[LE] Best way for a retextured item

[greyday01]

For a retexture of a vanilla mesh using vanilla textures there seems to be two ways to go about it.

First you could duplicate and rename the mesh and change the texture paths in the nif and save it into your meshes.

The other way is to make a texture set and in the CK edit your renamed object to use that texture set like they did with the bird eggs.

 

Which way is better, uses less memory, less prone to causing crashes, other benefits or problems?

[Deleted6874692User]

I prefer to build stuff from the ground-up if it's not something too time consuming.

Creating cells from scratch is a better idea than to duplicate (things I usually forget to fix tends to be a pain when you realize your quest markers are pointing in the wrong direction or whatever) , but for re-texturing stuff I... I mean if you're going to end up with the exact same result, I don't really think it matters too much to be honest. Unless you're running the CK on a toaster and really, really need to min-max it. I'm sure someone can present you with numbers on the matter, but I'd just go with what best suits the workflow for the moment as I don't think either approach has too much of a significant impact here.

[TheWormpie]

As far as I'm concerned, using a separate nif rather than a texture set makes your mod's bsa file unnecessarily bigger. I don't know anything about memory use though.

[Deleted6874692User]

Actually... yes. I didn't think of that. Wormple12 is entirely right. It is indeed unnecessary disk space, and, come to think of it, bad practice to duplicate nif files if it's not truly called for.

I wouldn't recommend it, but I also don't think it matters too much unless it's on a very big scale.