How to replace vanilla weapon textures and meshes with modded weapon textures and meshes?

[GunnerofLife]

I made a similar topic about a year ago or so but I don't have access to that thread anymore. Basically, I would like to replace some of the vanilla weapon textures and meshes with ones from the Weapons of Morrowind mod by InsanitySorrow. For example, replacing the vanilla Iron Longsword with WoM's Iron Longsword. Not only are InsanitySorrow's weapon retextures high quality (as always), I find the Morrowind weapon meshes much, much better than Oblivion's vanilla weapons.

 

If somebody could give me a step by step guide on how to do it, that would be great.

[WastelandAssassin]

funnily enough , here is a tutorial written by InsanitySorrow on just that matter (while this is about new weapons , all you need to do is edit the existing weapon forms with the models in question)

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/topic/1808-guest-workshop-using-modders-resources-by-insanitysorrow/

[GunnerofLife]

Thank you for the reply, but there was an easier method that I was looking for. When I posted this thread a year ago, somebody told me to just drag and drop either the new textures or meshes into the respective directory and rename the other to match the original. I know my explanation is a bit confusing since I don't remember what he said exactly (otherwise I wouldn't be making this thread). However, it did work for me back then and it did not require CS. I was hoping maybe somebody would know something among those lines.

[WastelandAssassin]

it is possible , though it would require more work

assets like meshes and textures are packed in specific archives as they are released . so the replacing method would work for loose files , less so for ones packed in such archives

though if you know the names of the assets you want to replace , you could rename them and place them in the correct directory (you'll probably need to create the correct folder structure , unless you extract the archive which will provide you with the loose files in the correct folder structure)

the one issue is that Nif files are assigned textures , so you'll need to make sure that the Nif is still using the correct texture files (if you rename the textures and place them in a different folder , the Nif won't recognize the texture which means you'll have wonderful purple missing textures)

 

so you might think it's easier , it's not necessarily so , especially if you don't know how to use NifSkope , or if you aren't familiar with the way the official assets are archived