I've installed a lot of modder resources, and I'm always having problems to locate the one I want (yesterday I spent nearly half an hour just to locate the .nif of a certain bed). Nifskope dosn't help much because the models not having absolute file paths, thus showing them untextured. The way I use now is simply adding them to the CS, but I wonder...is there a faster way to "navigate" or browse and previewing all your .nif's, and viewing them fully textured?

Thx in advance.

go to nifskope. Render -> Settings -> Rendering Tab -> "Auto detect game paths"

it will then look at those locations for the textures.....however because all the texture are stored in the .bsa archives, you'll also need ot unpack them to see the object get textured in nifskope. What i have is the textures unpacked to C:\Oblivion\Textures\ then Ive told nifskope to look there for a texture (in that same list as the game paths)...that way it doesnt effect ym oblivion install and i have all the meshes and textures unpacked and ready for use.

Well, all the models I want to see have unpacked textures, so no problem with that.

I'll give it a try, thx!

EDIT: Works perfectly, thx!

The one thing to note is that NifSkope is much more forgiving than the game itself. Many errors, like missing normal maps, will not mess up the render in NifSkope. You'll be able to see that things are in the right places, and that seams match up, but be prepared for surprises when you get the model in-game. Part of this is because NifSkope uses OpenGL to render and the game engine uses DirectX, and part is a deliberate tolerance of errors in a development tool.

I have a problem a bit like this one,

When I export my models from 3dsmax then when I open the model in Niftools I have to choose all the textures locations. 3dsmax makes the auto-path to the folder under textures like "architecture" or "weapons".
Its really annoying to go all the notes through to re-choose the location

you are not setting up your model correctly in max if you have to fiddle with texture paths in post.

one way is to drag you map into a material. assign that map to the model. when you get to export. type in the location of the texture in the texture file path. ie textures\mymod\mything\
if the texture file name is "thing.dds", then this will be file path that's set up after export "textures\mymod\mything\thing.dds"


or just put your texture into its final locations, ie in the data\textures\ folder and drag it into max from there. then the file paths will automatically be setup after export.

Thanks for the feedback. Don't worry, I always check either in the CS and/or in-game if the model that I add is to my liking.