Colors of rings and amulets - how do they work?

[Syntia13]

Question to people who understand how nif files work:

Where are the colors in vanilla rings and amulets comming from? I'm stumped. I took a look at the files in nifskope, and they all use the exact same textures (genericrings and genericamulets, both gray), and I don't see any difference in LightingShading properties, and yet each ring and amulet shows with its own colors (gold or silver, and multiple gem colors). How?

 

In case of circlets I had no problem playing around with textures, specular color and emissive color to change how they look, but with amulets and rings I don't even know where to start.

Help, please?

[thumbincubation]

Open up goldamulet_1, expand, highlight, and look at 4NiTriShape GoldAmulet [4]

 

Down in the block details, it will say "has vertex colors" (Y/N). Double click it to "no" and the color will disappear. While it's "yes," there should be an expandable section for vertex colors, beneath it, with several different entries. Open those and make those settings 1.0 across the board, and the color will disappear from a little portion of the amulet. Use that if you want to take the gold out of portions of it. Making it "no" will take the gold color out of the whole amulet, but it's worth noting that the vanilla SilverAmulet_1 has "yes" and all 1.0, rather than "no." I don't know if there's any adverse effect from just checking "no," but it's a pretty safe experiment. If you don't like the result, just extract a new vanilla mesh and you're good.

[Syntia13]

Open up goldamulet_1, expand, highlight, and look at 4NiTriShape GoldAmulet [4]

 

Down in the block details, it will say "has vertex colors" (Y/N). [...] If you don't like the result, just extract a new vanilla mesh and you're good.

Whoa, that's neat! Thank you! :)

[thumbincubation]

No problem. Good luck with your mod. I always enjoy seeing what people come up with.