GothGirlDanielle

Okay, that makes sense ... kind of. If mod A adds new textures and meshes for soul gems, and uses an .esp to direct the game to load those resources, then the only way it would revert back is if another mod specifically changed the path back, right? ~ Dani ~ Edit: @ Willie: That's good advice and I should have followed it. Luckily, I make backups of any mod I install, so I can go to the backup and figure out what I need to delete to restore the game to normal. @ Hanaisse: I just downloaded FormidFinder (great tool!) which should tell me the path of the last .esp to "touch" soulgems. I already have TES4edit, I'll just need to figure out how to find those results ... thank you so much for the tip. ~ D ~

I've already enable archive invalidation, but I'll checked again to make sure. ... Nope, not the problem. If I move the .esp to the bottom of my load order, the meshes/textures work. ~ Dani ~

Eggh ... I'm pulling my hair out here - and this is probably a really easy thing to do, I've just never done it before. Here's what I need to know: 1. You change the texture/mesh whatever on an existing in-game item (no, no, I didn't do it, another mod did). In this case, soul gem retexture. 2. I install the mod, complete with mesh/texture resources and .esp. 3. I sort the load order with BOSS. The mod sorts, so I can assume the load order is correct. 4. I enter the game, and no change. Logically then, some other mod, later in load order, is reverting the change back to the original soul gems. But, sigh, I'm running over 200+ esps! I've spent an hour trying to diagnose the problem and I can't figure out what it's called? Resource duplication? Is it mod confict? Egggh. I'm betting there's a way to check and see if a later mod changes the same resource. But, newbie as I am, I don't know what that way is. Can someone help? Sorry if this is a stupid question. ~ Dani ~

I'm arriving late to this discussion so this may not be of use anymore, but Wrye Bash solves this problem nicely .... providing your computer processor can handle the extra workload. When you build your Bashed Patch, you can choose how many active NPCs you have going at any one time. With Blood & Mud, Better Cities, & FCOM installed, I had problems around Bravil. I raised the number high ... I think even higher than 50 ... and it worked, although my FPS dropped a bit. Still, despite the occasional lag, those staring, frozen statutes are gone. Maybe this will help someone. ~ Dani ~

WooHoo!! Sorry for the double post but ... I did it! I burned through about six .nifs today and an insane amount of frustration but I've managed to get a grasp of basic UV map editing, thanks to Lady Nerevar's tutorial. I now have a clean, usable .nif for stone tombs and a template to make sure ever goes where it should. Finished my first one tonight. Thanks to everyone for the help. I really appreciate it! ~ Dani ~

Thanks to everyone for the replies. Here's where I am: Last night, after reading DarkRider's reply, I searched in the CS wiki and on this forum and found Lady Nevar's excellent tutorial, referenced in IS's reply above. As a result of that tutorial, reading it through about four times, I learned a couple of things that would have helped me. 1. I loved her idea of making a bright color template. This, when used in connection with Photoshop's opacity settings, would have saved me a LOT of grief. Here is the template I made last night. If you apply this template as a layer to my texture, you can see that my problem: my pattern crosses from one area into another that is positioned and tiles differently. 2. In the tutorial, Lady Nevar suggests that by editing the map, I can make the entire texturing process easier. By easier, she means flatter, neater, and easier to edit in Photoshop. I can see the logic here. I just can't make the logic work. Seriously, I worked on this until 5:00 a.m. (only to learn Starbucks doesn't open until ... 6:00 a.m ... egggh). Here's what I understand: The UV map shows how the texture is applied to the model and so the white lines (now yellow) in Nifskope represent the same lines on the surface of the model. By moving the nodes, you can adjust how your texture "lays" on the model. By selecting and moving the nodes, you can change things like overlapping and what part of the texture attaches to what part of the model. Only that's not how it worked for me. Instead, every time I tried to move the nodes, the texture ended up looking 100 times worse, smeared and distorted, than it did originally. For some reason that's lost on me, Bethesda has the "tiling decorative border" extend out on either side of the model, creating overlap. The tomb sides, however, do not extend. This creates the annoying overlap. When I try to fix it, it completely distorts the texture. I'm trying to fix it by selecting the nodes, as Lady Nevar suggested, and moving them with my mouse. Is there some trick to getting the texture to line up on certain parts of the model? Since people keep saying this is easy, there must be something I'm not understanding. Thanks. ~ Dani ~ Since this is supposed to be easy, I'm thinking I'm doing something wrong.

So continuing to retexture, moving beyond basic coffins and into what Bethesda calls "stone tombs." In this case, I took the existing texture and opened it in Photoshop as a .bmp. This texture became the background. I created a new layer, using a seamless marble texture I had created. This layer was exactly the same size as the original image. I added some features, using the transparency slider to make sure each of my new features was in exactly the same place as the existing features. Finished, I checked the seamless tiling with Filter->Other->Offeset. Made some fixes. Checked again from the opposite setting. Again, fixed it so that it was seamless in both directions. Converted the .bmp to a .dds, built a nomral map, opened Nifscope and attached it. This is what I got. Marble Tomb Marble Base Image in my frustration to discover that Bethesda's texture don't tile ... they appear to overlap. Four hours of work which I could have spent moving my mod in a more positive direction ... anyway, is there any way to fix this? What did I do wrong? Here is the texture. Just in case there's a problem with that. Thanks for any suggestions. ~ Dani ~ Edit: I do still have the layered .psd file in case there's a fix ...

I had seen that tutorial on the CS wiki, but in reading the discussion thread, I noticed that a couple of posters were pretty critical of the tutorial - one referred to it as the "worst" way to make a normal map. Anyway, on your advice, I tried it and it seems to work. If there's something wrong with it, I'm not understanding what it is. There's another tutorial on the wiki site that's pretty similar. I need to read up on normal maps once I solve my current problem. ~ Dani ~

Lol. Sorry ... I suppose old is relative - and, yes, the functionality hasn't change much. The only things missing are my plugins and presets from CS4. Well, not true: one feature that is missing from the old, uh, older version of Photoshop is the "shadows/highlights" equalizer. Great for leveling the light so you can make tiling textures. (There's probably other ways to do it, but that, the clone tool, the healing brush, and I can easily make tiling wood textues). Okay, I do have another question about using the NVIDIAMapFilter as part of NVIDIA tools. Here is what I'm doing, following along fron Darkrider's tutorial: 1. I make changes in the texture file as bitmap. Then I save it as as DTX 1 RGB 4 BPP No Alpha. If I'm using an existing normal file, I just make sure my filename follows StarX's tutorial on naming conventions. 2. If I need to make a new normal file, I save the file again, with these settings: - First, I go to NVIDIAMapFilter tool under Filter. This opens the Normal Map Filter menu box. - Here I select the follow: "Add Height to Normal Map", Filter type 4 sample, (under 3D options) Animate Light, and under Alpha Field, the default is height. The only otherr button that's selected is Average RGB under Height Source. I'm not selecting "Using multiple layers" or "Swap RGB". (Should I be?) - The file is saved as DTX3 ARBG explicit alpha. Is that right? ~ Dani ~

I see ... and now that you explain it, it does seem obvious. No, there are only a few new textures, less than, say 20, an not all of them will appear in the same dungeon. Thanks, Trollf! Well, that's good to know. My computer is above average - especially for a labtop - so larger textures usually don't have an effect, but I couldn't be sure. Thanks ... ~ Dani ~

Question: Using larger textures Last night I learned that if I wanted to increase the detail in my textures, I could increase the size - so long as they remained square. So Bethesda's plain wood texture is 512x256. It's "square" in the senses that one side, multiplied by 2, equals the other side. Now if I increase the pixel size to increase detail ... say double the size ... then I end up with an image that is 1024x512. Of course, this looks much better, but is substantially larger. I use bitmaps (to prevent .jpg corruption) and now I'm over 1 mb per image (the original is 500k) - which seems much too large to me. Maybe for a unique sword or shield, but for something that will appear multiple times in a single cell - like a crate, for example - this could create quite a load on the computer. Since I'm doing coffins, and since I'll be using upwards to 30+ coffins in a singe dungeon, this seems too big. In addition, I'll be adding some other new meshes as well. Should I just stick to the size of the regular Bethesda meshes? ~ Dani ~

WooooHoooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Problem solved. StarX and Willie should get the cookies ... they were right. My friend brought over his "old" version of Photoshop (very old ... Photoshop 7). He said he could not - in good faith - take any money for it since it was sooo old. But it works! I can use the NVIDIA plugins and save with MIDmaps! And if I need a "quick" job done, I have Photoshop (albeit 7) installed on Windows. @ DarkRider: Yes, I downloaded GIMP, too, just to see what the fuss was about ... the real issue is ... I know Photoshop and enjoy using it. I don't know GIMP. It would be one more learning curve. ~ Dani ~

Unfortunately, the DDS plugin (if you're referring the NVIDIA plugin) only works for the Windows 32 bit version of Photoshop (according to NVIDIA's development website). My verision of PS CS4 is for a Mac. ~ Dani ~

I think .... the problem was a pathing issue, as far as the textures appearing in-game. They show up in the the game fine now. However, they still don't show up in the CS. Someone else today said they had the same problem. I thought I had it solved with BSA-Redirection, but having used both WryeBash and OMM to institute that change (yes, I tried both), but the textures still are not showing up. Hmm ... but the MIPmap point is a valid one ... I'm still using the Mac version of PS CS4, so I can't work directly in .dds environment. I've converting the .dds files to .bmps using a program called GraphicConverter. I'm saving the bitmaps in DTX1 RGB format as opposed to the DTX1 RGBA format. I don't know how this effects MIPmaps. The texturing is not problem - I can create three or four tiling wood textures in an hour. I've read, as of tonight, half dozen tutorials and wiki pages. I can always download GIMP but another option is to buy an old Windows 32 bit version of Photoshop from a friend for five bucks. That way, I could at least use the NVIDIA plugins. Yet another option - one that's a lot more difficult to swallow - is to buy Photoshop CS5 with my educational discount and pay, basically, over a hundred bucks. I'm still learning about normal maps and how to create them in CS4 - but again, I may be fighting a losing battle with a Mac version of Ps. And I still don't know if the CS problem has anything to do with how I'm making my textures ... it could be an .ini tweak, for all I know ... ~ Dani ~

Thanks for the tip. Made the change, but the textures still aren't showing ... ~ Dani ~ Edit ... problem solved.

WooHoo! Welcome back and congrats! c:\program files\bethesda softworks\oblivion\data\textures\ggd candc\woodtexture02.dds So it should work, right? ~ Dani ~

Okay, so by using Dropbox, a portable drive and a .dds converter, I've come up with an acceptable workflow solution that allows me easily edit textures in my Mac version of Photoshop CS 4. Now I have one problem: Problem: My textures are not showing up in either the CS or the game, but they are showing up in NifScope. This is a coffin using a basic retexture of the Bethesda's woodtexture01.dds file. I've checked the path in NifScope twice (but if the path wasn't right, then the textures would't show up in NifScope, either). I have a normal map and it has the same name as the texture file: woodtexture02.dds woodtexture02_n.dds I did not create a new normal file because, well, I'm just retexturing the existing Bethesda woodtexture01.dds file. I checked the NiMaterialProperties to make sure my "lighting" setting were the same as Bethesda's (in other words, no change). I checked the path in the CS to the .nif file (but if that was broken I'd be getting the WTF mesh warning). But when I load the coffin, linked to the new .nif and then to the new .dds files, it shows black - like the textures were missing. There's probably a really easy solution here but I'm not seeing it. From StarX's and Darkrider's tutorials, I shouldn't have to use a new normal file for every .dds. Am I wrong? ~ Dani ~ Edit: actually, there's only one texturing question ... I figured out the answer to the other one.