I love the animated shimmer effect of this mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32918/?

And I would like to combine it with the glowmaps from this one: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/48785/?

But doing so leads to animated glowmapping, which is not the effect I want. I want a layered effect so you get the shimmer underneath the glowmapping. Can you stack them in such a fashion? Mesh->Animated texture->Glowmap->Normal texture? That second mod also adds translucency, can that be added in addition to the animation? I would like to combine all 3 effects but I have no idea where to even start. Any help would be appreciated.

Without actually downloading and looking at the nifs myself I'll only be able to give you a little bit of help with this.

Sometimes to get the various effects you use multiple meshes and from what I've seen usually they have a slight variation in size (like the layers you described), so you could try one mesh with all the animated effect (I'd try that as the larger sized mesh and check alpha settings especially on the vertex colors) then I would have the glow map mesh as the smaller one.

You will need to set them up properly i.e. make sure all the nif block properties are correct. The translucency comes from the degree of alpha values in the vertex colors or defined in the NiAlphaProperty (if the NiTriShape has one)

Yeah... I have no real idea how to do any of that.

Okay from the sound of your first post I thought you knew a bit about nifscope. If you like I could have a play around (no promises of it working) and if I come up with a viable nif I'll write up recipe of what I did.

The animated one looks like it's using vanilla textures (I've setup animated textures before) and I did see the glow map one earlier (liked the glow but I didn't like the runes) so I will make the thing from scratch. Don't know what permissions the authors give so best if I follow that route save noses getting out of joint, and If you want those glow textures then with a recipe and the authors permission you can alter it to suite yourself later.

One other thing with all those effects on one nif I wouldn't like to see 200 soulgems in one room, might cause graphics cards to melt.

Outside of renaming texture paths I know next to nothing about Nifscope. Talking about nitrifiles and the like is all gobbledygook to me. I would like to learn how to do the animated textures bit though, that is kinda the point of this. Mainly because I have another project I have been kicking around in my head that would use it too. Basically, its how do I do animated textures along with adding a glowmap. Because how I did it in nifscope before animated the glowmap itself, which is not the effect I want.

Well my best advice for you then is to get used to nifscope doing some of the more basic things like this: http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/tutorials/article/98-static-mashups-in-nifskope/

Also open up as many nifs as you can, especially some that do funky things and just look at them. Worm posted a thread ages ago that may help you also: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1438186-nif-tools-and-the-nif-file-format-knowledge-base/?hl=%2Bbsfadenode#entry22117898

Maybe this tutorial is what you are looking for:

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/1614-fpi-animated-textures-tutorial/

But as Mindboggles said: first you need some basic Nifskope knowledge.