2 Ideas for anyone skilled enough to make them!

[DragonKnightBob]

Ok, it's entirely possible that these have already been made somewhere and I'm just overlooking them, but here goes:

 

1) Armor Painter! - Allows you to change the colors of your armor by purchasing a dye in game and applying it. Player would get a choice as to whether it would be applied as the base colour, or trim, and the mod automatically applies it to all areas on the piece that it should go. Ideally, this would not affect the sheen on the armor; I love the Lost Paladins of the Divines Armor and the Drake Knight armor, but I'd rather paint the primary color blue with gold trim rather than silver.

 

2) I've seen all the myriad pose packs out there and that's not quite what I'm looking for. I would love a spell that would freeze target npc/monster in place, and allow me to pose them until I used the counter spell to release them. It'd be great to take a picture of yourself and 5 allies engaged in an epic battle, but it'd look cooler if you could co-ordinate them on the screen so it looks better. It'd likely need to turn them into Ragdolls that freeze when you let go of them, for the maximum amount of pose-ability.

 

If anyone knows of any mods that already do this, or easy TES CS tutorials that would allow me to do this there, I'd appreciate it! Otherwise, chalk this up to a 'please make!' request.

[David Brasher]

I am doubtful that the armor painting idea is possible with Oblivion which uses the Gamebryo system. Each color of armor has its own .dds file attached to a particular .nif. So if you wanted your iron cuirass to be dyed blue, you would need to create a new .dds file that made it look blue. This .dds file would have to be attached to a new model, very much like the original but having a new texture attached to it in Nifskope. (And you have to do this twice, for the male armor and the female armor.) And then you have to create a couple of new .dds files for the icons. Two icons if there is a difference between the male and female icons, and just one if both genders use the same icon. And don't forget the ground model. You can use the same texture, but you have to have this second mesh using it. Now this example is just for the color blue. It is just for one shade of the color blue. This is just for one particular cuirass. We have not said anything about steel cuirasses. we have not said anything about other pieces of iron armor like boots or gauntlets.

 

So it is my guess that this mod idea is impossible. If someone were to spend months recoloring all the vanilla Oblivion armors, then it still would not apply to custom armors which are added by mods.

Edited January 10, 2012 by David Brasher

[Septfox]

Well, there's a few shortcuts you can take. Detecting the player's gender and only changing the texture for that version of the armor would lower the amount of modifications per script run. And keep in mind that a lot of vanilla armors use the same nif for both male and female.

The ground model is unimportant. I doubt most people randomly leave their armor laying around, and even if they do it's unlikely that they'll care.

 

As for actually applying the textures, nifSE can change nif blocks via scripting: if you can SetFemaleBipedPath to work properly so you can apply the modified nif. I never did, it always set a blank/nonfunctional nif resulting in invisible armor.

Another way to do it is to switch out the texture file rather than mess around in the nif. I think Pluggy provides functions with which to copy/delete/move/etc files in the Data directory, but I'm not sure since I've never actually used it. Anyway, moving out the original texture and copying a recolored one to function as an override, then unequipping/reequipping the armor might force it to load the new texture. If this method worked, then it would be much better than mucking about with nif blocks. Again, this is very much theoretical.

 

 

Creating a high-duration Paralyse spell in the CS might do the trick for making monsters calm down so they can be posed. Or alternatively, a spell that hits the target with Damage Fatigue with a high duration and magnitude. I'm not sure if they can be stuck into idle poses while ragdolling, though.

Wait, no, that's it. Calm. Create a high-magnitude, high duration Calm spell. They'll go idle and you can pose'em to your heart's content. Probably. Then all you have to do is find someone to make a bunch of awesome monster poses.

[DragonKnightBob]

Leave it to me to suggest something that's impossible!

 

I'm also not averse to mucking around in the Construction Set and trying to change it myself, but I opened up a file there once and was pretty intimidated by all the files and stuff. If there are any tutorials out there that would help me I'd jump on those too, if you could point me towards the right ones. All I'd want to do (For the armor), is change the metallic silver sheen to a metallic blue sheen, which I'm assuming should be as simple as a texture replacement...?

 

And that's a thought... I find it funny because I see all these pose packs out there for companions (Sexy hip pose, Player A being cuddled by companion B, etc), but I also remember seeing a really good shot of an npc/player duel where one of them was kick-jumping at the other, and could never find an esp for it. Then again, that could have just been a really good click of the screenshot button during a deadly reflex fight.

[David Brasher]

All I'd want to do (For the armor), is change the metallic silver sheen to a metallic blue sheen, which I'm assuming should be as simple as a texture replacement...?

Texture replacement is not exactly simple. It is not really hard, but requires a number of steps. It is a little different thinking about changing about four .dds files and about three .nif files in order to change how a single piece of armor looks in the game, but your mod idea could require that you change hundreds of .dds files and hundreds of .nifs. (And then you might need some skillful OBSE scripting.) You speak of changing sheen. That part is not done with GIMP or Photoshop. That part is done by changing the model in Nifskope. You have to change things like material properties. Lots of little numeric settings and alphanumeric settings to sort through. When you found the right combination, you would have to go make the same changes to each .nif which you had attached a different colored .dds to.

 

Here is the link to one retexturing tutorial. There are others also available on that site and elsewhere.

Retexturing Tutorial