REALLY annoying problem with some armor's textures

[Firerune999]

Hello, i'm having a really annoying problem with some armors from Vindictus, and i've tried a lot of things to fix it, but i'm out of ideas now. For example, the print below shows how the Death Knight armor should look ingame:

 

But the prints below show how it actually looks ingame:

 

 

 

 

Look how weird some parts of the armor look. Their textures look like black blobs that keep moving as i pan the camera. The same thing happens to the Dark Knight armor. Look how it SHOULD look ingame:

 

But this is what it actually looks like:

 

 

This time the whole armor has this black blob as a texture. The funny thing is that those are the armors that i like the most in the pack, but are the only ones that have this issue. I tried converting the meshes with SSE Nif Optimizer, replacing the cubemap textures from the affected meshes in nifskope for other cubemaps, checking the BSLightingShaderProperty flags of the meshes and comparing them with the ones from functional meshes, but i can't seem to find what the problem is. Can anyone help me find what the hell is wrong with these armors? I really like them, they are literally the only ones i found in all skyrim's armor mods that would fit a death knight, so i want to fix them. I put the meshes and textures below in a .zip, if someone wants to take a look at them.
 

Vin Dark and Death Knights.zip

 

 

[Seijin8]

1 hour ago, Firerune999 said:

 

Vin Dark and Death Knights.zip 125.02 MB · 0 downloads

 

 

 

Your attachment is not downloadable.  I'd guess the normals are not aligned with the surface, but would need the nifs to check.

[Firerune999]

2 hours ago, Seijin8 said:

 

Your attachment is not downloadable.  I'd guess the normals are not aligned with the surface, but would need the nifs to check.

That's weird, i could download just fine. Try downloading it now

 

 

 

Vin Dark and Death Knights.rar

Edited August 26, 2024 by Firerune999

[Firerune999]

I use Community Shaders with Complex Parallax Materials, and found out that this plugin was causing this issue with the armors, since disabling it inside Community Shaders interface made the armors go back to normal. The mod has the following note on its page: "May lead to some warped textures on modded content which have an invalid alpha channel in their environment mask, e.g. the Durzog in Immersive Creatures." I don't know what "invalid alpha channel" means, but for now i'll keep this plugin disabled, until i see if i can figure out how to fix the armor's environment mask.

Edited August 26, 2024 by Firerune999

[Seijin8]

2 hours ago, Firerune999 said:

I use Community Shaders with Complex Parallax Materials, and found out that this plugin was causing this issue with the armors, since disabling it inside Community Shaders interface made the armors go back to normal. The mod has the following note on its page: "May lead to some warped textures on modded content which have an invalid alpha channel in their environment mask, e.g. the Durzog in Immersive Creatures." I don't know what "invalid alpha channel" means, but for now i'll keep this plugin disabled, until i see if i can figure out how to fix the armor's environment mask.

 

I don't see anything obviously wrong with the meshes.  The normals are correctly faced.  The alpha channels used are all 4844/128 which is common for Skyrim, though it can sometimes cause problems if layered.  You could go through and change them all to 4845 and see if that changes it (4845 is better for layering), but it may have no real effect at all.

 

The only other potential issue is that Skyrim's lighting engine doesn't like mixing transparency (alpha channels) and environment mapping, especially with shadow-casting lights.  Depending on lighting, that could cause the effect you are seeing.  You could just remove the alpha properties entirely (make backups first) from any NiTriShape that is set for environment mapping and see if that resolves it.