Now before you start, I’m well aware that Bethesda doesn’t allow this, however I’m not planing to redistribute this, this is purely for my own game.

I’ve tried to find a guide or a tutorial out there that would teach me how to port over outfits and weapons from 76 to 4, but nothing except one video made by someone who clearly knew nothing about what he was doing, and didn’t explain why they were doing what they were doing.

I’ve Unpacked all of 76’s files, I’ve got Creation Kit, Bodyslide and Outfit studio, BGSM Editor, and paint.net, however while I can get the models from 76 into the outfit studio, everytime I make a new material or try to use an old material to port the textures over, they simply don’t display, having the base (no image) texture, using fallout 4 materials like Hancocks_body_d.dds works, and you can see hancocks textures on the 76 armor, so I know it’s not an issue with the mesh. I’ve tried converting the DDS’ to BC7 DX11 and it hasn’t worked, I’m not sure what type of DDS fallout 4 even uses.

So if you have a guide or know how to port stuff from 76 to 4, or even know what my texture/material problem is, could you do a man a favour and help me.

First of all, get rid of Paint.net and download Gimp. Paint.net is crap for texture work. Just because it CAN save DDS files, doesn't mean it SHOULD. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do any of the below in Gimp because I use the Intel Texture Works DDS Plugin for Photoshop for all my textures. But the first tutorial I linked at the bottom does a pretty good job of covering textures in FO4 with Gimp. You should also grab Nifskope as that's a big part of texturing models, and you'll also need the Material Editor (links in the video).

As you've noticed, textures in 76 aren't like they are in FO4. I believe they're upscaled through the game's engine, so they all begin at fairly low resolution. You may want to resize the texture to whatever the resolution you use in your game and hope it doesn't look horrible when you do (2048 x 2048 for 2K, for example).

Compression Formats

- The *_l.dds and *_r.dds files together are more or less equivalent to *_s.dds in FO4. The *_r.dds is Metallic-ness (dunno where they got "r" for that, but whatevs). Specular files should be saved with BC5 8bbp linear format.

- Diffuse it's the same as FO4 and is the *_d.dds. These should be saved as DXT1, or DXT5 if there's transparency.

- Normals also should be saved as BC5 8bbp Linear format in the *_n.dds convention.

I know people have started to use supposedly better and higher texture compression for FO4 (DXT11 being one), but the change is so negligible, I don't know why people bother. Just because it's a bigger file size doesn't mean it's better, especially for a game that's going on a decade or more from when it started development. I'd stick with the format that we KNOW works for FO4 before trying to get fancy. Every time I use DXT11, my FPS takes a hit, and I have a RTX 2070 Super, 32 GB of RAM, and an excellent processor, so I stick with what I know works.

Here's a quick little guide on getting F76 textures ready for FO4:

1. Open the *_n.dds file, go to the Alpha Channels, select the Blue channel and fill it entirely with black. Now it should have the gold/red look of the normal maps from FO4. Save it as BC5 as well, keeping the *_n.dds format.

2. This next step is a bit tricky, because it takes a bit of Photoshop skill and playing with it until it looks right. Open  the *_l.dds file and the *_.r.dds file if the texture has them both. The *_r.dds file is a metallic map, but FO4 doesn't use those. It uses Specular maps to determine glossiness and shininess of an object. The brighter green something is, the shinier it is. Red is the opposite--it makes an object dull and matte.

Go to the alpha channel for the *_r.dds file and black it out like you did for the Normal map, then copy and paste it to a new layer on top of the *_l.dds file. If the _r file was gray, I found that I could set it to Overlay, or Soft or Pin Light to get those specific areas to pop out as bright green. If the background was mostly black, I found deleting the black and setting the layer as Screen or Linear Light, especially if any transparency was involved. Sometimes I just had to play with it until it looked right. Again, you want the metallic parts to really pop out as bright green, such as a zipper or a buckle, whereas the other parts should be green and even red if it's not supposed to be shiny.

When it looks all right, flatten it and save is as *_s.dds (* being the filename, of course) with BC5 Linear compression. (See the linked tutorial below for how to do this in Gimp.) If there was no *_r.dds file, just resave the *_l.dds file as *_s.dds in BC5.

3. You don't have to do much to the Diffuse file *_d.dds except open it and make sure it's the same resolution as the Specular and Normal maps, and save it as DXT1 if it had no transparency, or DXT5 if it had any transparency.

And that's what you need to do to convert the files. Just make sure everything is in the same resolution and saved with the same file naming conventions as the rest of the texture files in FO4.

The next part involves opening the mesh in Nifskope because now you're going to apply that texture to the mesh...

And that's where I'm going to stop and just have you follow the rest of the steps in these two tutorials. The first one is by Kinggath who makes Sim Settlements 1 & 2, and it's a great tutorial on how to properly save FO4 texture files. He shows it in Photoshop, but he also shows you how to do it in Gimp, which you'll need to see because I only use Photoshop. Overall, it really helped me understand how these files should be saved to work in the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cDJ0Rk7hC0

The second tutorial is by Darkwolf and it covers how to apply a texture to a model in Nifskope, which you will need to do to get it to work in FO4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYf6pw4V0iw

The last tutorial is also by Kinggath (his whole Bethesda School series is wonderful if you really want to learn modding), and it covers material swaps which you will need the Material Editor for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T11L193k1DM&themeRefresh=1

Also, be prepared to swear. Like, A LOT. I only did this for one mesh and texture and it took me a long time to finally get it to work (especially step 2 and the whole Nifskope thing), which I just did over and over until I got the model to look the way I wanted to in Nifskope. But the point is between Photoshop and Nifskope and Material Editor, I finally did get it to work, and those tutorials went a long way toward explaining how to save textures the "right" way for FO4.