I wanted to create my own variant on the Glowing One ghoul with a different texture, but I'm a little confused about the textures and meshes for this creature.
I used the Fallout 3 Archive utility to extract all the textures for the Glowing One from the Textures.bsa and I get three files under Textures\creatures\glowingone:
glowingone.dds (the color map I want to change)
glowingone_n.dds (normal map - not going to mess with it)
feralghoul_g.dds (glow map - not going to touch it, but why isn't it glowingone_g.dds?)
I open up the glowingone.dds in Paint.NET and mess about with the colors on some sections of the surface and then save again under a new name, let's call it myglowingone.dds. I use dxt1 format and check the box to generate mip maps.
Now I use the archive utility to extract the mesh from meshes.bsa. I extract meshes\creatures\glowingone which contains only the glowingone.nif file and I also extract meshes\creatures\ghoul because it contains skeleton.nif which it seems all ghouls use and another glowingone.nif which is slightly different than the one in the glowingone folder (it has a blown off neck piece that the other one doesn't have). Why are there two separate .nif files? I don't know.
I open up both of them in NifSkope and after some messing around discover that the first three NiTriShape nodes (one for the body, one for the eyes and one for the pants) in both files have a BSShaderPPLightingProperty node with a BSShaderTextureSet node that references the three textures. I change the glowingone.dds reference to myglowingone.dds and in NifSkope everything looks peachy. I save both .nif files as myglowingone.nif in the glowingone and ghoul folders.
In GECK I find the original glowing one creature CrFeralGhoulGlowingOne and create a creature from it called MyGlowingOne, I double click on MyGlowingOne and open the creature dialog. I go to the modellist tab, click off the Use Model/Animation checkbox under template data and I can now pick a different .nif file from the list of feralghoul.nif, ghoularmored.nif, ghoulvariant.nif, glowingone.nif and myglowingone.nif (i.e. all the .nif from the ghoul folder that use the skeleton.nif). I uncheck glowingone and check myglowingone instead. If I click the preview checkbox, I can see my retextured ghoul. I close out of here and place my new creature somewhere in a convenient cell and save the mod.
Now I open Fallout 3 and load a game close to where I placed my new ghoul but, in game, the texture is all messed up. Some times it looks right, then it switches back to the original glowing one texture. After killing the ghoul, I can look at the body and see that from different angles it switches from new texture, to old texture, to old texture with black or red holes.
So what am I doing wrong here? I think that despite selecting the myglowingone.nif in GECK it is still somehow linked to the glowingone.nif in the glowingone folder, but there doesn't appear to be any option anywhere to point it at myglowingone.nif in the glowingone folder. What am I missing? Has anybody else tried messing with the glowing one textures?
Help! Please!
I used the Fallout 3 Archive utility to extract all the textures for the Glowing One from the Textures.bsa and I get three files under Textures\creatures\glowingone:
glowingone.dds (the color map I want to change)
glowingone_n.dds (normal map - not going to mess with it)
feralghoul_g.dds (glow map - not going to touch it, but why isn't it glowingone_g.dds?)
I open up the glowingone.dds in Paint.NET and mess about with the colors on some sections of the surface and then save again under a new name, let's call it myglowingone.dds. I use dxt1 format and check the box to generate mip maps.
Now I use the archive utility to extract the mesh from meshes.bsa. I extract meshes\creatures\glowingone which contains only the glowingone.nif file and I also extract meshes\creatures\ghoul because it contains skeleton.nif which it seems all ghouls use and another glowingone.nif which is slightly different than the one in the glowingone folder (it has a blown off neck piece that the other one doesn't have). Why are there two separate .nif files? I don't know.
I open up both of them in NifSkope and after some messing around discover that the first three NiTriShape nodes (one for the body, one for the eyes and one for the pants) in both files have a BSShaderPPLightingProperty node with a BSShaderTextureSet node that references the three textures. I change the glowingone.dds reference to myglowingone.dds and in NifSkope everything looks peachy. I save both .nif files as myglowingone.nif in the glowingone and ghoul folders.
In GECK I find the original glowing one creature CrFeralGhoulGlowingOne and create a creature from it called MyGlowingOne, I double click on MyGlowingOne and open the creature dialog. I go to the modellist tab, click off the Use Model/Animation checkbox under template data and I can now pick a different .nif file from the list of feralghoul.nif, ghoularmored.nif, ghoulvariant.nif, glowingone.nif and myglowingone.nif (i.e. all the .nif from the ghoul folder that use the skeleton.nif). I uncheck glowingone and check myglowingone instead. If I click the preview checkbox, I can see my retextured ghoul. I close out of here and place my new creature somewhere in a convenient cell and save the mod.
Now I open Fallout 3 and load a game close to where I placed my new ghoul but, in game, the texture is all messed up. Some times it looks right, then it switches back to the original glowing one texture. After killing the ghoul, I can look at the body and see that from different angles it switches from new texture, to old texture, to old texture with black or red holes.
So what am I doing wrong here? I think that despite selecting the myglowingone.nif in GECK it is still somehow linked to the glowingone.nif in the glowingone folder, but there doesn't appear to be any option anywhere to point it at myglowingone.nif in the glowingone folder. What am I missing? Has anybody else tried messing with the glowing one textures?
Help! Please!