How to make those custom Armor and Weapon Textures into Stand-Alones

[Imperfections]

How to turn plain old texture modifications into new craftable armors

 

Forgive me cause i'm not the best with these guides but i've seen a lot of people ask about how to make craftable versions of all these textures mods out there.

 

 

 

Step 1. Using a BSA browsing tool of your choice, preferably FOMM's BSA Browser extract the armor or

weapons sets meshes folder. An example of one would be using the Dwarven Set "Data/Meshes/Armor/Dwarven/(Contents of meshes) Make sure to rename that Dwarven part to the name of your future craftable set.

 

 

Step 2. If you haven't already dropped this in a similar folder structure like above go ahead and do so. From there Drop the appropriate texture files in a Textures folder structure that mimics the one for it's meshes.

 

 

Step 3. Using a tool like Nifskope open the all the Nif files inside your meshes folder. From here were going to edit all the textures paths within the models(only edit the paths to the editted texture files, you can leave the rest alone as their mainly for glow maps, and mapping of the textures. This is what truely makes our custom textures work. Using the provided image you can find them all ease.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a182/Darkclaude/CustomArmorsNifPathingStep3.png

 

 

 

Step 4. Now once you've opened, editted, and saved all those nif files we have to make a Plugin to make this new set of armor actually craftable. For this part I highly advise you use FOMM's TESSnip program, it focuses mainly on hex editting, Skyedit is a incomplete tool that at this moment is incapable of making craftable custom armors this way.

 

 

Step 5. We need 3 pieces of data for your Skyrim.esm so open that in TESSnip. You will need the default crafting recipe(COBJ) for the original set of armor, the actual armor(ARMO), and it's attachments(ARMA). You can find out anything you need to know about recipes here: A Tutorial for making new smithing recipes

 

 

Step 6. If you somewhat followed that guide posted above you might already have your recipe prepared sorta. If you rather use the same exact recipe the game uses for default press ctrl + F and type Armor(armors name) then click find partial matches and click find until you find the ARMO's, ARMA's and COBJ's of your new set of armor. You will want your new plugin to contain 3 groups 1 ARMO, 1 ARMA, and 1 COBJ group, you use can use 1 I made for myself as a basic starter plugin:

Basic Starting ESP

Once you find a COBJ, ARMO, or ARMA you need you'll have to copy and paste them into their associated groups.

 

 

Step 7. Once you gotten all the needed COBJ's, ARMO's, and ARMA's we get to the actual custom armor part. Which is now associating these armors with their new textures. The way we do this is inside both the ARMO and ARMA's. Inside your ARMO's you will need to edit the MOD2, MOD4, and any other MOD# fields their might be these contain the file paths to the Meshes used which controlls what textures are being used. Once you've editted all those in your ARMO's you have to do the same with your ARMA's they contain the exact same MOD# fields. After you assigned all these texture paths you'll have to change the FORM ID's of each COBJ, ARMO, and ARMA if you haven't already done so. It's simple really and the guide I linked you too earlier for custom recipes explains to you exactly how to edit these fields. Now the very last thing you need to do after assigning the new Form ID's is right back inside you ARMO's there's 1 more field named MODL it contains a Form ID. This Form ID is what associates every ARMA to it's ARMO. Just swap out the new ARMA's form id with it's old one and you've just completed your esp for craftable custom texture modded gears. This works with weapons as well but you should be able to figure out how to do that with this mediocre guide.