I'm sure there's an easy answer to this, and I'm just completely missing it :brokencomputer:

What I'm trying to do is somethingIi thought was fairly easy and straight forward: edit horses. I want to make each stable have its own sort of 'unique' breed, ie with stats and different colouring etc. Which I can set up fine, but it's actually adding the horses into the world itself that's causing me a headache.

As a test, I loaded up the AnvilWorld exterior cell, and went to where I knew the stable was- cell -47, -7. But nothing was there, aside from the walls and houses of Anvil, some fast travel markers, and painted textures outling where the stable is supposed to be.

I've read through the construction set wiki but can't really find anything specific. I know it's something simple and easy-- but I just can't remember what it is!

I need to be able to see the stable objects in that cell; the horses, the fences etc; so I can edit them to incorporate the rest of the mod. But I can't do that when there's nothing to change...

If anyone can point out where I'm going wrong I would be really grateful

'AnvilWorld' is used to show glimpses of Cyrodiil whilst inside Anvil itself and as such has very little detail. What you want is the WorldSpace 'Tamriel' then select 'AnvilMainEntrance' amongst the individual cells.

Thanks WetBlanket, that is EXACTLY what I was looking for. I knew it was something really simple I was forgetting... :sweat:

No problem Are you familiar with the work of Slof and Zira? They make a project like yours much more interesting - my Legion troopers, for example, ride Clydesdales.

I'm working with their resources, actually. I don't intend to release it (mostly because it will take me a while, and because the resources are all from alien slof and Zira), I'm just going to keep it private.

I want a different feel to the game- I'm incorporating heavies/clyesdales into the game, and changing the stats so that 'normal' horses ride differently to the heavier breeds (ie a smaller 'light' horse is going to be a lot faster, but without as much health, where as the heavies will have lots mor ehealth but less speed). I want to have certain colours for certain areas to, and change the stables so they each have a sort of speciality. I'm still learning to mod, so it's going to take me a while :biggrin: But I know it'll be worth it if I can get it working the way I want it to.

And that's an intresting idea, have troopers on Clyesdales. Hmm... do you mind if I use you as inspiration? I was considering using Zira's cloth armour models for town guards and such, but I like Legions on Clyedales- that'd look pretty cool (I wonder if there's any armour for them though..)

We seem to have much the same ideas as to how Oblivion horses should be

Zira's horse clothes (which include two armour variants) only fit the standard-sized breeds unfortunately. When my Blender skills improve somewhat I intend to do something about that. As far as I can tell it's not difficult as such, just tedious.

Aaargh! I'm trying to make the Legions use the clydesdale mesh, but I'm running into Invisbile Horse type problems.

I selected the meshes/textures I wanted the legion horses to use, then copied/renamed them all appropriately. I then went in and, as a test, used nifskope to point the black clyesdale mesh at the appropriate textures. However, whenever I try to load it up in Tes4 CS the head displays correctly, but the body is invisibile. This is despite it showing the textures perfectly in Nifskope.

I renamed the meshes Lgion_BlackBody, Legion_BlackHead etc, and the textures are Legion_Black and then Legion_black_tail. But even pointing at the renamed textures isn't making the body magically reappear...

Any ideas on something I could try?

Do you have normal maps for all of your textures? They have the same name as their texture counterpart but end in _n.dds

No- I didn't think the horses needed them. I'm working with Slof and Zira's files (I dont intend to release this mod, it's just for me personally) and the original mods don't have any normal maps.

I did try creating a normal map (copying the original texture, and renaming it with _n.dds) but it didn't make any difference. And the weird thing is that the head displays fine- it's only the body that is invisible. And I made a normal map for the body, and not the head, and it still doesn't display :brokencomputer:


When I open the main body mesh in nifskope, the black clyesdale mesh I'm working with points to, near the end (line 186) to 'textures\as\ashorseblack.dds' but this texture isn't in any of the folders that come with the zira or slof mods. So I'm kind of stuck. I've looked on the TES4CS wiki and been going through the retexturing tutorials, but I haven't been able to figure out what's going wrong. :facepalm:

The "as" in that texture path is AlienSlof, and that texture does come in her base horse texture pack. You can find it at Slof's Hive, just Google it, can;t be linked to from here due to content ratings. If you don't have a texture for it that could be part of the problem. That said though, horses do need normal maps, and I've used Slof's horse mods for years it is included: ashorse_n.dds [Oblivion only reads to the first _ in a file name, so if all her files start with ashorse_ as in ashorse_black.dds ashorse_bay.dds then one normal map can be used for all textures.] Perhaps by renaming the files you have lost track of your normal map. Copying a texture and renaming it with a _n does not a normal map make :no:

It seems as though renaming things has caused confusion and is behind your issue, try redownloading and setting it up with the textures named as they are packaged.

Not to dissuade you because there can never be too many interpretations of a good idea, but there is a Legion Clydesdale Zira mod of you were more interested in playing it than making it (just in case): http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31159

:foodndrink:

The Legion Clyesdale mod looks interesting, but I want to learn how to do this myself (And I want to use different body colours and tack as well).

I downloaded a few different mods as per your suggestion; I managd to find the as/horse_n.dds textures from the 'great horse compilation' but unfortunately my problem is still ongoing.

What I've done is this:

I've selected a black clyesdale mesh from "Zira's Castle" and copied all of the meshes/textures needed (horse body and mane/tail textures, and all tack textures) to a seperate, clean install of Oblivion (I use MTES4). from there, I renamed all the meshes and textures as Legion_*filename* to differentiate them. I then went and opened each .nif in nifskope, and changed every single texture path to point at my renamed Legion_ texture files (I left the "textures/as/horse" texture as is though.)

I figured it would be neater and easier to have everything renamed this way, so when I get to actually placing horses in the world I can zip down to the 'legion horses' or the 'bruma horses' etc instead of having to search through for the specific ones I want from AS or Zira.

Only problem is, my horse body is still invisible! The head with the remapped textures shows fine, as do all the tack and such. But the body is still invisible and I can't figure out what's gone wrong! The only difference between the zira_Castle meshes and Legion meshes are that the castle texture pathing goes another folder deeper (creatres\horse\ziras castle\horses) where as my Legion folder doesn't (creatures\horse\Legions).

Any thoughts? I appreciate the assitance that you've given me so far, but I know there's something I'm missing, I just can't think of it =(

I think it's just that you still have an error in the filenames/paths somewhere.

Did you read and understand what Darkrder had to say about underscores? I personally avoid them except for normal maps. Capital letters are just as effective really eg. LegionBlackSuperDuper.nif or whatever.

Do you really have to alter the nif/texture file names? Unless you are editing the meshes or textures there isn't much point and it introduces opportunity for making mistakes.

Whatever you decide, good luck

I had looked at the underscores but hadn't though it made much difference, because Zira's have them all the way through the filename, and AS doesn't.

I read back over darkrdr's post, it does make more sense now- I think I'll try it one more time and just have the filename without underscores. If that doesn't work, I'll just use the original file names (I wanted to rename everything so I could keep it neater in the CS)

And I hadn't considered the texture side of it, I was just renaming everything so it all matched up. I migh try just renaming the meshes, test it, and see if it works okay that way- and if it does, it means I messed up with renaming textures :facepalm:

Thanks heaps for the help though, wetblanket and Darkrder, I really appreciate it