Novice modder with a few questions, (Retexturing and Nifskope)

[Joshawowo]

Hi all, I'm fairly new to modding and have been checking out some tutorials about retexturing. A lot of it makes sense and is straightforward, but I had a few specific questions. Besides just being able to recolor a texture, which is easy, I had a few ideas for projects that would be a good challenging introduction for me. The first is to retexture the sword Chillrend to make it actually look like it's icy or made out of ice, rather than just a bluer glass sword that it already is. I've ran into a few areas where I have questions:

 

1. I noticed (when checking it out in Nifskope) that the hilt of the sword uses the default glasssword.dds texture rather than the glasssword_chillrend.dds. I could just modify the glasssword.dds to make the hilt dark blue like I want, but obviously that would change all of the glass swords which I don't want... So I figured the solution would be to rewire the hilt to point to the new glasssword_chillrend.dds texture. I haven't actually found a tutorial for this exactly, so I've just been guessing at this point. The good news is that in Nifskope it seems to show up, the hilt does look blue like I want. I saved it out as glasssword_chillrend.nif and put it in the proper data tree folder, booted up Skyrim and unfortunately the hilt is still gold (the correct texture does show up on the blade though, since glasssword_chillrend.dds was in the right spot). Am I doing something wrong? What's the proper step for having a mesh point at a different texture than it was originally and being able to see it in Skyrim?

 

2. I'm embarrassed to ask this, since it really goes to show how novice I am at 3D stuff... For now I've just been using the default glass sword normal map, which works fine, but I'd imagine ideally I'd want to have a normal that matches up with the sword of icy-ness that I put on the texture. Problem is, I just don't really know how normal maps are generated, at all. Can I take my modified texture and somehow translate that into a normal map? Or does it not work that way? Any help or advice on this would be great.

 

I also had the idea of making the sword look transparent/reflective like it's made out of ice, but I figure that's out of my skill range for now and I'll just stick to textures.

 

So yeah, hopefully someone can help with either of these questions, it would be much appreciated next. After learning how to get Chillrend how I want it to look, I was thinking of taking on a more massive task, such as completely retexturing the Blue Palace in Solitude to make it extravagant and, well, blue.