Need a help getting started on a DDa tweak

[cynter]

First, Devious Devices and the cloud of mods that build off of it are awesome, and everyone involved are my heroes.

 

Second, this is not a request that anyone do any modding for me.  I am willing to do all the work; I am just hoping someone will give me a hint as to where I should start.

 

I just want one little tweak.

 

Specifically, I LOVE the Armbinder, but I find the smooth leather and shiny buckles aesthetic too “modern” for my tastes.  (This is not a knock on the original artist, or those who prefer the current styling, just a matter of personal taste.)

 

What I want (or at least what I think I want) is to replace the visual, in engine appearance of the Armbinder to something simpler, like leather, metal, or rope cuffs. I see no need to reinvent the wheel here; I figured I would use one of the many cuffs designs already in DDa or its siblings.  (If at all possible, one that is already CBBE and Bodyslide2 compatible.)

 

It is critical to me, however, that I change nothing else, that the armbinder still be called an armbinder, that it still has all the same in engine, DDa, DDx, and ZaZ Animation effects and values, and that it continues to be used and called up without conflict by DDa dependent mods like Deviously Helpless, etc.

 

Now we get to the hard part.  I know nothing.  I could not with confidence tell you the difference between a mesh, a texture, and a normal map.

 

On the one hand, I kind of think I should be able to do what I want to do in five minutes once I got past the initial learning curve on Outfit Studio.  On the other hand, I know just enough about modeling and animation to believe that it might turn out to require half a dozen specialized programs and a bunch of digging around in the guts of DDa.

 

Can anyone give me a little shove in the right direction?

[grumbler]

Have you tried just copying the mesh you want (like cuffsLeatherArms_0 and cuffsLeatherArms_1) and re-naming them armbinder01_0 and armbinder01_1 (after backing up those two files)?  That should just replace the mesh used by the game.  Those are in the folder Skyrim/Data/Meshes/Devious/Devices.

 

If that doesn't work, then I am out of ideas.

[ttpt]

Yeah, there's two ways to go about it

 

You either replace the mesh as grumbler said, making sure to also place the textures from whichever mod you're using to replace the armbinder in the default location for that mod's textures, not the texture location for DD. Texture information seems to be baked into the .nif files themselves.

 

Or you can actually replace the texture for the armbinder from DD, but that would require you to either find a texture that's compatible with the armbinder or make one yourself.