Making a New Goblin Problem

[Leubast]

So, I'm trying to make a new creature. Just a blue skinned goblin. So I made a new folder in the data/meshes/creatures and data/textures/creatures called "icegoblin" and copied all the vanilla texture, meshes and animation files to them so I don't overwrite any vanilla assets. I opened the textures and recolored the skin blue and saved it back as a .dds with DXT3 compression and mipmaps. Then opened the meshes in NifSkope and changed the textures to my new ones.



Looks perfectly fine in NifSkope, but in game and in the CS...



Have I done something wrong? Did I miss a step? Please help.

[DrakeTheDragon]

When you recolored the skin texture(s), did you save them under a different name or the same? Inside a different folder it won't really matter much, that's why I ask. But if you saved your texture under a new name and missed also renaming the accompanying normalmap texture (..._n.dds), so the diffuse texture file now has no accompanying normalmap texture file by the same name anymore, then that would perfectly explain the body going invisible inside the CS or game.

[Leubast]

I copied the normal map files into the same textures/creatures/icegoblin folder and everything works now! Thank you! For some reason I though since I didn't change the name or tell the .nif to look for a different _n.dds that it would still work. Turns out it's more important than I thought.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Yeah, for every 3D object's texture there always must be an accompanying normalmap texture file coming along. And as unlike in other games you do not give the path to this inside the NIF or elsewhere, it must also be exactly at the same place as the texture file and also bear the exact same name.

 

However, there's also one exception to that rule. Underscores ("_") count as filename terminators. You can have multiple differently colored textures for your mesh, "xyz_red.dds", "xyz_blue.dds", "xyz_white.dds", and need only 1 accompanying normalmap "xyz_n.dds" for the entire set. Saves a lot of trouble, i.e. identical normalmap files, when you're offering color variations to go along with your 3d assets in your mod.

 

Only important thing to keep in mind is the hardcoded filename codes/tags the game uses to match the special map files. "_n" for normalmap you already know, but there's also "_g" for glow maps, and possibly also some more, though I can't recall any right now. But the gist of it is, the game engine reads only up to the 1st char after the "_" to detect these. So you cannot have a "xyz_green.dds" (glow map) or "xyz_navy.dds" (normalmap) or similar starting with the -reserved- letters.

 

But that's just additional knowledge to keep in mind, should you come to need it in future.