Skyrim mods (update 2, 3ds max)

Hello my peril obsessed friends,

I have made progress in my quest to improve the visuals of spider peril in Skyrim.  Having absolutely no luck in Blender (I find it to be about as intuitive as learning Sumerian by beating my head against the wall), I moved to 3ds max.  There is a handy plugin that allows .nif files to be imported and exported relatively painlessly.  I have learned quite a bit about editing meshes, but I am having a problem: No textures!!!  I was super careful installing the plugin, and made sure my file structure was 100% accurate, but my 3ds still wont load any textures.  The results look very strange in game, making it look like my poor pc is moldy when wearing my meshes.  Does anyone out there have any insight into how to fix this?

Thanks!