How do I make a Retexture mod? [How To]

[AlvinTheBest]

Hello

 

I have googled (?) around a lot on information on how to retexture skyrim. Non found.

And that's where this thread comes into the picture.

I (and probably others) would love to know how to retexture skyrim. I have no Coding skills more than making a simple Minecraft mod (and Skyrim is'nt written in Java) and you have to start of somewhere.

 

So:

 

How do I retexture Skyrim???

Edited December 25, 2011 by AlvinTheBest

[Fisrion]

You find a nice tool like BSAopt to open "Skyrim - Textures.bsa" in the Data folder of Skyrim and extract the texture you want to edit. Then you open the texture in Gimp or Photoshop (you need the .dds plugin for Gimp) and edit it, save it (with mipmaps and dxt 1 compression for color textures and with dxt 3 compression for normalmaps) and place it in the proper subfolders of the "textures" subfolder (which you need to create in the "Data" folder).

You can see the proper subfolders in BSAopt.

[AlvinTheBest]

Thank you sooooo very much for the answer. I'm gonna make this to a list tomorrow :)=

[Rennn]

I recommend paint.NET for conversions, and Gimp for doing the editing and creation. Those are both free and relatively simple, yet powerful.

[AlvinTheBest]

I have used Gimp a lot, so I'm familiar with that.

[Fisrion]

Just use this to use .dds files in Gimp. No need for a second program.

Edit: A little note: The specular map is the alpha channel of the normal map (that´s why you need dxt 3 compression).

Edited December 26, 2011 by Fisrion

[Martian1]

after much searching for tutorials to use myself the best I've found are here... http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/Category:Texturing_Tutorials

you'll find some gimp stuff there and you will probably find it usefull to look into nifskope too if you are going to be editing armour.

[robham63]

You find a nice tool like BSAopt to open "Skyrim - Textures.bsa" in the Data folder of Skyrim and extract the texture you want to edit. Then you open the texture in Gimp or Photoshop (you need the .dds plugin for Gimp) and edit it, save it (with mipmaps and dxt 1 compression for color textures and with dxt 3 compression for normalmaps) and place it in the proper subfolders of the "textures" subfolder (which you need to create in the "Data" folder).

You can see the proper subfolders in BSAopt.

 

How do you retexture creatures like giants who have their textures attached to their nif files???

[steve40]

 

How do you retexture creatures like giants who have their textures attached to their nif files???

 

You don't actually need to mess with the nif files to do retextures. You can use TextureSets.

 

It's hard to explain, but not that difficult in practice. IIRC, these are the basic steps:

1) Create a TextureSet which points to the paths of your texture files.

2) Create an ArmorAddon that points to your TextureSet and creature race

3) Create an Armor "skin" that points to your ArmorAddon. This armor will be selected in the NPC's Actor form (Traits tab) as its "skin".

 

See this thread (especially the last post by JADAK) on the basic instructions on how to retexture armor using TextureSets. The same principles apply to retexturing NPCs.

Edited July 26, 2012 by steve40