texture problems Looking for help on a retexture mod (skip to bottom to see the problem)

[Uncle_Bob01]

Hi all

 

Thanks in advance for any help that can be provided. Also, I want to apologize in advance for a long post. I want to cover all the bases. My goal is to fix some, apparently missing textures. I am coming to you because I am exhausted with trying to find the solution with Google and Youtube. Nothing seems to work. I am clearly missing something critical.

 

First, I am newish to modding and have done a bit of research before starting, but i'm sure i'm missing a lot. I hope you will forgive me for my ignorance. My goal was to create a retexture of the standard Road Leathers under armor in Fallout 4. My goal was to change the Road Leathers into a basic replica of Trinity's outfit in The Matrix movie for those of you that have seen it. I knew this basically meant replacing the default specular map (***_s.dds) for this in-game item to make it look like PVC or latex material. I used the default in-game mesh. During this work I used the fo4 CK (with fix patch vis Nexus) for as much of this as possible and Gimp to modify or recreate the ***_s.dds file. I also have some experience with Material Editor, Bethesda Archive Extractor, Nifskope, and FO4Edit.

 

My Process:

1. Recreate the specular map according to . I had to work around not having access to Photoshop by using Gimp and achieved a similar "yellow" image to the author. But certainly this could be a problem. I have verified that all textures have included mipmaps and are 4096X4096 in pixel dimension. I am using the vanilla(high resolution textures) ***_d.dds and ***_n.dds. I exported the specular map using BC5 compression and I only have one layer. I verified that the ***_d.dds and ***_n.dds are also the same dimension, 4096X4096. These .dds files were placed in a textures file within the Fallout 4 Data folder. See links below in Material Editor.
2. Extract the "body" Road Leathers mesh with 1st person perspective i.e ***.nif with BAE from the "DLCUltraHighResolution - Textures03.ba2" file. Placed in a "meshes" sub-folder in the Fallout 4 Data folder.
3. Create a materials file using Material Editor (BGSM) (see below) and eventually associate the .nif's with the textures from part 1 above. Here are both tabs on the bgsm file.
   • https://postimg.cc/Lh49nB8S
   • https://postimg.cc/JGbPvJjy
4. Use Fo4 CK to create the mod. 
   • Open data in the Fallout4.esm Master File.
   • Create copies of the Armor Addon and Base Armor in Items->Armor. Rename and choose settings. Associate Base Armor and Armor Addon. See below.
     • https://postimg.cc/m13CXYKB
     • https://postimg.cc/21ShGBGN
   • Create Material Swap to change the textures of the Armor Addon created above for later. Here, I used the material (BGSM) file from step 3 above.
   •  
   •  
   • THE BEGINNING OF THE PROBLEM PERHAPS
     • https://postimg.cc/JH8Bky0g (as you can see the texture is purple and not rendering correctly)
   • Went back to the CK and Armor Addon to "edit" the female model, deleted the male model stuff, and adjust skin ... etc. In this menu I set up and performed the Material Swap. The image below was produced after days of troubleshooting attempts. Note this was what the image looked like the first time I went through this.
     • https://postimg.cc/mzfSmgh3
   • Save CK and generate .esp file for my mod in the Fallout 4 data folder.
5. Went to Nifskope to "adjust" lighting shaders for both the armor .nif and the 1st person .nif pointing to the BGSM material file. Note that I have included picture from the nifskope render.
   • https://postimg.cc/qtns6HQN regular .nif
   • https://postimg.cc/PpjmmVF2 1st person .nif
   • https://postimg.cc/kRMKH6CS render from nifskope
   • Comments: As you can see the skin textures are not rendering correctly, but the outfit is. I'm not sure if this is a problem.
   • Saved all .nif's.
6. Returned to Fo4 CK to see if anything had changed with the Armor Addon with no luck.
   • https://postimg.cc/mzfSmgh3
   • Saved CK .esp file again.
7. Finally, started up Fallout 4 with the F4SE in Vortex. Turned on the mod in the Fallout 4 mod menu etc etc. Found the item in the console and added to inventory. See below for the results. These have been my results after days of troubleshooting and research.
   • https://postimg.cc/SXW9N7N8

 

Anyway, once again, I apologize for the long post. I would appreciate any guidance or suggestions that can be provided. Feel free to give me feed back on how i can improve this post as I am new to this forum. Also, if more information is needed, I will do my best to provide.

 

Thank you,

Uncle_Bob1

[Uncle_Bob01]

UPDATE:

 

Today I rebuilt the mod in Fo4edit to try to understand more about what was going on under the hood. I ended up with the same results. This leads me to believe that the problem is with the ***_s.dds (specular map). My troubleshooting continues...

[Uncle_Bob01]

UPDATE 2: 

 

Good news, apparently the problem was some corruption in my installation. I reinstalled Fallout 4 and all mods from scratch and rebuilt my mod successfully. My game files probably needed a refresh. Anyway, the textures are all working correctly now. Thanks for anyone that was thinking about the problem.

 

Here is the final product:

https://postimg.cc/8JFYyQxd