Sharing Normal Maps

[Symon]

Another short tutorial in how to save space on your disk drives. This one can save quite a bit and requires only the most basic of NifSkope knowledge and the ability to rename files in Windows.

 

There are quite a few armour or clothing packs that come in a choice of colours. Usually these include identical Nifs that reference different colour textures and normals maps.

 

e.g. You have thonggreen.nif, thongblue.nif, thongred.nif etc. These all reference textures thonggreen.dds thongblue.dds, thongred.dds etc. Each also (usually) has an identical normal map, but due to the conventions the Oblivion engine has been built on, these are called thonggreen_n.dds thongblue_n.dds, thongred_n.dds etc.

 

The engine effectively looks for a text match before the _ separator, so with a bit of clever renaming, you can make all the textures share the same normal map. To do this, you need to rename all these textures and change each Nif to use the new names.

 

Firstly, do the textures. In this example, change thonggreen.dds to thong_green.dds; thongblue.dds to thong_blue.dds; thongred.dds to thong_red.dds etc. Then following the convention, change thonggreen_n.dds to thong_n.dds. You can then delete ALL the other _n maps, as the single renamed map will be picked by the engine with all the other textures.

 

Finally, you need to edit the Nif to use your new texture name. This is as simple as opening the Nif, locating all the nodes that use the old texture name and changing it to use your new convention of thong_green.dds etc etc.

 

Of course, sometimes you come across a modder that already knew this and so thats the convention already in use.

[Mailamea]

Symon you damn beast. Thanks this is very usefull and clever. Maybe someday every would do this method instead the so many _n version.