openmw.org

So, I'm just jumping into modding Morrowind for essentially the first time. I'm following the "Modding OpenMW" total overhaul guide. Several of the texture mods (we'll use Ebony Mail Replacer as the example) require texture renames from stuff like _normals or _nm to _n. My issue is this: exactly WHICH files do I rename? I've read the guide on the wiki but I have questions that it doesn't seem to cover or perhaps I missed.

In textures for this particular mod, we have tx_ebony_mail_d, do I just rename that to tx_ebony_mail_n? Additionally, do I also need to rename materials or icons? Or is the issue texture file specific? Or do I just do it to EVERY .dds file for the mod? Which if the last is the case, what do I do if tx_ebony_mail_d_albedo and tx_ebony_mail_d_normals end up with the same name by replacing albedo and normals with _n respectively? Do I just change the name elsewhere?

Any help is appreciated, perhaps I'm just over thinking this, but I'm 100 odd mods in and if I need to go back and redo all of the texture renames I'd rather know now than once I'm "done" modding my game.

In your case, you only rename _normals to _n. Normal maps usually has a name that tells you it is a normal map, like _normal, _nrm, _nm, _n etc. A modder could of course in theory call their normal map whatever they want (*_hotdog.dds), but that would be stupid. 99 % of modders will call them _normal, _normals, _nrm, _nm or _n.

Albedo is just the basic color map, so that should be left alone. The _d could be basically anything (displacement?), so I'd not touch that one either if I didn't know what I was doing.

1. tx_ebony_mail_d.dds is the diffuse map. It doesn't need to be renamed at all and contains baked AO and fake specular highlights, so it's unsuitable for PBR. But you should leave it alone. No, d doesn't stand for displacement here.
2. tx_ebony_mail_d_albedo.dds is the albedo map — PBR-friendly diffuse map, doesn't have any lighting information baked in. Get rid of it.
3. tx_ebony_mail_d_normals.dds is the normal map. Rename it into tx_ebony_mail_d_n.dds so OpenMW can recognize it as the normal map and put it into textures folder.
4. tx_ebony_mail_d_parameters.dds contains PBR-specific maps that can't be used by OpenMW — channels correspond to metalness, roughness and AO map (don't remember the exact order). Get rid of it.
5. And now delete "materials" folder which is already empty and which OpenMW wouldn't have used anyway.

Leave Icons and Meshes alone.

Thanks for the help guys, it's at least working (partially) now.

The icon is working now, but when I spawn the item for testing "ebon_plate_cuirass_unique" it still has the vanilla texture. I'm installing all of my mods through Mod organizer 2, so I didn't actually manually overwrite anything. This seems to have worked with all of my other texture mods (as far as I can tell), but this particular still doesn't seem to be changing the armor.

Make sure you have Better Morrowind Armor installed.

Didn't realize that mod was required, didn't see it anywhere on this overhaul guide or the mod page / readme, but I'll give that a shot when I get a chance.

Thanks Capo for taking time to research the mod in question.