Newbie texture question

[Valistar]

Could someone explain to me, or direct me to an explanation, of how textures are applied to meshes in oblivion? I'm not terribly familiar with the topic, but I've spent the day messing around with nifskope, 3dsMax, and photoshop, and I'm completely lost. I've read about UV maps, but from the examples I've seen, the texture still has to be contiguous. All the Oblivion textures I've looked at are completely jumbled up and mismatched. No matter how that texture is wrapped around a mesh, it isnt going to look even remotely like a sword, or whatever. So, somehow or another, the game knows to cut and paste certain parts of the texture onto certain parts of the mesh. This is where I'm lost. I've looked through different items in nifskope, and it doesnt have anything I can find that would indicate that would do this....it just lists the texture file and moves on. So yes....confused. All the tutorials I've found seem to assume you know exactly how to do this, and the only directions they give are to fill in the texture name under NiSourceTexture, and then somehow its all magically applied the way its supposed to be.

[Sarya]

You'll need these two lines - "edit UV" and "Export template" (nifskope). The first will allow you to edit the UV map for a mesh, the second allows you to export it as an image file - like a grid. This is how it looks in Nifskope (head06 UV). From one newbie to another, I can't provide much more information, but it worked for me well :)

[Valistar]

You'll need these two lines - "edit UV" and "Export template" (nifskope). The first will allow you to edit the UV map for a mesh, the second allows you to export it as an image file - like a grid. This is how it looks in Nifskope (head06 UV). From one newbie to another, I can't provide much more information, but it worked for me well :)

 

Cheers, someone on another forum told me generally the same thing, though I admit I'm still baffled. The UV map still just looks like a jumble of random polygons to me, after fiddling with them in nifskope and 3dsmax. :-p

 

I might try to puzzle things out, but it seems like its a lost cause, for me.

[Sarya]

I don't know, it seems to be exactly the answer for your question. Sure, the vertices are not marked and there are a lot of them, but if you edit the UV map, you can see in nifskope's window how the texture changes on your mesh and exported template seems to be accurate when playing with texture details on it. I used those things for skin and hair, thus far it was precise. In any way, it's "try and see what happens", but still works.