Black Faces texture trouble.

[IkeCoast]

JinixElder, as I told you before, the "biped model" in the CS is not related to textures, but meshes.

 

But let's have a little step-by-step tutorial on how retexture a piece of clothing and create a new instance of it in the game.

 

First, take the mesh (.nif) and texture and normalmap (.dds and _n.dds) files for your piece and put them in a separate folder where you can easily find both.

 

Open the texture file with GIMP. In the right floating panel, in the Layers list, select ALL the mipmaps and DELETE them. Leave only the layer of the texture, the bigger one. Now, recolor the texture and modify it as you wish. You don't need to modify the _n.dds file, so leave it as is.

 

Once done, File - Export - give your texture an unique name - as DDS - Compression: DTX5 - Tick the Generate Mipmaps flag - OK.

 

Rename the normalmap to have the exact same name as your new texture, plus the _n suffix. For instance, if your new texture is newtexture.dds, the normalmap must be newtexture_n.dds

 

Now, take the nif file and place it somewhere INSIDE the Meshes folders of your game. Best practice is creating there a folder for your own mods, like Oblivion\Data\Meshes\MyMods.

 

Do the same with the colormap and normalmap for the texture. Put them inside the Textures folder, ideally in a new folder for your textures.

 

Now, open the nif file and change its texture. Remember to use a relative path (textures\MyMods\newtexture.dds, NOT C:\ProgramFiles\BethesdaSoftworks\Oblivion\Data\Textures\MyMods\newtexture.dds so double-click the texture path line, select everything that comes before "textures" (including the inverted tilted bar) and delete it).

 

Save the nif.

 

Open CS. Load the mod you want the new piece of clothing to be in. Find the original piece of clothing you use as a basis for your own, or create a new one. Open it. CHANGE THE ID TO SOMETHING UNIQUE, for instance MyNewShirt (no spaces nor weird symbols!). Change its Name if you want. Now, the rignt side of the Item window, under Male and Female (we will assume you only have one version, the Male one), click the first button, the one under "Biped Model". In the popup panel that appears, hit "Select asset on disk" and navigate to where your new shirt nif file is. If you created custom world model and icon for your shirt, you need to change the other two asset paths, "World Model" and "Icon Image". But for now, LEAVE BOTH BUTTONS UNTOUCHED.

 

HIt OK in the main Item window. A warning telling you that you changed the object ID will poput and ask you if you want to create a new Form. Click YES.

 

Put the new shirt on the NPC you want to use it. If everything looks fine in the CS, then test it in-game.

 

That's all.

 

Cheers!

[JinixElder]

Thank you so much for the helpful advice ... the first thing that made it all work was the ""...Compression: DTX5 - Tick the Generate Mipmaps flag - OK...""

I am using paintdotnet and my saves were in DTX1 and no mip maps.

Having noticed that...and making the changes... all my textures now fit on heads, ears and bodies. Whatever face I want to make and any body skin with any textured ears...(all without normal maps)

 

However, clothes are still the unsuccessful part, but I know what to do as it is just the matter of making .n maps...which I would have done by now if I didn't have a couple of days of recovering after some major crashes and lock outs from the CS. But all is well now and I'm adding lots of new races and faces and making everything far more interesting in my world. Not to mention a renewed interest in 3dmodelling with an old version of 3dmax 8 on a recovered hardrive.

So thanks again.

[IkeCoast]

JinxElder, a 3D mesh will show pitch black in-game without a normalmap. Your faces look fine "without" a normalmap because you named these textures the same as vanilla hones, "headhuman.dds", and since you did not provide a separate normalmap for them, the game applies the vanilla normalmaps. Try to rename your textures to something else and see what happens.

 

Here you have a really good tutorial on how to create normalmaps for Oblivion. It's for The GIMP, but I think the procedure can be used with Paintdotnet and Photoshop.

 

Cheers!

[JinixElder]

Thanks again...

Well I can just open any old texture change it to a dds - resize to 512 or 1024 and 'paste' it to a head - the head is humanhead.nif but I can call the texture anything I want.

Also, I can 'paste' and texture without _n.dds maps to any body nif and have done it with dozens of faces, ears and bodies.

In the last few days I have made over 20 different races using different textures All without doing anything with a _n.dds file.... BUT,

I have not been able to do it with clothes. So I'm sure that you are absolutely correct about normal maps, but it does not seem to be a requirement for faces and bodies.

 

I AM going to follow your instructions until I can do clothes.

I have 100s of different faces etc but their clothes are getting boring...

[Striker879]

Isn't a lot of the info for heads and bodies in the EGT files, whereas there isn't such a thing for clothes/armor??