I want to apply a refraction effect to a mesh of my own creation. In case you're wondering, the refraction effect is what makes oblivion gates and other things look "shimmery".

Is there a half-decent tutorial on this? I tried looking in the .nif for a couple of different meshes that use it, but all I got was confused.

If I recall correctly, you set the material property of the trishape to 'refract'. The mesh that comes with Timeslip and Quarl's DoF mod does something similar.

I tried renaming the niMaterialProperty to "refract", but my mesh just went invisible. I'm guessing there's a lot more to it than that...?

Well, I wouldn't really know - My knowledge of NIFs is infinitesimal. Perhaps the DoF mesh could yield more answers.