Black and almost completely transparent texture bugs

[brothalynshhung]

Im having a weird issue where the textures of a clothing mod will be perfectly fine for the first little while, but as time passes, after a minute or two, the textures will either show black textures that move around the clothing item when you move, or make the mesh appear almost completely see through. Switching the clothing to someone else will fix the textures back to normal but only for a minute or two and the process will repeat.

 

Can anyone please help me with this?

 

edit: heres a picture

****ADULT IMAGE NSFW**** http://imgur.com/a/n2L9L ****ADULT IMAGE NSFW****

as you can see the scarf will be almost see through and the belt will be that black texture ( you can slightly see the normal texture on the part that hangs down from the side), that black texture will move around the clothes when you move.

Edited January 17, 2017 by brothalynshhung

[JoKelly]

when that has happened to me its been a low memory/Heavy CPU load thing. if your running mods, something is probably script heavy or you have HD texture packs.

[brothalynshhung]

Thank you so much for the help! The mod in question is my own mod that has 200 retextures that can be applied to 3 different clothing pieces, and all the of textures are very high resolution.

 

So I can answer yes to both of those.

 

Since using lower resolution is undesirable, do you think that cutting the mod into say, 4 pieces of 50 retextures for each of those 3 clothing pieces, and seperated them with differently name material files and nifs (though they would use the same paths) and even change the tab they are found in at the chemistry station, would these changes help the problem do you think? That seems like my best route at this point?

 

Again tyvm for the help.

Edited January 17, 2017 by brothalynshhung

[JoKelly]

I'm not sure that will make a difference because you will still have the same number of HD textures and that means the same load on your system. keep in mind I am no expert so there might be a work around that I know nothing about.

 

With that said you could merge some of the textures to reduce the file numbers which should help. say you have a texture for each item of clothing, scarf, shirt, pants, boots, combing them into one texture file reduces the number of texture files the system has to scan and that can reduce your load.

[brothalynshhung]

true eh :/ very true. looks like I'll have to cut down the amount from 200 to something more reasonable, because I believe Ive merged as much as possible (Ive made them use the same n, and s .dds textures, with a material swap changing the d .dds texture).

 

Thats upsetting but at least I have a very very likely cause and fix for my problem instead of running around without a head for the past month trying to fix this problem.

I appreciate the help very much! thanks man

Edited January 17, 2017 by brothalynshhung

[Perraine]

You can also use a "Palette" file which applies an overlay onto existing textures. This is used a lot on weapons but also on several clothing items (such as the army fatigues, and the "mobster" outfits) this avoids having to load an entire new texture, and is a considerably smaller file, although the effects aren't as broad as an entire re-texture

 

But realistically it is completely, totally and utterly useless ( and simply epeen stroking) to have anything larger than a 2K texture, because the game will NEVER display it under normal circumstances. It will instead display one of the "mips" inside the file. generally the .5K one for most world objects and 3rd person textures, and the 1 or 2k "mip" for 1st person objects, unless you are using TFC to zoom in to within a few cm of the item, in which case you aren't really playing the game then.

 

This is why Bugthesda made almost all of their clothing diffuse maps 2k, but pretty much everything else .5 or 1k.

[brothalynshhung]

cool tyvm for the info! Ill try using a palette file as well as bringing any that were above 2k down. I had no idea the mipmaps effected it that much and I really dont mind changing the resolution much I just didnt want to go all the way down to like 512x512 pictures, theres probably only a few that are above 2k by 2kish.

I appreciate the help guys I should have asked here first! ty ty

[JoKelly]

your welcome, happy modding

[brothalynshhung]

Alright guys heres the update;

 

i've made all the textures i've changed's dimensions exactly 2048x1080. also made them all DXT1 (most complatible compression setting possible) instead of DXT7, with and without alpha channels. I updated them to be two sided, tried with specular enabled and without it. I remade all material files and checked all nifs in nifskope to ensure all paths were correct. Tried with absolutely no other mods enabled. Cut down the textures from 200 to 25!!!! and changed the .esp to match.

 

Same ******* problem >.<.

 

Any more ideas would be really appreciated its been a really, really, really rough over a month now dealing with this and its getting pretty frustrating:/

[kitcat81]

Alright guys heres the update;

 

i've made all the textures i've changed's dimensions exactly 2048x1080. also made them all DXT1 (most complatible compression setting possible) instead of DXT7, with and without alpha channels. I updated them to be two sided, tried with specular enabled and without it. I remade all material files and checked all nifs in nifskope to ensure all paths were correct. Tried with absolutely no other mods enabled. Cut down the textures from 200 to 25!!!! and changed the .esp to match.

 

Same ******* problem >.<.

 

Any more ideas would be really appreciated its been a really, really, really rough over a month now dealing with this and its getting pretty frustrating:/

I think that 1080 is not the correct size. Should be 2048x1024. All vanilla textures are something like from 128 then 256,512,1024 etc . Not sure that it can cause black textures, but it can cause a fps drop and even a ctd. It seems to me you are trying to manage too many stuff at the same time. Make one texture that works fine, then you can copy some settings from this texture. And you can use vanilla materials as a reference . Take some vanilla material file and change paths to dds.

 

As you have mentioned that even reducing the number of textures does not help, then it`s more likely that the problem is not in the number but in the textures or in the materials or maybe in the nif settings.

 

DXT 1,3 and 5 all work fine for me and alpha also works fine. I`m a nebiew with game textures myself and Perainne has helped me a lot to learn about specular maps. While experimenting I`ve noticed that if you save specular in the wrong format it also can cause some weird effects sometimes. But not sure that it can be your problem.

Also when you save your textures make sure to check "generate mipmaps" option.

Edited January 22, 2017 by kitcat81