Better Retextures : Detailed Guide For NifSkope and the GIMP

Now with pictures!

This is a very detailed reference tutorial. It's mostly aimed at making things easier for the modder who is tired of looking at retexes where everything is the same shade, including metal parts that shouldn't be. Hopefully, this will allow you to use GIMP and NifSkope to make better retextures with more color variety, higher contrast, and unique additional images. You may not need all the parts of the tutorial at once, but I hope this will serve as a useful resource. I've also covered normal and glow maps, since I haven't seen many resources for those.

Important Preliminaries: The Modding Toolbox

1. You'll need a BSA unpacker in order to get at the default game meshes and textures. Get one here: http://letalka.sourceforge.net/morr/index.htm

2. You'll need the GIMP, a powerful image editing program. You can use Photoshop, but GIMP is free and I will be discussing commands and features of that particular program. I'm currently on version 2.2.13. Get GIMP and the GTK runtime environment (you need it to run GIMP) here: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

3. You'll need a .dds plugin for GIMP to be able to open the game's texture format. Get it here: http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/download.php?filename=gimp-dds-win32

4. You'll need a normal map plugin for GIMP to be able to generate normal maps. Get it here: http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/download.php?filename=gimp-normalmap-win32

5. You'll need NifSkope in order to retexture game meshes. This wonderful mesh viewing and editing tool will also allow you to see your texture change with each save as you go along. Get it here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149157