Disappearing Textures and Warped Meshes

[Grabstein]

I have been working on a simple retexture for armor meshes. The textures have been working fine, until last Thursday. Suddenly, texture portions are disappearing and what's not going invisible is becoming warped and distorted. I cannot come up with a reason. Anyone have any helpful ideas? Thanks.

 

EDIT: Everything appears fine in NIFskope, it's just in the toolset it looks screwed up.

Edited December 5, 2016 by Grabstein

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, I know for a fact that missing normal maps ("..._n.dds") can also cause the rigging to get lost, for whatever reason that might be, but it is... though you said it was working fine before but now it isn't anymore, so definitely "something" must have changed.

 

This scenario with replacement textures randomly getting lost over time strangely reminds me of those times of old, where people were still using antiquated Archive Invalidation techniques like just entering the texture files into the list in "Archive Invalidation.txt". You working with "re-textures" means you know of the need for Archive Invalidation, or your replacements would not work at all.

 

This method of old was done away with for exactly that reason, for at some point, some random threshold, some files from the list were ignored and the game was either falling back to Vanilla or acting as if the files would be missing instead. Until at some other point, once you added or removed a couple more entries from said list, certain files started working again and others failed... everything pretty much random in fact.

 

But this surely can't be it, can it? You're not using this antiquated means for your Archive Invalidation still, or are you?

 

edit: That said, is it "only" in the CK or also in the game?

[Grabstein]

No, didn't work properly in-game, either. I'm remaking my normals, now, to see if that'll fix it.

[Grabstein]

I'm a cotton-headed ninnymuggins. In order to try to make things easier, and take up less space, I renamed the normals to the item name, minus the version number. Despite adding the appropriate normal for each mesh, the normals weren't being found. I rerenamed them, and everything's working, again. Thanks, again, Drake for pointing me in the correct direction and helping me find my error. Cheers!

[DrakeTheDragon]

Wow, you're welcome. Glad I was of help.

 

Now if only someone... anyone... could tell us why in all saints' names a missing normal map, a mere texture file, can effectively kill a mesh's rigging... I mean, how is that even possible technically? The rigging is inside the NIF, inside the vertex stored bone weights... not in any of the textures, and no render engine's "vertex" shader out'a hell should even remotely consider textures to have an effect here... but it does. I know it does from my own personal observations.

 

A missing normal map texture file can kill the rigging. Eternal gratefulness to the one kind soul that tells me why. :wallbash: