Question about Skyrim NIF files

[hideouscircus]

So I'm curious to know what the deal is with Skyrim and nif files. I'm fairly new to modding, started with FO3. I've made armor mashups and countless retextures.

 

I was looking at possibly making a replacer and started looking into the NIF files and found something I didn't understand. I've noticed that some of the nifs in Skyrim have two of the same nifs, with a minor difference in the file name.

 

EXAMPLE: The Ebony Armor has two nifs. One named cuirass_0.nif and the other named cuirass_1.nif ................ can anyone tell me what the reason for this is? I assume that one of these nifs is the one used by the game to make the item appear on your character, and the other is like a 1st person or world representation of the item?

 

If I want to replace say the scale armor with a customized nif is there any special steps I'm going to need to observe?

[FavoredSoul]

Character Creation has a Morpher where you can go from small to large.

This is achieved by having TWO version of every mesh (armor and body meshes that is)

Each time you hit the slider, Mesh A incrementally morphs into Mesh B until Mesha A eventually becomes Mesh B. Vice Versa.

Mesh A is denoted by _0.

Mesh B is denoted by _1.

 

If you want to replace a piece of armor with a new piece of armor, there are many steps involved. All of which are detailed in any one of the many tutorials available. Check out the Tutorials section of the Nexus sites for this information.

[Sunnie]

Each body and armor has 2 meshes, a skinny and a heavy, initially used by the weight slider in the CC to prevent horrid texture stretching between skinny and heavy size bodies. So if you are going to edit an armor/clothing mesh, you need to edit both _0 and _1.

[hideouscircus]

thanks :)