Perceptual Motion - Texturing for Dummies...and not-so-Dummies

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Perceptual Motion :: Miscellaneous :: Tutorials :: Texturing for Dummies...and not-so-Dummies

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Bravo 1
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Texturing for Dummies...and not-so-Dummies
« Thread Started on Feb 13, 2005, 8:12pm »

Alright, first off, let's all make sure we're on the same page here; you'll need:

Your second CD that came with Morrowind
A graphics program (Photoshop or PaintShop Pro)
NifTexture

Also, pictures are supplied, but linked to for the sake of our 56k readers.

Lets say we want to edit the Silver Dagger in Morrowind.

Starting off
Now, we both know that the files for the dagger can be found on the second CD of Morrowind.

However, how do we find them? That's a lot of files to look through!

So lets do this:
Open the Construction Set (you did install it when you installed Morrowind, right? If not, pop in the play CD and browse around until you find the installer!).

Go to the file menu and select Data Files.

Put a check mark next to Morrowind.ESM (should be at top of the list) by clicking twice on the box. Click OK.

Now be patient as the editor loads up the files. (go make some coffee or grab a snack)

Once everything is loaded up, look at your Object Window (the one that reminds you of Microsoft Excel, but it has tons of tabs at the top). Click on the 'Weapon' Tab.

Scroll down until you find the Silver Dagger. Doucle click on its name and a menu should come up. See the picture in the upper right corner? The red box is the NIF and the blue one is the icon.

Take note what these say:
Mesh: w\W_silver_dagger.nif
Icon: w\Tx_silver_dagger.tga

These tell us where they're located in the second CD! Much easier than sorting through all that stuff, no?

Finding the Right Files
Next, close the editor and head over to you second CD. Find the Data Files folder, go inside. Next go into the meshes folder. Now, remember how it said w\W_silver_dagger.nif?

Well, we're looking for the W_silver_dagger.nif in the w folder (w stands for weapons...in case you hadn't figured that out already

).

Copy that mesh to your desktop (right click on it and drag it to desktop and choose 'copy here'). Now, open it with NIFtexture.

Ok, see those three .bmps listed there?

Those are the names of the textures we're looking for! Now, head back to your second CD, but now go into Data Files -> Textures and fish out those three files. If you open them with your graphics program of choice, you will notice that each one contains a certain part of the dagger.

The texture
Make you modifications of choice (I'm just going to show you what piece of the dagger each texture represents):
TX_W_silver_blade = green
TX_W_silver_blade1 = red
TX_W_silver_handle = blue

Make sure when you're done to save each one under a different name (for example, for me, I put B1_silver_blade to distinguish it from other people's textures and so that it does not replace that original silver crossbow's texture ingame!); save each one as bitmap for now.

I'll talk more about different file types later. Save them to your desktop too!

The mesh
Now, we have our textures, but we need to apply them to the mesh. Go back to NIFtexture and open the silver crossbow, click on TX_W_silver_blade and the select 'browse from the bottom corner. Now, find your file (it should be on your desktop, so select desktop and then double click on your file. Now the name TX_W_silver_blade should be replaced with (in my case) B1_silver_blade (yours should be different, at least if you release the mod, please change it). Now, repeat the steps for the other two bmps listed.

Next go to File and Save as. Choose a different name, in my case B1_silver_dagger.

Now you have you .nif!

Alright, let's take a look at our work. Find the Data Files directory on your computer (where you installed Morrowind, NOT on the CD where you got the files! XD) and move your three bmps into the Textures folder and the .nif into the meshes folder.

Now, open up the construction set, but don't load anything, we're just taking a quick peek.

Right click in the Object Window again (under the default tab that comes up activator, that's ok for now!) and click on the add art file. Browse until you get to your Morrowind directory, then look in the meshes folder until you find your mesh. Open that and then select Ok. You should have a new entry in that list. Drag that entry into the Render Window (big blank grey thing). See that? That's YOUR dagger!

The icon
What's this you say, now we need an icon? Well, everyone has their trick to doing this, but here's mine. Position your weapon in the preview window as you want the icon to look. Hit the "Prnt Scrn" button on your keyboard (usually above your insert key). Now don't copy anything (ctrl+c or the like).

Go back to photoshop and create a new workspace (ctrl + n and make SURE you select the background as being transparent toehrwise you'll have some 'issues') and paste your screen (ctrl + v). Now, crop the image so just your dagger is showing (try to make the crop 'squarish'). Next, use the magic wand tool to take out the background (yeah, I know, sometimes it's kinda hard to do when the background is the same color as you item). You can always zoom in with the eraser and 'prune' about too. There are also various tips and trick for both Photoshop and Paintshop, but I don't have Paintshop so my advice won't work all the time. And even the best of us have to zoom and prune at times.

Anyway, when you're done with that, resize the image to 32 x 32 (to avoid distortion, it is best if you'd gotten you image as squarish as possible through cropping and gotten rid of excess background around it). This may take you a couple of tries until you get it how you like it, you could also take just a portion of the weapon and resize it so that you get a more detailed icon, but don't see the entire shape (Bethsoft does this alot with their icons).

Anyway, go to file and save as, but DON'T choose BMP this time. Since we want just the icon and not the other white stuff around it, we shall select either dds or tga (note that dds needs a plugin). So for simplicity's sake, choose tga.

Alright, take this file and put it in your Icons (like your mesh went into your meshes).

And don't forget the unique name.

Putting it into the game
Alright, now fire up the Construction Set and load the Morrowind Data File again. In the object window, click on the Weapons tab, then right click anywhere inside and select new.

Under Add Art File, load up your Nif from the Meshes and under inventory image load up you icon (we saved it as a tga, but it won't show up becase by deafult it looks for .dds; so, see that little thing at the bottom that says files of type? click on it and select tga).

Once you've added those two files, fill out all the other stats (pretty self explanatory, just make sure your id is unique so that you don't get an error for using one already used by the game; to be on the safe side, some modders put their intitials first, so I would go B1_silver_dagger).

When done with the stats, you could load up the Seyda Neen cell and drag it into the game world. You're up high in the sky you say? ...well, you can hold the V key to zoom in on
stuff, you can rotate with Shift (and if you select and object and then hold shift, you rotate around it!), hold spacebar and move mouse to pan. Drag your dagger near the ground and save the plugin something creative! (my new dagger? ...the punisher? ...Bravo 1 shut up now?).

Now, launch Morrowind, click on Datafiles, find you plugin and put an x next to it to enable it. Hit the play button and go to Seyda Neen to find your dagger!

Nifty eh?

Now what's all this huff about bmp, dds, and tga?

Well, let's put it this way:

Bmp is the most common form of texture; it also happens to take up quite a bit of space and does not support transparencies (which is why Morrowind won't let you make your icon bmp).

Dds is a pretty compressed alternative, the only problem being that the more you edit a dds, the more quality loss (so always resave a dds as bmp when you open it and want to mess with it; when done, THEN you can resave as dds). Dds also supports mip maps (changes the texture size depending on players distance from said object, really good for faces so that major distortion is avoided when looking that said face from afar). It also supports various types of transperancies.

Tga supports transperancies, but there is only one type, so no cusomization there :-/

. It also happens to take up a fair amount of space, but the quality is good and I believe you can freely resave when editing them, unlike with dds.

I don't know everything certainly, so don't quote me

If you want all the technical stuff about them, google is your friend.

I hope you find this tutorial useful.

Anyway, thanks to the forums for not cutting me off with character limits. (for once!)
Thanks to Happyhannah for unwittingly prompting the making of this tut.
Thanks to the maker of NIF texture, may you walk on warm sands...always!
Thanks to Bethsoft for the game.

« Last Edit: Feb 14, 2005, 1:29pm by Bravo 1 »