I'm attempting to retexture the boats in Morrowind.

I'm going from Gmax -> TES using the NifTools exporter.

Everything works fine, the models look OK and the textures are correct EXCEPT... they are too bright and the game does not display vertex shading on the new textures. I've tried googling, but I can't find any references to how textures work and how the Netimmerse engine renders them.

I would expect that using the MODULATE option on the texture option would mean the texture is affected by the underlying diffuse colour, but it doesn't appear to work that way. I've already pushed the ambient colour setting to black and that also seems to have no effect.

I could just darken the textures in the image file, but that irks me as it would mean losing a lot of colour information although I can live with that if that's the only answer.

Does anybody have any info or references that could help me find the solution?

Thanks.

Try loading your mesh in Nifskope and change material settings to 'ambient' and 'Difuse' to white then 'specular' and 'emissive' to black which are the default settings Bethesda used.

By altering those settings you can lighten , darken and change the hue of your textures,http://s70.photobucket.com/albums/i109/Slartibartfast_2006/?action=view¤t=ScreenShot001.jpg

Thanks for the tip, S. Unfortunately, my textures still look crappy. Maybe it's just the textures. Oh well, the rowboats look nice with my oak texture. It's the deck planking that's the problem. A large expanse of flat polygons, with one texture. I should expect it to look rubbish.

Thanks again, and I'll post if things improve.

Post a screenshot .maybe i can help further with suggestions how to adjust the texture itself as it may be achieved altering the gamma settings or brightness in an art package.

Perhaps its a simple shader setting.
Most game models have the Ambient and Diffuse white, and Specular and Emmissive to black. I usually use that setting for basic static meshes. If using the blinn shader the ambient and diffuse is white and specular is black. ( official TEsixporter for max5 automatically sets emmisive same as specular, I haven't done enough testing with gmax or niftools exporter )

I haven't used gmax with niftools plugin much but you maybe make sure the vertex colors box is checked on the Niftools shader options in the material editor window, and also the vertex colors box is checked in the export options window.
After exporting open in nifskope to double check that NiTriShapeData does have vertex colors enabled and that they are correct

Probably not relevant but i suggest make sure "generate strips" is unchecked from the exporter. Stock game meshes use NiTriSHAPES, that option makes NiTriSTRIPS, which surprisingly do render in MW but are unstable on my machine and prone to CTD, especially in vanity mode.

Hi Slartibartfast and Wildman,

thanks for your suggestions. One thing I found; double checking original .nifs against the exported .nifs is that there a couple of flags that don't get set.

I suppose I could go through the .nif in NifSkope and fix the textures by hand (so to speak) but that's a long winded way to go about things and I'll have to do it again if I change the models in any way.

So, I decided it would be a whole lot easier to start editing the inport/export code and see if I can't set those flags in my .gmax file.

Thanks again guys, CAD