modifying texture paths

[cstarkey42]

Hello STEP!

 

I'm hoping someone can answer my question.  If an NPC record has an "WNAM - Worn armor" and the "armor" record points to the "armor addon" and the "armor addon" points to a different "Nam 1 - Female Skin Texture" than the default, if I change that record to the default will it completely ignore the modified "texture" records and only use the default?  Also, if I leave the "armor addon" record as is and instead change the "texture set" to point to the default skins instead of a modified path will only the default texture load into memory once or, since it's addressed via two different FormIDs, will it still load twice (not counting cached copies, of course)?

 

For example, if I'm modifying "The Ordinary Women" would it be best to:

 

1)  The Ordinary Women.esp>Non-Player Character>Bryling>WNAM - Worn armor>0_Ordinary_Body>Armor>Armor Addon>Textures Set>default vanilla path

 

2) The Ordinary Women.esp>Non-Player Character>Bryling>WNAM - Worn armor>0_Ordinary_Body>Armor>default vanilla path

 

3)  The Ordinary Women.esp>Non-Player Character>Bryling>WNAM - Worn armor>delete record AND The Ordinary Women.esp>Non-Player Character>Bryling>Head Parts>default vanilla path for "FemaleHeadNord"  (This assumes that by bypassing the Texture Set completely I'm keeping from loading it into VRAM).

 

My objective is that, since I'm using the same texture set for my unmodified npcs as the modified ones( Pride of Valhalla and Fading Pride ), it's using a ton of extra memory by having to load multiple copies of the same textures simply because they're located in different folder paths.  Ideally I would do the same for the followers and other npcs affected by mods and, if I understand it correctly, save hundreds of MB of vram.

 

Thanks to anyone who can help me figure this out.