Help modifying .nif geometry

[xoham]

The pulldown says "Custom material swap" and the "only valid" checkbox is checked.

[xoham]

The lens flare part gets through, but the beam does not.

 

Does the glass around the pillar maybe attenuate the light? And maybe if it does it twice it is extreme? I can try changing that too I suppose.

Edited October 2, 2020 by xoham

[xoham]

Also note that the center of the pillar is now transparent, which proves that I did the material swap correctly.

[xoham]

Here's a discrepancy I can't explain. In the CK, the pillar has no interior texture, as expected, but ingame if I use the tcl command to go through objects, it does. So how do I get the changes made to the lighthouse to appear in game? The mod is on because the light is there and it spins. But the material swap change is not there. What gives?

[xoham]

I'm stuck. I searched for all local copies of the lighthouse01.nif and deleted them, so it should only reference the built-in one. I deleted any mods that affected the lighthouse; fully deleted; no just uninstalled.

However, when I use the TCL console command ingame, I can plainly see that the material is still two sided. I created a material swap, gave it a name, and applied it to the base item. You can see it becomes one-sided in the CK.

 

I don't know how to proceed and I think I have to give up.

 

If someone can point me to mesh editing, like what tools do you use, I can maybe try that route.

[niston]

Possibly the game is still showing precombines?

[xoham]

If that's the case, and I barely understand what you mean, what could I do about it? I understand precombines to be a combined set of static objects treated as one. I'm not sure it would be a precombine given that most of it is in one .nif.

Edited October 13, 2020 by xoham

[niston]

If the the lighthouse is part of a precombine, and the game is still showing precombines, then it's not going to reflect your edits.

 

But... If you change something in a cell (delete something or move it about), precombines should break. Applying a Matswap should also break precombines.

 

Not sure what gives. But another thing you could try is, making the texture transparent where the column is. You can use NifSkope to look at the UV map, so you can get an idea where on the texture the column is. You'll possibly have to adjust the Alpha Test Reference value in the Material file if you try this.

[PJMail]

Probably too late to this discussion but my recent experience tells me 3 things concerning your issues.

- Material swaps are ignored by Precombines

- Removing a reference in a precombine does not reliably 'break' precombines (I mean the precombines stay active in the cell)

- The value to modify in the bgsm if you want a texture to become transparent is just the "Alpha" (set to 0.0).

The "Alpha Test" value relates to the Alpha channel in the texture file (if it has one) so is generally used to make parts of the texture transparent (the alpha channel in the dds looks like a cutout).

The "alpha" value ignores all this and makes any texture go from opaque (1.0) to transparent (0.0)