Need Help With Invisible Textures

[envyme]

Ok here is what im trying to do. i want to replace steel armor in my game. so i extracted the ebony files from the vanilla folder and used a random texture i got from another mod. i placed the ebony mesh in folder ( meshes/armor/simplesteelarmor/knightarmor20/ ) i then placed the random texture in folder ( textures/armor/knightarmor20/ ). i then opened the vanilla ebony mesh in nifscope and changed the texture path from its default folder ( textures/armor/ebony/m/ ) to the folder i created ( textures/armor/knightarmor20/ ) and then typed the appropriate path into my archiveinvalidation.txt in my oblivion/data directory. the textures are still invisible. what am i doing wrong?

 

ps i have made the appropriate changes in the geck in order for steel to be replaced by these meshes.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Make sure you also always have fitting "..._n.dds" files along with your new ".dds", or things will be either pitch black or invisible ingame. The alpha channel of those normalmap images tells how much light should be reflected. Having it all black (solid, no transparency) will not reflect any light, as in black surface. The same happens when storing the normalmaps in a wrong file format without alpha channel on most occasions. For certain types of items (maybe random, maybe not) pitch black means invisible even.

 

Reading "ArchiveInvalidation.txt" there... don't use this out-dated, never-really-working-reliably approach to Archive Invalidation and get rid of all those files (there can be more than 1 in different folders actually). Switch to "BSA Redirection" instead, either through OBMM's Utilities, Wrye Bash's Replacer tab or the famous mod "ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated!". They all do the same, adding an empty dummy BSA into your data folder and making it load at the same place in the "sArchiveList" variable in your "Oblivion.ini" the textures BSA was loading before. This makes the empty dummy BSA the only archive needing Invalidation ever again, and as it's empty there's no need for Archive Invalidation at all anymore ever after. Why I was talking about deleting the "ArchiveInvalidation.txt" files before is because now they would make the game Invalidate files from the BSA which aren't in there to begin with (it's empty) and this will cause multiple random issues.

Edited August 2, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon

[envyme]

THANKS! i have noticed that you cant edit these files in paint.net. i dont understand why exactly but it doesnt work and im not sure how to make new ones. could you help me with this?

[DrakeTheDragon]

THANKS! i have noticed that you cant edit these files in paint.net. i dont understand why exactly but it doesnt work and im not sure how to make new ones. could you help me with this?

 

Well, actually you can edit them, but it doesn't make much sense, if you don't know what a normalmap is about and how it's working.

 

I actually wanted to give this link in one of your other threads already, but couldn't for the life of me find it anymore back then.

I myself am using this plugin for Paint.NET to create my normalmaps. If you don't know how to do this to begin with, continue reading the thread a little further down to where the author explains what normalmapping itself is about and how to use the plugin.

http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/2534-normal-map/

 

For further information about the topic specifically for Oblivion modding there are also comprehensive guides for texturing and normalmaps available at the CS wiki http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page and other places.

 

I hope this helps.