SSE Armour re-colour questions for a simpleton.

[cumbrianlad]

This post is now answered!

 

If you can answer, please do so as if talking to the idiot child of a sub-normal hamster!

 

Background: I wanted to add a variant of the dwarven armour set but have it coloured more like Nordic Carved, ie silvery. It is to be stand-alone, not a replacer. I wanted it to be dwarven so that the player got the ability to cast 4 levels of dwarven centurion steam breath, depending on how many pieces of the set they had found and equipped. It had to be silvery rather than the normal dwarven armour colour because it's supposed to be made from (Lord Of The Rings) mithril and therefore fall into the light armour category.

 

I can handle all the CK stuff like spells, armour addons, armour and crafting recipes... it's just the re-colour I don't get, despite trawling the internet for hours.

 

I can extract the relevant textures and can edit them in Paint.Net. I'm hoping that I won't need new .nif files because I don't have Nifscope and don't want to go there!

 

Do I need to generate new .nif files using Nifscope for a simple re-colour? I can't see a way in CK to attach my new texture colours.

 

Signed,

 

The idiot child of a sub-normal hamster, aka cumbrianlad.

[Tasheni]

Unfortunately you will need Nifskope. But it's an easy task. Open the nif in Nifskope, look for BSShaderTextureSet, klick it left, look in the Block Details list for Textures and just change the path to your texture files. Do this for every NiTriShape. Then delete all strings of the paths so that just looks like textures\YourTexturesFolder\YourTexture

 

without backslash at start or end. Safe the nif. Ready. In ck you need sometimes to refresh the view with F5 - or F4 - I just forgot it :smile:

Edited June 4, 2018 by Tasheni

[Deleted3897072User]

You can do it in the CK if you use texturesets, then you don't need NifSkope necessarily.

 

A textureset is a group of related dds files, at least a diffuse texture and a normal map, that can be applied to a mesh in an ARMA record to override the ones named in the nif file. That's how colour variations are done in Skyrim.

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks folks.

 

OldMansBeard, Since I read your post I've found a page 'using texture sets for skyrim' on Nexus Wiki. I'll give that a go and see how I get on. If it works it makes sense anyway. Why add a dozen or so new nifs to a mod along with the recoloured textures if you don't have to?

 

Tasheni, I'm really hoping I don't have to bite the bullet and learn nifscope... If all else fails, I'll give your advice a go!

 

Edit: OldMansBeard, It works a treat! No Nifscope (Sorry, Tasheni but I was dreading needing to learn it... I just keep putting off)! I now have silvery light-weight Dwarven armour. I'll need to do it for all the other male and female parts but now the process should be much quicker now that I know what I'm doing. I'll also make new variants of mineable ore so that I can have it requiring mithril rather than moonstone, since that was unbelievably light and strong in Lord of the rings.

 

Thanks a bundle. It looks fine in game, even though I only have DXT5 compression available in Paint.Net. I added mip maps to the texture and I'm assuming that's the right thing to do. I was pleased that paint.net did a good job. I edited the normal Skyrim SE texture rather than high res (I don't have high res texture packs). If this gets released on Nexus should I get the high res pack and repeat the process for that? I'm just thinking that other players might be disappointed with the basic textures.

 

With regard to making high resolution sets, I'm guessing that DXT5 compression would probably screw up any advantages of using a higher res map? Would I need to get BC7 compression into paint.net somehow (or get photoshop, which can use it already). I can get a plugin for paint.net that supports BC7 compression but the file extension needs to be renamed .DDS2. Would this cause a problem with the game, directing it to a file with a different extension?

[Deleted3897072User]

If you are taking the textures from the SSE bsa's and recolouring them, those are the ones from the Oldrim HiRes DLC texture packs and that's as good as you are going to get. They will have been DXT5 compressed so the quality has already been compromised and there is nothing whatever to be gained from coverting them to BC7.

 

If you are creating your own textures from scratch then, yes, it's worth using BC7 to compress them. The trick with paint.net is to change the file extension to dds2, let it do BC7 then change the extension on the compressed file back to dds. SSE will recognise the BC7 format inside the file but it will only load it if the extension is actually '.dds' .

Edited June 5, 2018 by OldMansBeard

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks again for that.

 

I'm just using the basic Skyrim Special Edition textures, so what I've done will be fine.

 

I'll remember what you said if ever I get bold enough to use my own from scratch.

 

The only problem I found in testing was that my new textures didn't show up in the inventory and smithing previews... until I found out that I had to alter the world model textures in CK. Now it all looks fine and good to go!

 

You are now officially on my 'I'll buy you a drink if I see you' list! This means very little in practical terms but you'll get a mention if I publish.