add meshes/texures without replacing for mods

[seansaysyeo]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm new to modding so sorry if this is a bit simple but I have seen some interesting mods for clothes/armour I'd like to work with but they replace vanilla clothes/armour and I was looking to add them to work with in the construction set without replacing the vanilla content.

 

How can I add the new content without replacing the old stuff?

 

Thanks

[Pellape]

The CS Wiki has a nice Beginner Guide but I cannot find how to add clothes or armor in it so I will make a simple guide and we see hows it goes.

 

Right click at a cloth item in CS and choose new in the pop up menu and add it there, simple as that. :smile:

 

Clothes and armor is under the menu Items at the left side in CS so click the [+]Items and then click at Clothing and not the [+]. Start by looking at some clothes how they are added by editing them (double click any of them), specially which body slot they are attached to, which is called Biped Object in CSE but you can add any cloth or armor to any slot but that will just end up messy in the game later for sure. Some armors and clothes use several slots like those that are made like a whole body suit, so look them up. Click OK when you have added:

• The Icon
• The Body Mesh
• The Ground Mesh

And also given them proper names, one name that will be visible in game and also an unique Object-ID.

 

Another way is to edit a premade object, like a shirt, exchange everything except the Bipad slot for your shirt and when you gave it a new ID and click OK, CS will ask you if you wanna make a new object instead of overwritten the one you edited and click YES, make a new object.

 

Open a cell in the render window from the menu under that window and add your clothing to it and push F when the item is active so it drops to the ground. Press T to see the object from above or C to see it from the side and hold Shift to circle around the active object. You can also add them to containers but be sure it is a new container that do not respawn and we can debate containers separate later if you wanna use them but they are explained in the CS wiki beginner guide for sure, making your first home or your first dungeon.

 

Best way to learn how to do stuff in CS is to first look at a similar solutions, how they made it, either how Bethesda did it or how other modders did it and adding new stuff is almost always done by right clicking in the right sub menu on the left side in CS, mostly by right clicking an already made object really or under them.

 

So lets take a peek at what a clothing or armor item are made of, shall we?

• 2-3 textures
  • The visible texture (x.dds)
  • The Normal Texture (That will add a none flat surface, or flat or see through, depending on how it is made) (x_n.dds)
  • Maybe glow map but that is rare (x_g.dds)
• 1 Icon that are placed in \data\textures\menus\icons\xxx and it is a (x.dds)
• 1 Ground Mesh (The one you see on shelves or at the ground) often named (xgrnd.nif)
• 1 Body Mesh (x.nif)

The Nif file has info about which textures to use, so that is what you add in CS, the Nif and the icon, not the texture.

 

So if you wanna add new clothes or recolor them and attach them to a new mesh (nif) or just simply look at them, then use Nifskope for it from the Niftools Project but that is not what you wanna do right now but maybe in the future so I want to point out the best tool for it that we now used in latest 17 years so far. To be able to see the textures, you have to point out where they are for Nifskope, but we can make a separate guide for that, which I did somewhere already but can make again for sure.

Edited March 30, 2021 by Pellape

[Pellape]

I forgot to mention that first you load CS with Obkivion.esm only and when you made your object(s) click save and choose new esp.

 

I did find 2 tutorials, one video and one text based. The video has a very low quality but you could find others by google "Tutorial adding meshes to CS oblivion"

 

 

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/How_to_create_new_re-textured_items

[THETRUEDOZAH]

I have the opposite problem. I want to be able to replace the vanilla armor/clothing with HGEC stuff, but every mod wants to use an esp. Even the mods titled 'replacer' use an esp 'cause modders always gotta add that one extra little thing. I sometimes try to jury-rig mods together by simply renaming files to what I think they should reference from vanilla file structure. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.

 

Otherwise I find game data starts to bloat up too much. Using a texture mod that updates all the textures to high resolution creates those files in the folders, overwriting or substituting for what's in the game's bsa, then adding an esp-required mods often creates duplicates of the exact same data, the same exact textures with the same names except under a slightly different file path. Kinda just gave up on finding an actual 'replacer' for clothing because the mods specifically titled 'replacer' clearly aren't, require an esp, and leave ladies with invisible torsos that heave and hurl, and crunch like nuts in the mouths of squirrels. Also, pink undies.

[THETRUEDOZAH]

For ex; I wanted to use Electric Blue Dremora and Dremora Females. I took the files from blue, renamed them and moved them into the file locations I knew matched vanilla since I had HD textures already installed. Then I just had to activate a single mergeable FemaleDremora esp and Viola! - electric blue dremora females. Renaming/moving the files and using them as a direct overwrite prevents there from being redundant or unused data in the game folder, that still has to be scanned because it's in the folder but doesn't actually do anything.

 

My latest project was finding a mod called 'performance sound' which gave me the exact names and location of about every sound asset in the game, and taking GOSH piecemeal and renaming the files one-by-one so I can have a complete sound overhaul without even using any esp.

[Pellape]

Yes I know what you mean and you do have all file patchs in CS at the very right end of the object line in the object window and the easiest and fastest way I think to see the patchs and file names, is to use TES4Edit instead so try it as it can also sort stuff easy by names instead of base ID. I used TES4Edit when I added farm animals to my mod, loading the animal in the background with it and read the stats while I added them in CS. It can take some time to get used to TES4Edit but when you do, it is extremely fast and neat to use in your case.

 

So why is it not always working for you? It is the Archive invalidation (Hope I got it right this time). Do you use SKYBsa or which of the 3 different versions do you use? SKYBsa will force the game to first look at the loose files first and if it doesnt find them, start looking for them in the bsa files and the vanilla game wants to do opposite, so if it finds the object in the bsa, it ignores what you added in the right path anyway and will never find them.

Edited April 1, 2021 by Pellape

[Striker879]

I have the opposite problem. I want to be able to replace the vanilla armor/clothing with HGEC stuff, but every mod wants to use an esp. Even the mods titled 'replacer' use an esp 'cause modders always gotta add that one extra little thing. I sometimes try to jury-rig mods together by simply renaming files to what I think they should reference from vanilla file structure. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.

 

Otherwise I find game data starts to bloat up too much. Using a texture mod that updates all the textures to high resolution creates those files in the folders, overwriting or substituting for what's in the game's bsa, then adding an esp-required mods often creates duplicates of the exact same data, the same exact textures with the same names except under a slightly different file path. Kinda just gave up on finding an actual 'replacer' for clothing because the mods specifically titled 'replacer' clearly aren't, require an esp, and leave ladies with invisible torsos that heave and hurl, and crunch like nuts in the mouths of squirrels. Also, pink undies.

 

Not sure which HGEC replacers you've looked at but the recommended one is EVE HGEC Eyecandy Variants Expansion (the only one that is a complete body and equipment replacer to the best of my knowledge). The ESPs that are included with EVE are just to enable female versions of armor that has no female option available in the vanilla game (e.g. steel armor), for compatibility with some DLCs and to fix a vanilla game problem with female Khajiit that rears it's head to bite any HGEC version that doesn't address the issue.

[THETRUEDOZAH]

Thanks, I'd been using hgec more revealing standard armor which I haven't had any issues with. I tried using colourwheel's clothing replacer and ended up with the invisible torsos because I tried using it without the esp, lol.

Variants will do nicely to get the rest of the female outfits looking nice.

 

I'm kinda-ish doing a livestream playthrough on twitch with morroblivion, elsweyr, valenwood, and valenwood islands so I have to be a little careful about what I put into my game, but so far the topless dremora haven't gotten me banned, lol.

[Striker879]

Thanks, I'd been using hgec more revealing standard armor which I haven't had any issues with. I tried using colourwheel's clothing replacer and ended up with the invisible torsos because I tried using it without the esp, lol.

Variants will do nicely to get the rest of the female outfits looking nice.

 

I'm kinda-ish doing a livestream playthrough on twitch with morroblivion, elsweyr, valenwood, and valenwood islands so I have to be a little careful about what I put into my game, but so far the topless dremora haven't gotten me banned, lol.

 

I do some mixing and matching using different sources as what I call "pure replacers" myself (i.e. replacers that don't use an ESP), so my EVE installation isn't in an unaltered state.

[THETRUEDOZAH]

Yea, I'm about to put it into my game and noticed that. Well, plus I'd want to keep my original body choices, and not have an extra folder full of clothing meshes doing nothing. Yesterday I noticed that the bronze armor from Forgotten Shields kinda matched the mesh for vanilla orc armor, so I took the mesh from orc f that was HGEC and replaced the bronzearmorf,nif and got golden orc HGEC armor.

 

There are so many awesome mods for Oblivion. I see streamers sometimes put in their title that they're playing vanilla, and to me it's like an ice-cream store advertising they only sell vanilla flavor. Lol. The latest I'm super impressed with is a mod ported from morrowind called True 3D for Headphones. Wow. Little subtle changes can make such a huge difference, things you didn't know were missing. That plus Gecko's parallax maps are the two standouts for my current playthrough.

 

I couldn't do a 'must-have mods' list proper, there's just too many. Even a modlist isn't enough, because half are not esp-bound. What's a streamer scamp to do?