I'm having trouble figuring out what certain types of textures are:

_g (glow?)
_m (mirror?)
_em (emissions?)
_d (destructible?)
_e (emissions?)
_opt (optional?)
_p (parallax?)

g is glow.
e IIRC is environment map.

_n -> Normal.
_e -> Environment Map also called Reflection Map.
_em -> Environment Mask Map, Defines which parts the Mesh the _e map will Effect.
_g -> Glow Mask Map, Defines which parts of the meshes Material Property Emissive will Effect, it can also be colored (instead of the normal GreyScale) to apply different colored glowing to different parts of the Mesh.
_p -> Parallax, though its referred to as the Height Map.
_d/_opt/ -> no Idea most likely just named differently because they got used for some special case secondary purpose -> maybe follow these back to what they are being used on to find out what that purpose was.

thanks to you both!

any idea on _M?

I can't recall what _m was, have an example file?
And where did you see _opt?
_d I recall seeing once in there somewhere, I think it was a copy of the diffuse map.

Or you can set the immisive color in NifSkope and just have the glow map black and white. Its what Bethesda did with most of the things that glow in the game like the Enclave stasis cell fields and the engery barriers Optimus Liberty Prime destroys around the Jefferson Memorial.

Beth Uses _m and _em as the Environment Mask Map slot -> there are a few instances of both existing but only one of them is actually ever used -> usually the _m is a non alpha layered version and the _em is using an alpha layer, never spent much time caring why they created both but only used one or the other.



The section that says "instead of the Normal Greyscale" covers this as Pure White to Pure Black is Greyscale.

After very extensive in game testing, I prefer coloring glow masks as opposed to coloring the emissive material in most circumstances. It's my default preference now.

I've always wondered what method works best when using glow maps. I'll take your word for it Ghogiel.

But if you decide to color the glow map texture instead of the emissive property... what color should you set the emissive property to in Nifskope? White or black perhaps?

White -> Black = Zero Emission no matter if you have a Glow Map defined or not, its a rather annoying fallacy people seem to think that the Glow Map enables Glowing IT DOES NOT only the Material Property Emissive does.

Also The Emissive Color is combined with the Glow Map Color so a Red Emissive and a Green Glow Map will produce a Yellow Glow and any other color combination mixture from the two sources.

White emissive and control mask power and tint via the glow map itself. Coloring the emissive material property dulls the emissive strength more so than coloring the mask. other than that there isn't a whole lot of difference, except you can have multiple colors on the map- you can only have one color in the material.
Which is handy for retexture, just set up a new texture set without need to copy the mesh just to make a change the material.


It won't look very yellow imo. pretty much an exact example of that case, with a white diffuse map will look like box #8 in this image http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c85/lego-botz/other/GLOWMapInteraction2.png

random experiments i made one day on emissive material property behavior.
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1111249-glow-map-interactions/page__p__16293251&#entry16293251

Every game engine does this a bit differently even going from Oblivion to FO3 to FONV the exact same object will look slightly different in all 3 games using whats basically the same game engine just with slight revisions.

Although complete coloring comes from 5 base sources -> Diffuse Map -> Vert Colors -> Material Property -> Secondary Maps (Glow, blah blah, others) and Shaders, this only effects coloring on an object level -> game shaders and other effects also factor in during runtime.