Nif documentation

[BenChang]

As of late I've noticed that a huge number of .nif files in mods have the 'Astridbody' set of textures listed under their female body meshes's BSShaderTextureSet properties, while some do not.

 

Examples of the latter include the bikini mods by Nisetanaka (the body mesh maps to textures\actors\character\female\FemaleBody_1.dds), whereas examples of the former can be found on several other mods including those on Nexus (where the body mesh instead maps to textures\actors\character\female\AstridBody.dds).

 

This puzzled me, so I proceeded to do a bit of google trawling and found these links:

 

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/2861-what-mod-is-this/page-1012

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=5949

 

>This is a CK issue, the way texture sets are handled in the ck to be precise. All of the female bodies use the burned astrid body as the default skin, and then are changed with the texture sets. Any female body item you make, if you use the original texture paths, will show up using the burned textures The optimal way to fix this is to create a texture set for your new item. If it is a new body, you need to assign it to a specific race as the default also uses the burned texture( I think)

 

My question is, where can I find out more about how the game handles texture sets? Clearly the game doesn't identify 'body meshes' to assign texture sets to by nif block name, since body meshes have many different names varying across different files- i.e 'SLIM PUSHUPNW004' or 'UUNP' and so on.

 

This makes me wonder if it has anything to do with the 'Skyrim shader Type' tag called 'Skin Tint' instead, then? I'm very confused about the entire process and this seems important for my modding purposes. Where can I get started on understanding this 'convoluted process' on how body textures are handled?

[Levionte]

As of late I've noticed that a huge number of .nif files in mods have the 'Astridbody' set of textures listed under their female body meshes's BSShaderTextureSet properties, while some do not.

 

Examples of the latter include the bikini mods by Nisetanaka (the body mesh maps to textures\actors\character\female\FemaleBody_1.dds), whereas examples of the former can be found on several other mods including those on Nexus (where the body mesh instead maps to textures\actors\character\female\AstridBody.dds).

 

This puzzled me, so I proceeded to do a bit of google trawling and found these links:

 

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/2861-what-mod-is-this/page-1012

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=5949

 

>This is a CK issue, the way texture sets are handled in the ck to be precise. All of the female bodies use the burned astrid body as the default skin, and then are changed with the texture sets. Any female body item you make, if you use the original texture paths, will show up using the burned textures The optimal way to fix this is to create a texture set for your new item. If it is a new body, you need to assign it to a specific race as the default also uses the burned texture( I think)

 

My question is, where can I find out more about how the game handles texture sets? Clearly the game doesn't identify 'body meshes' to assign texture sets to by nif block name, since body meshes have many different names varying across different files- i.e 'SLIM PUSHUPNW004' or 'UUNP' and so on.

 

This makes me wonder if it has anything to do with the 'Skyrim shader Type' tag called 'Skin Tint' instead, then? I'm very confused about the entire process and this seems important for my modding purposes. Where can I get started on understanding this 'convoluted process' on how body textures are handled?

 

 

The CK identifies the "body mesh" based on the block order, specifically: whichever is on top. If you made a mesh where the outfit was first and the body second, the game would try to put the skin texture set on top of the outfit instead of the body. Texture sets can also be applied manually on the ArmorAddon entry, which needs to be done to support things like color variants for your outfit.

 

I've never tweaked the "Skin Tint" on the body mesh; it's best to let the CK handle that so that it keeps all the body parts consistent for you. On head meshes, I have tweaked the hair tint to change hair color without making an entry in the CK. But, again, not the head because then it wouldn't match the body. I suppose you could make the same changes to all the body parts, but in that case, you should just adjust the skin tone in the CK or change the textures.

 

I could be wrong, but I believe each vanilla race is set to use the femalebody_1 texture set. In which case, it wouldn't necessarily matter what the default texture is because it gets "retextured" when you actually see it in the game. Either way, if you make custom meshes, there's no reason not to point the textures to the default (textures\actors\character\female\FemaleBody_1.dds). As I said, it may not be crucial, but if you're going to set it to something, you may as well set it to the correct texture and not worry about it.

[BenChang]

Where in the CK does it handle skin tints? I've only ever edited the tint property to environmental diffuse and so on via nifskope and that was for static objects.