[LE] Golden claw texture help

[mcchuggernaut]

I am currently working on a mod that aims to "normalize" all the gold objects in the game, specifically by making them all roughly the same color and as near to real-life gold as possible. I got through the gold bars and coins so they don't look like they are made of two different materials, but then when I moved on to the golden dragon claw I found a catch.

 

The claw "body" texture I found easily by searching all the texture files with a .bsa unpacker, but the key bit (the animal pictures used for the puzzle doors) apparently has a separate texture, and for the life of me I cannot find it. No idea what it is called or where the texture for it is located.

 

Anybody else out there have an idea? I have manually gone through an ass-ton of texture files in likely categories, but still nothing.

Edited March 11, 2017 by mcchuggernaut

[Algabar]

Find the nifs for the claw and check it with Nifskope. This way you should see all textures used by the object.

[mcchuggernaut]

Find the nifs for the claw and check it with Nifskope. This way you should see all textures used by the object.

It would appear there is no texture associated with those parts of the dragon claws. There are .nif files for them, and it looks like the .nif files themselves are assigned some kind of base color. The Creation Kit is rendering them really funky and isn't any use. I got the .nif for the golden claw extracted and into Nifskope, and can find no textures attached to it at all (it renders blank white). After looking at several mods that changed the base textures of the dragon claws in an effort to deconstruct them and find what I was looking for, it seems NOBODY changed the little animal symbols at all. I can see why, because at this point there seems to be some hidden variable in the .nif files themselves that are giving them a texture, and no actual texture file doing it. Very confusing...

Edited March 11, 2017 by mcchuggernaut

[Algabar]

First of all, I'm not a Nifskope expert. Never tried something like Beth did with these claws myself.

 

As far as I understand, they used the same set of textures on every claw. They just changed the color using vertex coloring. You can clearly see that in the "NitrishapeData" of the various parts of the claw.

 

As for the animals, in fact there IS a texture. Since I don't have the original Beth textures in unpacked state at hand ATM, I coludn't look at the file myself. But according to Nifskope it's this one: textures\clutter\ruins\RuinsExtraAnimals.dds

I don't see, why it shouldn't be possible to change it. Only thing to consider is the fact, that the player needs the symbols to open the doors. So you can "overhaul" the look a bit, but the animals must be clear to see.

 

Hope I'm not talking nonsense - as I said, not a Nifskope expert....

[mcchuggernaut]

First of all, I'm not a Nifskope expert. Never tried something like Beth did with these claws myself.

 

As far as I understand, they used the same set of textures on every claw. They just changed the color using vertex coloring. You can clearly see that in the "NitrishapeData" of the various parts of the claw.

 

As for the animals, in fact there IS a texture. Since I don't have the original Beth textures in unpacked state at hand ATM, I coludn't look at the file myself. But according to Nifskope it's this one: textures\clutter\ruins\RuinsExtraAnimals.dds

I don't see, why it shouldn't be possible to change it. Only thing to consider is the fact, that the player needs the symbols to open the doors. So you can "overhaul" the look a bit, but the animals must be clear to see.

 

Hope I'm not talking nonsense - as I said, not a Nifskope expert....

 

Thanks for taking time to help me with this!

 

I guess I am going to need to learn how to play with vertex coloring then. As for the "RuinsExtraAnimals.dds" file, when I extracted it I thought that had to be the texture file I needed, but when I took a look at it using Gimp and Paint.net (I use both programs, depending on what I want to do with a texture.) it didn't have the animals used on the claw depicted in the texture file. So if Nifskope is saying that texture is what it uses, I have no idea what's going on. Guess it's back to the drawing board until I teach myself how to work with .nif files more proficiently.

 

Edit: Finally cracked it! If you click on the puzzle bits of the mesh when it's loaded into Nifskope, you can then expand the "BSTriShape" entry for that part by clicking the little plus box beside it. Then click on the expanded "BSLightingShader" entry. It will show you a list of "Block Details" in a window below the "Block List" window. You will see two entries with a band of rainbow color beside them: "Emissive color" and "Specular color". Modifying these two values changes the default color of that bit of the mesh, and you can make it any color you wish. Seems the devs got lazy and never assigned an actual texture to anything but the largest "claw" part of the mesh itself, and just slapped on a default gold color value to the other bits of the mesh for the golden claw. I can just tweak these color values to match the retexturing I do to the rest of the claw body.

 

Thanks again for the help! I can get back to work on my project and call this case closed. :)

Edited March 11, 2017 by mcchuggernaut

[minieyke]

Not sure if it's helpful but the combinations for each door and on each claw get randomized each new game a player starts. That might be what's throwing a wrench in your hunt.