Been having a lot of fun messing about with making my own island and house and stuff, then I decided to change the colour of a helm I really liked. I went on a tutorial and it said to look for the helms original file on the Construction Set disk, which I obviously don't have. I looked in my Steam meshes folder and all I could find was the iron tanto nif file, so I'm a little confused. Would it be possible to download the files from somewhere, or are they in a non obvious place, or is it just better to stick to making houses and islands for the moment until I can buy the disk version?

Thanks for any help.

You can unpack the meshes from BSA file. BSA is archive file containing meshes, textures etc. You need BSA unpacker (or similar) for that. CS disk had those files already unpacked iirc.

For changing colour of the helm, you'll need Nifskope, Photoshop or Gimp, and unpacked files that you need.
First open mesh in Nifskope and find out which texture it uses. Then recolour that texture in PS or Gimp and save as. Then, open mesh in Nifskope and change texture to your new one and save as.
Then, you can turn on CS and create new helm.
That is if you want have both original helm and your new one. If you want to replace original, then just recolour texture and save it under same name in your Data FIles\Textures\...\.

Thanks, I'll look into it. I might have some more questions in the future too.

OK, noob question. I've got BSA Browser, Niftexture, and Photoshop CS5. I find the the high ordinator helm mesh in tribunal.bsa, and put it in niftexture, which says it has 2 parts, the mask and the cloth, but I can't for the life of me get the 2 textures into Photoshop to recolour them. I assume it's either really easy and accountable to my noobyness with Photoshop, or it's one of the problems I've heard about when you use the construction set with Steam.

Either way help would be appreciated.

The textures are also BSA. Have you extracted those that you need?

Uh, I can't find the textures...

I unpacked the Morrowind and Tribunal BSA's into my Data Files, but I can't find the textures in my Textures folder. I can find them for some random stuff like misc items, face models, some mods I downloaded, bits and pieces of armour, but no helm. Any ideas?

Been a while since I used BSA browser but I recall it extracts your resources into a 'BSA' folder. So look in '...\Data Files\BSA' and you should see 'textures' and 'meshes' folders and possibly others. This is done I think so you can avoid overwriting similar files in your real game directories. (If it isn't obvious, move desired files out of the BSA area into your real game directories, and you should be in business)

PS - You should check out NifSkope too if you find yourself growing more interested in modding meshes and textures. NifTexture is great but NifSkope gives you a lot more options and visibility concerning the entire mesh and texture that goes with it.

Thanks, man, found it. I think I see what the problem was, I installed BSA Browser to a folder separate from my Morrowind\Data Files, so it was putting the unpacked textures hidden among other textures within the Morrowind\Data Files\Textures directory, and that would also explain why my BSA folder had empty folders in it. Nothing a quick file search coudn't solve however, I wish I'd thought of that earlier, lol.

Unfortunately I've discovered that Tribunal content won't load in the Construction Set, so I'm having to put my island mod on hold, and I'll have to go on with other parts of my wizard armour set until I can get that fixed, but that's for another topic when I have the energy for more modding shenanigans. Again, thanks for the help guys, and I'll undoubtedly have more questions in the future.

Now, I'm off to retexture some ebony pauldrons.

Okay, one more nooby question.

I've retextured the ebony pauldrons from black to white. and they look awesome. The problem I have is even though I can look at them in the render window and they look perfect, when I put them on an NPC they just look like normal ebony pauldrons. I assume this has something to do with the bodyparts having normal ebony pauldron id's, but I cant figure out how to create new body part id's for my new white pauldrons.

I'm sure it's because it's late and i'm tired, but I'll put this out there and see if it's answered in the morning if I can't figure it out then.

Hmm hard to say what the problem is without being able to look at all the details in your cs, but I'll take a stab:

Did you simply take the existing ebony pauldron(s) entries and use 'add art file' to put in your mesh? If you did, you shouldn't. Do it this way instead (first let me note that oftentimes when you edit NPCs or objects [the original ones] the in-game engine simply ignores your changes and uses the .bsa files - if you absolutely need to remove NPCs or objects you have to do it through scripting which is another discussion):

Make new entries as follows:

1) in body parts tab, find the ebony pauldron entry, double click to bring up properties. Now change the ID to something unique and different like "mynewebony_pauls" or anything you want as long as you are sure its obscure enough that there is no possibility of some other original reference using that ID... and click ok. The cs says "blah blah create a new object?" click yes.
2) Now reopen and use 'add art file' and so forth on this new object you just made
3) in armor tab, find the ebony pauldron entry and do the same thing as step 1, with a new unique different ID - follow same steps as above
4) now when you reopen, go to the male clothing pulldown and select the body part you made above - this attaches your custom mesh to the actual armor piece.
5) now you can put the new ID armor piece on an NPC and will actually use your new mesh.

Absolutely not. I don't know if this statement is how it should be, but I play my game by using BSAs and I normally replace everything in ordinary unpacked folders without having to register anything. Works just fine.

One reason your pauldron looks normal might be because you didn't name the texture exactly the same as stock one and didn't place it in the same directory where stock texture lies. Otherwise it would replace the old texture. Also make sure you made your custom texture a dds. or tga., game ain't gonna recognize a different file (such as ps, jpeg, gif etc).