its texture is a duplicated renamed version of Data\Textures\creatures\imp\imp.dds with

Data\Textures\creatures\imp\imp_n.dds

 

In the CS I have a renamed creature with a new form ID bearing the new mesh.

In NIFSkope I have attached the new .dds to the .nif.

 

In the CS and in-game, my imp is invisible. I can fight it and kill it and loot its corpse, but I can't see it.

 

I suspected my new installations of Gimp and Nifskope were faulty. So I followed the same procedure and retextured my scamp. It worked just fine! It looks different now, just like it is supposed to.

 

What is going on?

 

 

EDIT: Nevermind. It started working again for no good reason. I might have been able to witch it by jerking around the save formats. One of them rendered as grey. Then I saved again with the default setting. It sort of defies logic.

[jacobe0100]

same thing happened to me my imps are invisible except for their head. so it looks like a floating head i need help in making its body visible again if you can help please reply..

[Hickory]

You might want to take a look at Mythic Creatures.

[Telyn]

Recently I installed a well known region mod which retextured imps and some animals. After that I had problems similar to the ones described in this thread. I'm not sure what is different about imps, but the only replacement textures for imps I have found which work properly are from Mythic Creatures. No idea why imp textures are problematic, but Mythic Creatures does texture them correctly. Excellent textures, too. The Mythic Animals mod by the same author is also very useful for correcting texture problems with rats and other animals that some mods create. I couldn't play without them. Or rather, I could, but I would have to give up some nice mods which otherwise work fine. For anyone who is experiencing black or invisible/transparent animal or creature textures, I agree with Hickory, have a look at those mods.

[David Brasher]

When I retextured my red imp, which has been used in The Forgotten Realm Update and which I will let people use as a modders resource, I think the thing that made it work was using default settings in GIMP when saving the .dds. It appears that you cannot use any sort of compression or save in any other formats which use less memory than the default. So just bite the bullet and make a large .dds file, and be sure to play-test to see that your new imp is not broken.

[Telyn]

Oh, that's interesting. That would never have crossed my mind. This must be what happened with the rats I downloaded that had transparent bodies. When alive, they had holes in them and when they died, they had intact heads and ghost bodies. Never seen anything like it. I am just learning to mod, so your information will be really useful to me. Is it just some animals and creatures or all of them?

[David Brasher]

In addition to my imp, I have retextured a bear, a wolf, a spiggan, a hunger, a scamp, and a fire atronach. I never had invisibility problems with any of them except for the imp. I have reason to believe that GIMP is weak in this department and is not good at saving .dds files in various formats and compression levels and having them still function with Oblivion. It is clearly not the program that Bethesda used when making the game.

 

But GIMP is free and quite stable and works well in general, so I would say go ahead and use it, but if you ever end up making an invisible retextured creature with it, then back up and save the file in the default format with no compression.