Blender/Texturing From A UV Map

Introduction

This tutorial takes you through the process of creating a custom texture for your custom armor, clothing or weapon using its UV maps. You can use it for default game armor retexes too, provided you’re able to unpack the bsas and import the meshes into Blender so that you can get access to the UV maps.

This tutorial is for creating textures totally from scratch, starting from a UV map. If you want to retexture, here’s a tutorial with some techniques in GIMP: [SickleYield’s Retex Tutorial ]

In writing this tutorial I’m assuming you have some basic familiarity with Blender – enough to have created a custom mesh for which you would need a custom texture to begin with. I’m also assuming you’ve already created a good UV map, or used a modeling method that comes with one already included (like [this one] ).

You should also be familiar with basic techniques in GIMP as included in the retex tutorial above.

There are those who are better at this technique than I am, but no one seems about to create a tutorial for this wiki, so I’m stepping in to fill the gap.

Important Preliminaries: Your Modding Toolbox

1. The latest version of Blender: http://www.blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html …And a working knowledge of the program, because it’s complicated: http://math.hws.edu/eck/cs324/

2. NifSkope, a powerful editor for meshes that we can also use for texturing: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149157