You can set up to 8 different types of textures in one Texture set.

Change the Texture set ID to make a new set of textures.

Double click on the selected Texture set and a window will pop-up like the one shown in picture Texture set.

In the Object window expand the menu Miscellaneous, select the TextureSet category and then choose any of the existing Texture sets.

But now I want to add a black version of the armour and here is where I am going to use the Texture sets. In the original nif file I already linked a set of textures and created the Armour Addon and Armour objects as explained in the Creating an armour for Skyrim tutorial. In this guide I am going to add a new recolour for an armour, but if you want to retexture another item (like a weapon), it works exactly the same.

If you are retexturing a custom item, the advantage of using texture sets is that you only have to package the nif file once, decreasing the size of your mod file and making it easier to package. for armours and clothing: as your retexture points to the vanilla mesh file, if somebody uses a body replacer automatically your retexture will be shown on the armour made for that body, so you don't have to bother packaging retextures for all the existing body types: your mod will work for everybody.you don't have to package the nif file of that item into your mod, only the texture (.dds) files, decreasing the size of your mod file and making it easier to package.

The advantages of this system when retexturing a vanilla item are: Since Fallout 3, Bethesda introduced the use of Texture sets that allow to use only one nif file with different textures. In Oblivion, when you wanted to release a retexture of an item (armour, weapon, etc), you had to make as many copies of the nif files as retextures you wanted to create, and then link the different textures to each of the copies.

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