Shield Texture Not Working Properly in Menus

[Jailbird174]

So I'm a fledgling modder and one of my first attempts was simply to modify the texture of a shield. I unpacked the texture bsa using bsa commander, then opened the dds file with paint.net and just drew colors on to see how the texture lays out, saved it as a dds, and then saved it in oblivion/data/texture/custom/shield.dds.

Then I opened the shield nif file with NifSkope and set the texture ('purple flower') to that path. I then deleted the reference to my hard drive so it just reads texture/custom/shield.dds.

Finally, I added it into a container via construction set and went into the game (enabled it via NMM) and grabbed the shield. The texture showed up! .... but if I go into the menu it is a black shield that does not move even as my character removes.

Also let me know if there was another thread. First time using this site and I was struggling to refine the search to only the section about modding and not just problems users are having with already made mods.

Thanks in advance.

 

I'll attach the file but please know it looks horrible and I haven't cleaned any dirty edits because I'm not releasing it and am just using it to familiarize myself with the tools :P You can instantly fast travel to the house and inside the container in the middle of the room is the shield.

[Striker879]

Did you also extract and edit the icon.dds for the shield? In the BSA the icon textures are in the path Textures\Menus\Icons\<appropriate sub-solder ... e.g. Armor>.

[DrakeTheDragon]

As it says "custom" I take it it's not in a Vanilla file path anymore, like your shield's textures are separate from the original shield's and you didn't just overwrite those instead?

 

Why I'm asking is, you didn't mention anything about also adding a normalmap texture ("shield_n.dds" in your case) going along with your new shield texture there. Missing a normalmap will lead to light not reflecting, thus pitch black surfaces, but not always and/or for all resources, and sometimes also the rigging going haywire or other similar or even completely unrelated issues.

 

As a rule of thumb, if it's something to be rendered, if you point it to another texture, there must also be another normalmap going along with said texture.

And for reference, normalmaps are not defined or applied inside the NIF but only associated by the game via file name tagging. If your texture's named "shield.dds", then your normalmap must be named "shield_n.dds" and remain in exactly the same folder as well.

 

There's several different means to create a proper normalmap for a new mesh or from an existing texture, but I think in your case it'd be easiest to just extract the original normalmap for your shield as well and save (& rename) it into the same folder your custom texture is inside now.

[Jailbird174]

Yep, I indeed forgot the normal map. Thanks to both of you. Any way I can upvote you or in any other way repay ya?

[Striker879]

Speaking for myself, your thank you is all the payment that has value for me.

 

If you wanted to take it a notch higher you could pay it forward the next time you see someone's question on here that you know the answer to. Often I find that I benefit more from trying to help out than those I'm trying to help out benefit from my help (if that makes any sense).

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, technically, there is no such thing as up voting, giving reputation or anything else similar here on Nexus. The only thing coming close would be to give so-called "Kudos", which is just like a digital tap-on-the-shoulder or something, and you can only ever give 1 kudos to a user once. It used to be more easy some years back, but nowadays you have to go to the user's file site profile page, look at the boxes up on top saying "add friend", "block author", "track author", "message", "X kudos" and "Y views", and when you hover over "X kudos" it'll say "give kudos" so that's the button you click.

 

But I have to copy Striker on this. Share the knowledge with others asking for the same and it'll be re-payment more than enough. I'm sharing my knowledge for that very same reason to begin with, I got it for free from others in the past, and I'm freely passing it on to anybody who needs it whenever I can, to give back to the community I learned so much from and still do.

 

I'm not giving much, or anything, into e-points of whatever kind. They're meaningless to me. Knowing my sharing my knowledge helped you is all I need, your thanks is an additional treat. (Way too few people actually give it anymore these days after they were helped, so it can actually be considered something special already, just so you know.)