Flaming Sword

Why am I Doing This?

I (mostly) finished creating a flaming blue sword, and I wanted to document what I did, hoping that people who read this will have an easier time of figuring this out than I did. I still need to edit the 3D mesh of the flame effect, but that can't be accomplished by only using NifSkope, so I'll hopefully finish that later.

Texturing the Silver Sword

We already did this in the previous tutorial, but our texture was totally lame. I installed a cool "Ancient Geek" font from DaFont.com and used google translate to translate "The real battle rages within" to "Verus bellum furit intra". Then, I used the gimp to attach it to the sword. Not the coolest thing I've ever seen, but it works.

Reverse Engineering the Bound Sword

This is the part where I still need to do more work. Once I figure out how to do some quality mesh editing, I need to update this part. Also, I'm going off memory here. In the future I'll try to write as I go instead of doing everything, then writing.

The Bound Sword has a neat flame effect. We're going to steal it. Let's go to Items>Weapons>BoundWeapons and double click BoundWeaponSword. There isn't much to look at, except for the enchantment attached to it, BoundSwordEnchantment. Go to Magic>Enchantment and double click BoundSwordEnchantment. There still isn't much to look at except for the Effects. They all look pretty lame, except for BoundSwordFX. Double click it to find out the EditorID, which is EnchBoundSwordFX. Go to Magic>MagicEffect and double click EnchBoundSwordFX. Woah baby! Now we're talking! Our eyes our immediately drawn to the Visual Effects section:

You'll notice that there are only two things here that hold values: Enchant Art and Enchant Shader. If you mess with this, you'll find that you need BOTH of these for there to be any effect.

SPECULATION: I am not an expert on this, but I know enough about Direct3D to know that shaders have nothing to do with shadows. Shaders essentially tell the GPU how to color a 3D image, while the 3D data simply tells the GPU where to draw the image. If you have no shader of any kind, you will see no image.

Anyway, you will find that the shaders here make our sword look different, and we don't want that. Lets create a null shader, or a shader that tells the engine not to draw the effect any differently than normal.

Creating a Null Shader

First, we need to find where the shaders are at. Thankfully, I've found them for you. They are at SpecialEffect>EffectShader. Let's use the EnchBoundSwordFXS as a starting place. Right click it, and select duplicate. Double click the duplicated shader, and change what you see to this (my best guess of what a null shader would be):

I'm not sure 100% about what all of this information is, but what I did works for what I wanted. When you hit OK, it will give you some crap, but you do NOT want a new form.

Adding Sounds

At first, I applied the sound to the shader, but this was wrong. When you dropped the sword (or anytime the sword was dispalyed in-game) the flame sound would be on, but there would be no flames.