ok so i wanted to make the master robes both dark and light use darth bandon style robes and then retexture the bandon robes for light but just to get an understanding of how i would do it i made a new item - i dont want to disguise the wearer as bandon just have his robes and i dont want to replace the standard model - how do i direct my new item to use his robe model and my texture
You will need to edit the appearance.2da (essentially a very large excel spreadsheet) and replace one of the in game models with the model you want. As such you will need to learn about 2da editing...
Click me for Stoffe's guide (
http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=148638)
When you edit clothing uti's there are texture variations and the like in the uti, this tells the game which texture variation to use. You will have to decide on one of the appearance slots you want to replace (perhaps heavy armour) as an example, change all the model and texture names to the model you want. The easiest way to learn maybe to download one of the clothing mods out there which changes things in a manner similar to what you want to do, and see what they have changed. Which would mean looking at their appearance.2da file, their uti's and the way they have arranged their textures. To this end you may find my mod; Force Fashion II (
http://knightsoftheoldrepublic.filefront.com/file/Force_Fashion_II;104261) useful, especially the readme in working things out. Hope that helps, as this seems to be a similar theme of question, I'll write an integrated tutorial, gimme around 20 minutes and I'll have one up.