Hi Guys

I am relatively new to modding and i have a problem regarding re-texturing, I am trying to add a custom texture to a current set of armour (although the set of armour is from a downloaded mod someone else has made [I have no intention of releasing this mod to the public as it is only a test]). I have renamed the meshes and placed them in their own file within the oblivion\data\meshes folder and I have created new .dds files for the textures/normal maps/glow maps and placed them in their own folder in the oblivion\data\textures folder. I have also taken the time to create a new plug-in file in the CS following the tutorial on the CS Wiki (new ID's for the armour, placing the .nif files in the correct place, creating _ghd files meshes for world view etc),

The problem is that when I go in-game, with the plug-in turned on, I cannot see the armour when I put it on my character, and it turns part of my character see-through but I can still see some parts of the armour on the character (albeit a bit hit-and-miss), i have read on other forums and on the CS Wiki that this can be caused by the normal map not being named properly or in the wrong place, but i have double checked these and have even tried it without the normal maps all together, also i do not believe that the mesh is the problem because i am having the same problem with the normal vanilla Leyawin guard cuirass and when I load it into Nifskope it loads up fine and I can see how the mesh/texture SHOULD look in-game,

I have tried everything I can think of to get it working but it still wont work, including saving the texture files with and without encryption and mipmaps, re-creating the normal maps different ways and ensuring everything is attached to the mesh when it is saved in NifSkope.

The software that i am using is GIMP(With .dds and normalmap plug-ins), Nifskope and the CS, i also have blender 2.49b (With the .nif plug-in) and Python 2.6.4 (with PyFFi 2.1.5) as in the future i hope to start working on mesh manipulation, i think that covers everything, if you guys need any more information just let me know, I can send you screenshots and/or the .nif and .dds files via e-mail if you wish

Thanks Guys

McKid

Is the texture the right size (multiple of four)? Perhaps if you uploaded the mesh & the textures to Mediafire or some other hosting site, I could take a look.

WHen you are saving your normal maps from GIMP what compression format are you using ?? - the normal maps must be saved as DXT3 or DXT5 (or uncompressed with the alpha channel) --- DXT1 does not save the alpha channel of the normal map. Other than that there are a myriad of possible causes so it would be easiest to check if you package the files up ( textures and mesh that you are using) and upload to a host site (ie. Rapidshare or similar) and post a link here so they could be downloaded and looked over. If you want I'll take a look at them to see if I can spot the problem -- Just PM me a copy of the files or a link to download them from.

Hey Guys

Thanks for the feedback:

WHen you are saving your normal maps from GIMP what compression format are you using ??

I was using DXT5 compression although at the moment all my textures are uncompressed and without mipmaps.

Is the texture the right size (multiple of four)?

It should be all I have done is modified the existing texture file and saved it under a different name.

I have uploaded a .rar file to Rapidshare http://rapidshare.com/files/409801556/DragonArmor.rar.html for you to download, if you could take a look at it for me it would be a great help

Cheers

McKid

The lack of Mip Maps could be the problem if that is what you have been using -- the game needs the Mip maps generated (only uses 4 levels so really only need to generate 4 levels)

But the real problem you are experiencing is the Naming convention you used ---- The _ is a special character and the game will truncate everything past that point so right now for your Mc_DragonArmor_Top.dds texture the game would need a Mc_n.dds name for the normal map and not a Mc_DragonArmor_Top_n.dds !!! (it does this so you can have several models use the same normal map but it can cause problems if used incorrectly !!) -- So you need to rename your textures to remove those _'s and then resave them generating the Mip Maps and then change the pathing in the NIfs to correct for the new names and it should fix you up.

For example lets say you have an armor that you want several colors of named myarmor and it is using the same detailing just different colors to avoid making several normal maps you could name them

myarmor_red.dds
myarmor_blue
myarmor_black
etc.
(be sure to avoid special characters like myarmor_gray or myarmor_nvde (since _g would be seen as a glowmap and _n would apppear to be a normal map !!!)
and by placing a single myarmor_n.dds in the folder they all would use this normal map

I will try both of these now and i will let you know if it fixes my problem

Thanks

McKid

It works!!! thanks JDFan and Sami_, i wont make that mistake again :tops:

Cheers

McKid

Thou art welcome, lad.