Played with retexturing yesterday, now I need to figure out how to get the new textures to load into the CS. It is taking the new meshes, but not the textures.

I am pretty sure it has to do with the naming system in the Morrowind Data file - so am knee-deep in revamping my mesh/texture file names (thank goodness I don't have that many yet).

Princess Stomper gave me some wonderful hints yesterday, and I know many on here played and modded Morrowind as well - hoped to get some advice and tips from anyone who has modded in Morrowind - will greatly appreciate even the basics!

I played in the construction set just a bit yesterday, was comfortable with the basics - but not the intricacies/quirks of the naming issues, etc.

So: "HELP!" (and) "Thank you so much!" to anyone who is willing to share some of their vast wealth of knowledge !!!

From what I have seen of the other Beth games, the textures are not entirely assigned in the game's data files. Rather they are also assigned in each individual .nif (mesh) file as well. You have to open up the .nifs with a program like Nifskope. In Skyrim's .nif files you do it this way:


It might not be exactly the same with the .nif files of Morrowind, but it is probably pretty close.

I believe the texturing node is different in each of the three - Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. They added new graphic capabilities as DirectX provide them, so the nodes all have different names.

The interesting thing is that the Blender import/export uses Morrowind format for Skyrim and there are steps you do in NifSkope to adjust from one game to another. That means the conversion process is documented for Skyrim, and you can learn a lot from the tutorials.

In Oblivion, the nif file named a base texture, and the additional textures (such as normal map) were derived by a naming convention, whereas Skyrim explicitly names each one. I'd expect Morrowind to be like Oblivion. I've only just started playing Morrowind - fighting incompatibility with win 8 - so I haven't done any modding yet.

Thank you both!

@ SubRosa - I used NifSkope to do the retextures just like I did for the Oblivion retextures, and they looked great and loaded easily into the Morrowind CS (after several renamings) - but once in the CS the new textures didn't show up on the meshes.



THIS is exactly how the guy on the internet described how the Morrowind file system works too, so Ghastley is right that I need to study the conversion information for Skyrim!




@ Ghastley - This is some great info, especially learning why/how the nodes differed between the games (why I couldn't bring Morrowind NIFs into Oblivion, lol) and definitely about those steps to adjust NifSkope between games - that is something I need to learn!

I have no idea how to make a mesh, I only use NifSkope to retexture existing meshes to my own liking and preference.

Somewhere on the internet I read that problem had to do with the file naming system in Morrowind (and I believe it, the file names - even the Bethesda Official ones - are like "a," "b," "x," etc - VERY short, and very few file divisions too.

From what I can figure out from the CS warnings while I was uploading the meshes, the Morrowind CS only allows for 32 letters (to include the path names).

So you have to force NifSkope to shorten the path file as much as possible, then name your file with very staccato descriptors:

Example:

in_wall_wood
ex_wall_stone

(interior, exterior).

*

Since all the mods I loaded up were/are working smoothly; I looked to them for some clues to what I was doing wrong.

Some of the mods just dumped the new textures loosely in the texture file and some divided them into small-named files:

Example: Ice's files are divided by the mod name:

(Ice's Hideaway file name = "1ih" Inside the file there are few to no divisions, any there are named "a," "b," etc.

So technically, you have to either give a short code name and make your own list so you know what each mesh/texture is; or try to use mini-descriptions (which is what I'm attempting to do in my personal Morrowind meshes/texture files right now - just revamping file names on everything I uploaded for my own use before it grows too large to fool with - like what happened in my Oblivion mesh/texture files, lol)

Thank you both, very much !!!

PS:

@ Ghastley - You might need to make a small partition with a different OS to bypass the compatability issues, but ... if you DO begin modding in Morrowind, I am standing in line waiting for whatever you crank out to add to my game!

The better body mod made a huge diff to me, and the body looks decent nude as well. Not quite on par with Oblivion, but I was really pleased with the result (especially when compared to the vanilla).

Another thing - there are VERY few animations made for Morrowind that I could find. There is one for dancing and another for a "hug" type vampire feeding (that is actually quite good).

Princess Stomper said that to make the NPC sit you have to (on activate the chair) force them to equip a different pair of legs and hips that is in the sitting position - that is how the sitting is done.

I found a few of the "body bottom halves" to use, and am going to script some of the chairs in her house mod so she can sit in them.

@ Ghastley - I just found this on the internet, a vid on how to convert meshes from Oblivion mods (because it is illegal to convert any Official meshes from one game to the other if you plan to upload them anywhere) to Morrowind:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCrfZ56PaWU


Truthfully, I like the meshes/textures in Morrowind a lot - just wanted a prettier covering on my bed and bedroll and cleaner walls inside "my home" (mod) - adjust the textures of a few furnishings to suit my taste.


Actually the only things I did hope to convert over from Oblivion to Morrowind were some modded animations (like walk, run, dance, sit, lie down, etc); and haven't found a way to do that yet. Still looking, but ... need to figure out the CS quirks first, lol.