LE Ebony Blade Retexture with existing Texture mod.

[Florentius]

Hello competent modders.

 

I've been trying to get the Ebony Blade to look like the Ebony Greatsword from https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/37645/?tab=files the Oblivion Alternate Texture to be precise.

 

But I wanted it only to replace the Ebony Blade and not my normal Ebony weaponry.

 

Tried my own hand in it by manually editing files but sadly I'm just terrible at it and only got so far as to replace the Ebony Blade with a missing purple texture variant of that Greatsword, haha.

 

 

Aaaanyway. I'll take both advice on how to do this or just someone who knows what they are doing to do it.. Who'll likely be done in 5 minutes.

 

 

Thanks for reading.

Edited January 3, 2019 by Florentius

[thumbincubation]

The Ebony Blade uses its own textures. Textures > weapons > ebonyblade > ebonyblade.dds and ebonyblade_n.dds. There are also textures > cubemaps > chitin_e_ebony.dds and ore_ebony_e.dds, but those are most likely something you won't want to bother with until you're done with your main textures, if at all.

 

Use some kind of .bsa extractor to extract both meshes, and both of those textures, from your meshes and textures archive, respectively. Then change the diffuse map (ebonyblade.dds) to your desired look, in GIMP or Photoshop with .dds plugin. You may or may not wish to create a new normal map, depending on what changes you've made (grip design/ridges/decorations, etc. or just coloring). Give both textures unique names, just in case some wild object, or other mod item, uses the vanilla ebony blade texture, Use Nifskope to apply them to the ebony blade meshes (don't forget 1st person) and put the newly-textured meshes into your data folder, along the appropriate file path, which will be the same as you find it in the archive.

 

Here's the tutorial I followed when I first started. It's pretty decent, but it's a few years old. I'd suggest googling the most up to date extractors, extensions, etc., rather than relying on the links provided.

 

https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Retexture_Tutorial

 

If you run into trouble getting CK set up, here's the front door to that tutorial series. There's a link to the tutorials hub, where there are more job-specific tutorials, and you can also find more using the search box at the top right.

 

https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Category:Getting_Started

 

There are also some videos out there, though I tend to like things I can keep looking at while I work. Hope it helps.