There's plenty of texture sites around for oblivion. But i meant this thread to become a quicky for proper saving of textures. Simply said; the way bethesa does it. Also a brief explanation on alpha channels. The rest is up to experimentation in your editting program.

*.dds DXT1 (one bit alpha)
*_n.dds DXT5 (interpolated alpha)
*_g.dds DXT1 (one bit alpha)

auto generate mip-maps for each of these.

icons;

*.dds DXT3 (explicit alpha) no mip-maps

The alpha channel in dxt5/*_n.dds is the one you mostly work with.
This one acts differently, because it will show the game how much you want a part of the custom item to shine in the oblivion world. Simply put; wood normally doesn't shine.. metal does. So you want wood to be black and metal to be more near white. Because it's interpolated alpha you can add detail as well.. white-greytones-black.

About image editting programs

So you might read this post and think "well gee..sounds simple". Now all you need is the program itself. You heard people mention Photoshop. You race off to the local computer software store.. and notice the neat box with photoshop printed on it. But then you notice the price-tag. There goes your dream of your own textures right?

Wrong.

http://www.gimp.org/ .. it's free!

http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/dds/ Oblivion uses a special filetype called "dds" (DirectDraw Surface).. after installing this plug-in you'll be able to load and save your fancy textures and it can be implemented in-game.

few tips:

The *_n file is very important. Without it your textures will likely end up black ingame. This file will tell the game about emulating depth on a texture. In techy terms it's called a "normal map". Also the alpha channel actually applies the "shine" effect.

If you downloaded the tool for editting *.dds you can actually transfer your texture to the settings required in the normal map. Now you can experiment with converting it. Change the height. After this apply a blur effect.. well lot's of options to choose from.

Was the above right? Well yes mostly. Clothing for instance is something else. Sure 1-bit Alpha on a regular texture works fine. However you don't really need fancy black-greytones-white in the alpha channel on a normal map if you're editting clothing. So it's alright to save it as a DXT3 file.

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Okay what now. You've made a fancy re-texture and you want someone else to get it into the game?

Download http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope

If you open the proper mesh which you want your new texture to apply to, look at the left side of the tool. Mostly likely it will show (+) 0 NiNode.. okay left click the (+) .. It wil most likely show up another branch part called (+) 1 NiTriShape. Finally here's the NiTexturingPropery. In here you'll notice the proper path used. So you can actually type in your new path and filename. It's using "textures\..." which is the proper root for every texture.

Another very neat function of NifSkope is that it will re-fresh your image on the mesh if you save it. So you can always keep track of what you're doing. Very useful if you want to make a perfect circle.. while the mesh is uv-mapped (the way textures wrap around the 3d-object) in a different way.

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Sometimes you just need a nice set of wood-textures.. for a static wooden board which is part of a ship for example. Well you can of course spend three days working on a magical looking wood-base, i really respect you for it. But if you lack the skill or the time or both . You can also surf the internet for free data-bases of standard textures of all kinds.

Example: http://www.cgtextures.com/

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Okay. So making a brand-new texture isn't your cup of tea. What about "re"-texturing an existing Bethesda texture?. Download; http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3311.

With this tool installed you can actually extract (pretty easy) all the models and textures you need from the original Bethesda package. Pick something you like to screw up ehmm change ..no wait make it look insanely cool . Do keep in mind that if you don't change the name of the model name (*.nif) it will replace the original one. Because the construction kit only searches for the model name (at least if you use the standard oblivion directory path)

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When dealing with armour and clothing always remember there's two versions of each mostly. Female and male. So open up both versions. If you apply a tweak, you can repeat it to the other one. Hopping from one to another, otherwise you got yourself the most amazing looking female cuirass .. and then you have to repeat it later on to the male.. which you can imagine with thirty changes you made can be quite the pain in the royal beh...

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Probably when you're done with assembling the texture. You also want a custom icon (the small picture which shows up before the item in the players inventory).

They are located in /textures/menus/icons. With this file there is a use of the alpha channel in a different way. Black means there will be transparancy. White means no-transparancy. So either pick DXT3 or DXT5. The proper size is 64x64 pixels.

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Some people do simple re-texturing, okay but what happens when you edit for example a shield with a new design. Now most tutorials help you along with generating a proper _n file (normal map).

However what it never changes is the alpha channel connected to the normal map. So if you test it ingame, you'll have the old (i'll just call it light reflection at the moment) alpha channel.

There's a tool for this. It's part of the DirectX Software Development Kit (SDK) which always has a current version for download on the Microsoft website.

Inside there's a very handy tool called dxtex.exe; Now if you load the normal file you can actually import the colour map onto the alpha channel of the normal map. Very easy and quick.

Now reload the normal map again in your favourite graphics editting program, change the alpha channels contrast (if you don't it will be the infamous nuclear dawn texture) and woohoo. Completely done.