Hello good people of the Skyrim modding community! I've created an armor mesh from scratch in 3ds Max, imported it into Skyrim, and have come across a particular problem that I've yet to find a solution for.

Q: Why is the entire character mesh darkening and flickering whenever I equip my custom built armor?

An Image of the Problem will be placed here as soon as a MOD allows me to post links. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The following is a list of information that might help you provide an answer:

• The armor occupies three parts of the character: the body (SBP_32_BODY), the forearms (SBP_34_FOREARMS) and the calves (SBP_38_CALVES).

• The entire armor mesh is comprised of three chunks named body, body-armor and limbs.

• The body and body-armor chunks are hand made and share the same BSLightingShaderProperty values as the orcish armor (cuirassm_1.nif).

• Custom textures were created for the body and body-armor chunks in the .DDS format (diffuse/opacity & normal/specular).

• The limbs chunk has been taken from the male body mesh (malebody_1.nif ) and uses the approriate BSLightingShaderProperty and textures.

• In NifSkope the NiTriShapeData has normals and the BS Num UV Sets are set to 4097 (save for the limbs which have no normals and are set to 1).

• Updating the Tanget Space for each chunk in NifSkope did not resolve the issue.

• Each piece of the mesh shared the same smoothing group when exported from 3ds Max.

• When uploaded to another engine and using the same maps the armor displays correctly.

One note of particular interest is that darkening and flickering of the character mesh vanished after I removed the body and body-chunks from the .nif (essentially equipping just the limbs chunk).

Any help towards resolving this issue will be much appreciated!