Tutorial to make my weapons less shiny

I receive a lot of comments on my mods about how shiny my weapons are. Especially in comparison to the vanilla weapons, mine are very clean and shiny, and some people don't like the disparity. That's completely understandable. I, myself, like consistency in my games. So, I thought I should write up a quick and easy tutorial for people to alter my weapons to be less shiny.

First off, you'll need Nifskope (preferably Nifskope 2.0) and to install the mod you wish to edit (the textures have to be present in your Skyrim directory or else they won't show in Nifskope).


Righto, let's get started:

1. Open Nifskope, then open the .nif file you want to edit. In this case, I will be editing my Leaf Dagger (after installation, it can be found in "data\meshes\billyro\leafdagger" - all my weapons will be located inside the billyro folder).

2. Now, click on the weapon and it will go wireframe. In the Block List (the thing on the left-hand side), expand the NiTriShape and the BSLightingShaderProperty inside of it.

3.By clicking on the BSShaderTextureSet (which, on mine, is denoted as "...") we can see the textures of the weapon down the bottom of the screen in the Block Details section. Here, we want to change the cubemap from my own one (provided by Humus) to a vanilla one (most weapons use shinybright_e.dds, so that's what we'll change it to).

4. Double click on the value with the cubemap, then change it to "textures\cubemaps\shinybright_e.dds", and you'll see it change immediately to the darker version below.

5. You're done! You can also tweak some other values inside the Block Details of the BSLightingShaderProperty itself, but you shouldn't need to with my weapons.

I hope this tutorial was somewhat useful, and perhaps it'll help you with unifying your Skyrim weapons. :)