((( Nota bene: Pfeh! I borked the subject line. It is a new *modder* question, not a new *player* question. Sorry about that...long day.)

I am a new modder running a dual-boot Linux and Windows system for my modding work. I've gotten comfortable with the construction set, and decided this week to spend some of the holidays learning Blender. Since my primary o.s. is Linux, I decided learning a complicated piece of software like Blender would be easier in my familiar environment.

It was really easy to get Blender installed and running on Linux, and I have a fairly extensive project that I now want to playtest in the Construction Set and in Oblivion.

Getting the NIF tools running under Windows 7 was a nightmare, because most of the documentation covers Windows XP, but I do have things working now. I can open NIFs in Blender on Windows now, and everything works including textures.

The problem came when I tried to read in the .blend file I created under Linux. Apparently Blender stored absolute paths to the texture .dds files. This *ought* to be something pretty easy to fix, but I can't seem to figure out how to do that in Blender. I've tried reloading the images in a "UV Mapper" window, but the reloads don't seem to "take".

So I have two basic question:

1. For my specific situation, how can I most easily change the path root for the .dds texture files in an existing .blend file? Is there a nifty automated way to do this, or at least a manual method that I'm not seeing?

2. In general, how do you more experienced modders set up your data paths for NIF development under Windows 7? Here is what I have right now:

* Python 2.6.x at C:\Python26\ and subdirectories
* Blender at its default location, and told it to use its installation directory for scripts.
* PyFFI at its default location.
* Manually extracted the Blender NIF scripts into "C:\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts\" and subdirectories. The automated installer couldn't do this even though I ran it as administrator. (I find this behavior of Win7 *really* confusing...On Linux, if you're the root user, you are the root user, period. But that's another topic for another forum.)
* My data is in c:\users\myaccount\OblivionExportData\ top-level folder, which contains subfolders "meshes", "textures", and so on. This is the BSA extract directory.

Thanks for any advice. I've searched all over the web and found not much about how to organize things, just more about installing the tools. I'm past that point and now need to figure out how to set up the work environment.

Kind regards,

Syscrusher

Solved the first part of this: I exported my Blender file to NIF, then reimported it back into Blender. That process fixed my texture paths so they are relative to my Oblivion data directory, and the file is usable again. Woohoo!

I'd still appreciate some advice on how to set up the directories, though.

Also, I wanted to share something I learned along the way: The NIF export will fail if your polygon meshes are not all children of the main geometry object in Blender. This can be verified using an "outliner" window in Blender, and you can reparent an object by selecting the child first, then shift-click selecting its new parent, and hitting Control-P. I realize all you veterans knew this, but since this is a newbie post, I wanted to share for the other newbies like myself.

Kind regards,

Syscrusher