Help on .NIF files

[xylon]

OK, my son loves the jedi plugin. I've created some simple quests for him, and (after some hair-pulling) it's worked pretty well. The only problem is he wants a purple lightsaber, not the green one from the plug-in. Being a dutiful dad, and wanting to keep him busy with the PC version so I can have the xbox to myself ^_^ , I decided to try.

 

I got paint shop pro, I downloaded the NIFtexture tool, I read the skinning tutorial, and even though my artistic skills are generally limited to the available clip art, I decided to give it a try.

 

First problem -- NIFTexture reports an error and won't load the lightsaber.NIF file. OK, I can figure this out...there's a texture directory, and I should be able to figure out which ones go with the lightsaber. Hmmm, doesn't look like any. Crisis!!

 

Can you embed textures in a NIF rather than specifying them as separate files? Is that what's happening? If so, is there a PSP-compatible add-in that lets you edit the NIF? Or am I way off base?

[TheDeadTree]

.nif's have textures within the Morrowind->Data Files-> Textures folder. However if I remeber correctly, the lightsaber mod uses a particle effect to create the blade. It may not be as easy as opening up the texture file in PSP, and changing the color as particle effect .tga/.dds have to have an alpha channel. This is do-able, but not really that easy if you don't know what your doing. If you can find the place where you downloaded this mod, or, find the texture in your folder (because it's in there) either I, or someone else could probably help you out.

[xylon]

Well, the mod is Jedi v1, available here. I've opened the lightsaber.nif file in a hex editor and don't see any file names, nor did I get a hit on the strings "bmp" or "tga". Where do I go from here? Any help is *greatly* appreciated!!!

[Peregrine]

Well, if the NIFTextrue thing won't work, you'll have to edit the textures the hard way. If you can open the .tga files and find something that looks like it would be applied to the particle effect, you can just repaint it and save over the old texture (make a backup first).

 

But things really get hard if there is no texture. If it's all pure particles without mapping, the only way to do anything with it would require loading it in 3dsmax, editing the particle system, and reexporting to .nif. I'd take a look at it, but I still can't find a .nif import plugin that works (I have 3dsmax3 and 6).

[xylon]

But things really get hard if there is no texture.

 

Well, that seems to be the situation. Fortunately, I've found another jedi add-in that looks like it does have textures, so I'm going to have to load that one up and see what it looks like. With my limited artistic ability, I can't see cost-justifying 3dsmax...or, rather, there's hardware I'd rather spend that money on. Like a tablet pc with a ton of graphics memory... ;)

[jtd1987]

I tried to load the mod Jedi v1 but I get an error saying "One or more plugins could not find the correct versions of the master file they depend on. Errors may occur during load or gameplay. Check the warnings.txt files for more information" Then I click to continue running the executable but when I go to enter the Excise Office it says "Model load error: Meshes\w\lightsaber.NIF cannot load file in Meshes\w\lightsaber.NIF. Will use the default object Marker_Error.NIF. I thought I did everything correct in the text intructions in the mod. I have the update

BLOODMOON PATCH v1.6.1820 installed, if that could be the problem. HELP!!! :bye: