I figure this has to have been answered before, but I've been searching for about two hours now with no luck.

I only just started using the Construction Set again today, and I'm not exactly an expert user. My main goal is to edit the faces on the vanilla NPCs to make them look less alien and more distinctive to their various races. (No more orange-skinned Imperials, etc.)

So I opened up TES CS for the first time, found Uriel Septim, and when I previewed him (and others) in the NPC window, they had this light on them, which made it so you could see all of the detail of the normal maps.

After a little bit of tinkering, I found out that I couldn't change the skintone of the vanilla NPCs without this http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10811. So I installed that, restarted the Construction Set and suddenly, the light is gone. I've tried everything. I've extracted the textures from the bsa file myself, I've deleted the texture files, I've looked for some sort of toggle for the light, but I cannot get the light to come back.

I honestly have no idea why this happened or how to fix it.

There's actually a few ways to turn on the light in the CS.

- The easiest is simply hitting the "A" key.
- Under View, check Bright Light (you'll see the shortcut is the "A" key there)
- There's a toggle button in the buttons menu, toward the right side that looks like a light bulb.

If you already have an NPC preview window open when you turn on the light, run your mouse pointer over the preview window to 'turn it on'.

That's... not exactly what I meant, I don't think. Either that or it's my "Bright Light" that's not working properly. It just adds a flat, overall light. The light before was more directional, creating shadows as well as light.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGrFP6P9AQE&feature=related

You can see how the lighting used to be for me at about 4:42 to 5:20. (I tried to find something a little less annoying, but this is about the best example I could find.)

Bright light IS flat directionless light. Turning it off returns it to the neutral light.

Alright. But what I'm saying is that when I turn off Bright Light, there isn't that directional light like in that video. It used to be there, but now its gone. It's still flat lighting like Bright Light, only less intense.

Sorry, I really have no idea where that light in the video is coming from, I've never seen it before and it's not default.
Maybe try playing with File > Preferences, and the shaders tab?