Recoloring Question on Projectiles

[Campaigner]

Recently, I learned how to texture stuff and put it ingame. I was incredibly overjoyed when I finally learned the trick to doing it right, so I made a few recolors (as seen by the one I uploaded recently, give it a look and criticize my poor retextures!), but in my haste I didn't bother to try and make new laser colors and such. That brings me to today's fun flop; I could not get the color of the lasers to change. I'm trying to fix up the weapons I made yesterday, specifically the gold laser pistol, with energy colors to match the scheme of the weapon. I made four edited meshes for the lasers (one yellow, one rainbow for the laughs, one dark red, and the other a sickly brown/green monstrosity). I also wanted to edit the plasma effect, melting and remains included, but didn't know where to get that texture so I steered clear of accidental file breaking. Now, I got the colors just as I wanted for the lasers, but when I went to nifskope to put them into the game files, it didn't work. The lasers are the generic color, and I don't even get the option to put what I made into the GECK. So, here's my list of questions for today's mod learning:

 

1. I have edited the texture for the beam and created a new dds (laseryellow.dds). How do I get this into the game? I understand nifskope to an extent, so a simple explanation would suffice. Though, a detailed "Teach the dummy" guide wouldn't hurt ;D

2. How would I go about changing the color of the plasma projectile, plasma crit death effect, and the pile of goo color? Is it as simple as a quick texture swap, or are there other technicalities I gotta work with?

 

 

As a side note, I also wanna recolor an enemy, and I have the edited texture all ready to go. How do I import that into the GECK? New model, or some option to choose the texture in GECK?

 

EDIT: Also, how do I get the lasers to be bright ingame? I did something to my settings with the ATI mod on the nexus, and had to lower some settings due to a slightly bad video card. My lasers and all glowing textures suddenly went kaput, and I want my awesome bright glows back. What option was that to turn on the increased glowing effects?

Edited March 5, 2011 by Campaigner

[MonsterMonkey]

Well I did Changed the color of plasma bolt and it's simple as hell (i always try the easiest way before askin' for tutos and sometimes it's just workin') i 've changed it in nifskope by changin the nimaterialproperties color sheme (palette icon).

 

I made it purple, renamed it "PurplePlasma" and edited the projectile in geck so it uses my new purple mesh, if you want to edit the "impactdata" and "crit effect" (green gellow) to have it purple too, do the color trick in nifskope and after open the GECK, type filter "Impactdata" or "impactenergygreen" for replacing the plasma impact effect , and criteffects = goolification for replacing the critical effect (green gellow), in other words replace original meshes with yours, and that's it.

 

And for the textures if you want to recolor an existing model, an easy way to do it is to name your new texture the same name as the original and paste it to the same directory, in fact, it's a trick because original textures are compressed in "texture.bsa", so open it with FOMM and find the directory of the original (ex: Data\textures\armor etc...) and you ll'have to paste your own in the data\textures etc.. folder in thze Fallout directory, it's important to imitate the same directory of the original, so with the invalidated\invalidation option of FOMM the game will search in data folder before texture.bsa.

 

Ok i like doin' teacher stuff maybe you already know what follows but i'm in the mood so i give my tricks.

 

I prefer creating new forms by renaming the projectile with something like PlasmaPurpllewhatyoulike so it keeps the original if something go wrong...

There are fun applies for this trick, i made a new projectile called meteorbullet, i turned the plasma bolt to be yellow/red, i edited the scale to make it a little smaller, and replaced the original "plasmatrail" with "missile smoketrail"...how?

Look...by just opening 2 nifskope windows one with plasmaprojectile02 and the other with the missile and after that searching for addonnodes (if you dont know see it in the GECK you'll see these forms are particles like trails etc...) and in nifskope remove the branchs addonodes on plasma/ then copy addonnodes branchs from missile then on plasma right click on the first node (0) and paste branchs... and that's it, just simple and workin fine.

After that i reedited it in the GECK so the projectile go as fast as a bullet and put an explosion effect (grenade) with twice the radius on impact (when you level up the radius it level the size of the mesh too... you can make gigantic explosion if you like, hmmmmm.... it's just give me the idea of creating a enormous nuclear explosion with the nuka, i'll try it ) .

 

Of course this is not Pro.

But this method is very fun, and allows you to create impressive mods!

You can, as an exemple copy shoulders from an armour to another etc..., and believe me it works, sometimes the textures just go well together, and of course sometimes it don't so you 'll have to do your own, this method allows you to edit or correct any models without knowing much about modeling (wich is tuffffff, i passed 2 week just to understand 5% of blender).

For exemple you want to remove shoulders of metal armor, just extract thr mesh from fallout "meshes.bsa" with FOMM then open it with nifskope clic on the shoulders in render window, right-clic go to "blocks" , remove branch (not just remove block or you'll have warning) save as then rename it and you're good.

 

Anyway i'm tryin' (for weeks now) to find a way to make energy projectiles cast light on other object as it travels, just like a spotlight would do, i think it would be very impressive to shoot in a Metro tunnel and see your plasma bolt enlight it from floor to ceiling as it get to it's destination.

If you find a way to do it can you please explain, i've tried to attach light effect in nifskope but it doesn't appear ingame.

Edited September 1, 2011 by MonsterMonkey