Oblivion Texture Editing

[Braeden]

I cant seem to find any tutorial on retexturing armor and other stuff in oblivion. I have a program to edit the textures, and i have texturing experience, but how do i get them out of the game, and also put them in a mod. If anybody knows it would be great to try and explain it and/or give me the programs needed for extracting the textures from the .bsa files and converting them, or if anybody has a tutorial or knows where i can find one that would be great too.

[Blue Shift]

The easy way:

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/TR:_Retexturing_Made_Easy



The way to use if you don't like being finger-fed:

1)  Use BSA Commander to extract the texture files from Bethesda's compressed archives (BSA files, located in the Oblivion/Data folder) to extract the texture file that you wish to edit.
2)  Download nVidia's dds converter tool for photoshop (it works with older versions too, which is handy if you prefer a different program but still keep an old copy of photoshop around) and use it to convert the texture files to something that you can edit.
3)  Edit the texture.
4)  Convert the texture back into DDS format.
5)  Copy the texture file to Data/Textures, mirroring the folder tree on the interior of the BSA file.

[Braeden]

Yeah after posting i saw the one that you called "The Easy Way", but ive had to extract-convert-edit-convert-place file, for everything else, so im going to do it he other way that you mentioned. Thanks  and i already had the nVidia's tool for doing normal maps for other games.

EDIT - Some stuff like glass has an extra map besides color map (boots.dds) and normal map (boots_n.dds), and then theres another one, boots_g.dds. Anybody know what this is? Daedric has them also.

[DM8954]

_n is the normal map
_g is the glow map

That's why you should avoid using "_" in any file names because it could throw off how the computer reads your file names.


Even if you know 90% of the things in a tutorial, it's often more helpful than you think to still go through it. Actually doing it is always the best way to learn something new and if a tutorial is well written, it will help you understand why you're suppsoed to do things a particular way in some instances.

As long as your nVidia tools can convert to .dds, you're all set. Good luck. Let us know if you run into any specific issues.