How To make a mesh to reflect light if it is black in game

I don’t know if this is a gimp and DXTBMP problem only or not as I don’t know the default settings at the dds plugin used with Photoshop but if the dds and _n.dds are not saved with Mipmaps, the mesh will be black or extremely dark in game. Be sure you dont forget to export Normals and Edges from Blender if you use that nice 3D program that is.

I quote myself from the Painting WIP:

I just noticed that my DDS files were not saved in the same way. Some was saved with DXTBMP and some with Gimp and I think that some _n.dds might have missed mipmaps too. So I did following:

I loaded all my .dds and _n.dds with DXTBMP (Direct Download) and I made sure that the mipmap box at the right side of the window was checked and saved them again as DDS.

We have been very spoiled at Morrowind, there we where able to use tga, bmp, jpg and dds mixed and it didn’t matter much how we did them. It seems that we can’t miss a single "small" detail at Oblivion or we get problems immediate.

There are 2 blocks at a mesh that handle light reflection so we must also keep an eye at the blocks to see if any of these 2 is present: NiSpecularProperty which seems to be the old way to reflect light. NiVertexColorProperty which seems to control the same thing but it also has more settings like Emissive or Ambient Diffuse and it seems that Ambient Diffuse makes objects to reflect light most natural.

Well if not any of those 2 blocks are present, then no light will be reflected at all --> the mesh will be black. This means that e have 2 different sources to look at if a mesh gets black in game. --> Are the .dds and _n.dds saved in exact the same way? Are one of the locks described above present?

Notes

• If you export from Blender and a mesh appears black ingame, you can fix this by opening the mesh in nifskope. Find the little flower icon that indicates the name of a texture in use and click on the "plus" sign to its left to expand the branch. You should see a series of numbers going downward. They may say something like 5,2,3,1,0. If so, change them to 6,1,3,1,1. Save the nif. Voila. Your lovely textures are now visible even if you didn't give them mipmaps.

• If the color map lacks mipmaps, then when you add a ..._n normal map file for it, it will look pitch black.

If you can't figure out what's causing it, that might be it. I think it's especially tricky because it only occurs after you create and add the normal map, so you might be led to believe the problem is in the normal map's specular texture or that some setting in the nif is wrong.