Fallout 76 Nif format

[tonicmole]

A very curious situation with Fallout 76's nif format. First off Fallout 4 nif's so far have been 100% compatible with FO76, however, Nifscope and Outfit Studio cannot load a nif from Fallout 76. I opened a Fallout 76 nif with notepad and it still lists the same format version as FO4. FO76 has the identical file structure of FO4 including files referring to FO4 DLC. The question is what could have possibly changed? FO 76 has slightly different textures, but as far as Nifscope is concerned it's listing the same material file, so it shouldn't know the difference. Any idea's? 

 

PS-Currently Nifscope development seems dead, so I'm not expecting FO76 support soon if ever. Also, format is far beyond my pay grade, so I'm just fishing around. The only nif's that matter are the few that don't exist in FO4. Specifically the swimsuit, and Vault suit (kinda, it's a long story). So far I've successfully directly swapped FO4 nifs into FO76 without any adjustments to material files (Altered material files crash the game) meaning FO76 textures work out of the box with FO4 nif's, The weirdest thing I've done is took the FO4 Vaultsuit and assigned the FO76 vaultsuits material file, which should not have worked, but it kinda did. The textures worked, but instead of looking like the FO4 or FO 76 vault suit, it looked like neither. It's baffling. It means somehow they made an entirely new vault suit out of the old nif, without reskinning it. I can only look at the new suit in game, but it almost bares zero resemblance to the FO4 suit. That's where I'm at.

[olrd]

That's because Fallout 76 uses a newer iteration of PBR materials (Base/Metallic/Roughness/Normal/Emissive) instead of the old Fallout 4 iteration (Diffuse/Spec-Gloss/Normal/Emissive).. If you look you will notice there are no more specular maps, instead replaced by _l maps (lighting). The blue and green channel on these are ambient occlusion and roughness if I am not mistaken. The _r map seems to be a metallic map OR an inverted roughness map. Just take the base, run it through photoshop and save it as BC3 for the diffuse, and cobble together a spec map  using the _l texture. Beware of the normal maps though, 76 has them oddly compressed so changing the format can cause them to turn almost grayscale.