khulse Posted March 12, 2012 Share Posted March 12, 2012 So, I'm trying to mod the dragon-bone armor, to make it a little more fitting for my paladanish good guy (well, gal, but whatever). I thought making the armor shiny and giving it a sort of opalescent color overlay would look neat, and it does. Just one little problem. The rest of the armor looks nice and polished without any real trouble, but the shield stays stubbornly matte no matter what I do to it. I used enviromap textures to get the gleam on the others, but the shield nif doesn't have one. I added it, along with assorted other textures the other armors have using both nifscope and the creation kit. No good. I've jiggered around with the normal map- still no good. In short, I've tried almost everything I can think of, and the @&^% shield still has the same dull finish! I've got to be missing something. Anybody have any suggestions, before I pull whats left of my hair out? Maybe I should go take a up nice, relaxing, low stress hobby like stunt driving without a seat belt or wrestling anacondas. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
khulse Posted March 13, 2012 Author Share Posted March 13, 2012 Never mind, I figured it out. Seriously, some of you could have at least looked at the topic... Anyway, in case someone else has a similar problem and manages to find this thread: Shine, gloss, and so forth seem to be influenced by several settings of the nif as well as the textures. If you have all the normal maps and enviromaps (has an _m in the name, such as 'Helm_m.dds) set properly and attached to your nif and it doesn't have to amount of reflection you want, find an item in the game that has a similar level of glossiness to your item. and open up it's nif. Check the BSLightingShaderProperty block details and compare them. VERY IMPORTANT: I changed so many settings that I'm not sure which ones need to be changed. The last one I changed that got me the results I wanted was the seventh line of the BSLightingShaderProperty detail list, labeled 'flags'. Finding the right setting for this is rather difficult. Some settings remove any gloss effect, some settings add it, and others mean that the item doesn't show in game. The catch is that settings from other nifs that aren't the same kind of item are usually the ones that make it dissapear. I finally found a setting that worked right by checking the settings on on another shield, which presumably means the flags are specific to item types. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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