Material

[Ethreon]

OK, so trying to do material swaps using some materials I modified. I copy all the stuff, make the appropriate folders, assign the paths in the material swaps as they should be, then .. they don't happen. Game refuses to acknowledge my material swaps, and just maintains the default material/texture on all objects.

 

Any ideas?

[TrickyVein]

materials swaps need to reference the original material assigned to the resource for the swap to happen; if you're sure that you've dotted your t's and crossed your i's then all should be well

[Ethreon]

Setups I tried

 

New nif, with a new initial material. Works fine

Same nif, with the initial material, and applied a material swap to a 2nd new material (by new material I mean materials I edited for my mod). Material swaps refuses to register the swap.

Same nif, reverted initial material to the default one, before me editing the nif file. Changed the material swap record accordingly, tried again. No swap

 

I have plenty other record entries where I used material swaps, I know how it works since it's not that hard. As long as I switch a material with a vanilla path for another material with a vanilla path it doesn't care. IF I try my own material swaps, it buggers to hell. I'll keep trying, but for now the classic "100 files per folder" will do.

[PoliteRaider]

Edit: Actually I think I've got an idea.

 

This is purely a guess, but when I was looking at that flag you made in Nifskope this morning you had a slightly different structure on there than the vanilla files.

 

You had the BSLightingShaderProperty where you specified the material.

However you didn't have the BSShaderTextureSet underneath it.

 

If your other models that you're working on here are doing the same thing, that might be the source of the problem.

 

While this entry should be redundant when you're using materials, I haven't seen any of the vanilla .nifs without using the TextureSet there. Given that you're only experiencing this error with your own original content, but not the vanilla content this seems like a possible explanation to me.

Edited April 15, 2016 by PoliteRaider

[TrickyVein]

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but the texture sets do seem to be redundant and when applying material swaps - I routinely delete these and have used material swaps on assets which lack texture sets in the past.

[Ethreon]

Yup, texture sets are irrelevant if you use materials. Anyway, I tracked it down to me using wrong directory and adding materials/ in front of the paths. Too late, but at least I know now.

[TrickyVein]

:D

[PoliteRaider]

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but the texture sets do seem to be redundant and when applying material swaps - I routinely delete these and have used material swaps on assets which lack texture sets in the past.

 

Nothing wrong with a little rain. Happy to be corrected when someone has more information.

 

I tend to be of the school of thought that if nothing should be a problem and you have a problem anyway, start questioning your assumptions about things not being problems. Not the correct approach in this case but I stand by it as a general technique.

[JuJooGuppy]

Still not as bad as the time I left a single blank space on the end of one of my texture pathways... that single space caused me hours of grief.

[Ethreon]

You must love coding (if you know any).