3D Craftworks: Working with Nifskope

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Contents:

1. Changing Texture Paths
   
2. Export UV Map Template
   
3. Basic UV Map Edits
   
4. Basic Nifskope Alchemy
   

Introduction:

Nifskope can be a confusing tool to use, especially to newcomers, but even the more experienced modders have trouble working out how to do certain tasks in Nifskope. These short workshops will cover some of the more common and basic Nifskope operations.

For those that are unsure what Nifskope is I'll cover that bit now. Nifskope is a 3rd Party utility developed and maintained by the Niftools team. Nifskope allows us to edit the models used in the Elder scrolls and Fallout games, which are NIF files.

Smarty Says: The workshops here unless stated were written using Nifskope 1.1.0 RC7.

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Introduction:

Nifskope allows you to add, remove and change the textures that will be used by the model (NIF), we're going to take a look at where and how we can do this.

Let's Change a Texture:

First thing we need to do is open our NIF, so start up Nifskope and click the Load button in the top left corner, or if you have the NIF in front of you, you can double-click the file to open it in Nifskope.

Load me pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease!

To the left you'll notice the Block List pane, each model has blocks of data, these blocks are for things like the model shape, the collision and with some models things like animation data.

If you look closely you'll see little arrows next to the node names, if you click the arrow it expands the list, do that with the top item so we can see all the other data the model has.

In the window to the right click on the part of the model you want to change the texture for, this will highlight it's node in the Block list to the left, you'll then be able to use the arrows to expand the node list. Keep expanding the nodes until you see a BSShaderTextureSet property and click on it.

Now press F3 to bring up the Block Details panel, you'll notice this is for the textures. If you click the arrow to the left you'll be able to see all the textures the model has.

Smarty Says: For a list of textures use and the slots they go into, check the Graphic Artistry Reference sheet.

To change or add a texture we simply click the purple flower icon, this will then display a find file box for us to locate our texture. Clicking the open button will make Nifskope display the texture on our model.

Smarty Says: Before saving your NIF make sure all texture paths start with Textures\, this stops the textures from being hard coded to a location other potential users might not have the files.

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Introduction:

Every model has a UV map, the UV map tells the game how the texture should be applied to the model. Nifskope reads this information too so you can display textures in it's window, it also allows you to export a template texture file, which is used when texturing the model.

Exporting:

Just like above, we need to expand the node list to the left so we can see the blocks the NIF has. Now we need to find the block that holds the UV map data for our model, or the part of the model we want the UV map template for (Many models come in two or more parts).

To do this we simply click the model on the right and Nifskope will highlight the block that holds the data we need. Next we right click on that node to bring up a small context menu.

As you can see there are quite a few options here, the ones we need are under the Texture option, so click it and you'll see the options for it open up to the right.

From here we want the Export Template option, click the button and a small window will open up.

The top option allows us to set the location where the template will be saved and also what we'll call it, the files get saved as a TARGA (TGA) image. The only other setting we need is the size option, click the drop down box to select the size you want. The most common size is 1024x1024

Once you're done click OK and the UV map template will be saved.

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Reserved for future use.

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Reserved for future use.