Gaming

A bit further along, though the wood is too bright and clean and the iron is a bit dark (and also shifts between light grey and almost black for whatever reason). The diffusemap is probably wonky, which doesn't help either...

I think I need to learn how to see the textures in Blender rather than picturing it in my head while mapping and then fixing the texture links in nifskope and THEN being able to load the item and see what the textures look like in the CK

 
 

Are you not using the Material or Rendered view in the Blender viewport?
Or are the materials not set up properly to see them in Blender?

I've tried to use the materials view but it never seems to do anything so I've given up on it

Speaking from a position of complete ignorance here...

I think you should be able to see the diffuse textures but all that extra stuff with the normal/specular in the alpha channels (or however it's done in the game engine) would be difficult to do with the nodes.
You'd have to use a separate image for each one in Blender.

Or do you combine all that stuff afterwards?

I think my complete ignorance was greater than I first thought.

I suspect it's a case of my complete ignorance being greater than yours...

I don't use nodes, you should know that my now.

To make the materials work with Skyrim I tend to load in something from the game - preferably something which texture I can use as is... Then I set my pieces, even if they're brand new meshes, to use that material. So all those alphas and speculars and stuff are the same as a game object.

I can load an image in the UV mapping preview so I know which part of the image ends up on which part of the mesh. But I can't get anything but the grey solid view or the wireframe view (or the blue/orange view that shows which side of mesh faces are the visible side in game) for the 3D model itself.

To add the texture to the material you need to click the "Shading" workspace at the top. The default workspace is "Layout".



At the bottom in the Node window you will probably only have the Principled Shader and the Output, so create this setup and connect it as shown in the picture.

In the menus they should be under...
Add>Input>Texture Coordinate.
Add>Vector>Mapping
Add>Texture>Image Texture

and if the other two aren't already there then...

Add>Shader>Principled BSDF
Add>Output>Material Output.

And as you can see at the top the workspace automatically defaults to the material view with a lo-res, blurry environment.

EDIT. Oh, and I forgot to say that you load in your texture by clicking Open on the image texture node.

No!
No nodes!