upperbodyfemale normal maps

[junkacc]

hello all, hope everyone is doing well, this is my first post here.

I have a question regarding the normalmaps for tribal females. Are they used by the engine? From the readme of Dirty Hairy Women (https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/61656):

Thanks to the crazy way the tribal skins were originally implemented the tribal skins do not have their own normal maps and instead point to the base body normal maps (similar to the hand textures). I find this disappointing because It really degrades the appearance of the hairy areas. Maybe I'll have to learn to play around in the NIFs and update that one day.

Also, the lobotomite females have a normal map in the OWB bsa, textures\characters\nvdlc03\nvdlc03lobof\loboupperbodyfemale.dds but it seems not used.

So the question is, should I bother making normalmaps for FO3 pitt and pointlookout tribals?

[RoyBatty]

Sounds like a bug I need to fix honestly, but it could be an engine limitation, I will have to look.

[junkacc]

Apparently it's the engine. There is a function in JIP that let's you swap textures on the fly though:

SwapTextureEx objectRef:ref nifBlockName:string texturePath:string texSlotIndex:int{0-5}
ex) SwapTextureEx objectRef "SodaBottle01:0" "clutter\junk\SodaBottleClosed01_n" 1

Could be used after scanning for NPC race. I'll make normals for pitt infected tribals if this gets implemented.