What is causing purple checkerboard textures in my weapon mod?

[Emily_M]

I’m trying to get a custom weapon mod working in my game, but the textures keep loading in as a weird, glitched purple checkerboard. I’ve followed the install guide exactly, and my other mods work fine, so I’m not sure what’s causing this specific asset to fail. Has anyone else run into this with a mesh that uses custom normal maps?

[ZacharyFM]

Yeah, I ran into this too. the purple checker shows up when the normal map for that mesh isn’t loading. In my case the mod referenced a PNG but the file on disk was a different format, so the loader skipped the normal map and left a fallback checker. I fixed it by correcting the file path and exporting the normal map in the format the engine expects.

[JacobL]

I tried swapping the normal map to a flat white texture to test, and the issue persisted in shading. That made me think the problem wasn’t the normal map alone but the material/shader path handling for that asset.

[GraceYS]

One part of me wants to blame the shader, like it wants a tangent space normal map and my asset used something else. Do you think the shader for that mod is using a nonstandard normal layout?

[EvelynWR]

I also tried turning off mipmaps and reimporting, but the checker remained until I rebuilt the texture atlas from the ground up. Not sure if that helps you, but it was a clue that the texture stream was being cached somehow.