Creation Kit: Bookshelves Help

[IronDusk33]

Hi, I'm having difficulty making a bookshelf for my home mod. I followed this tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8hr1Tp4hrI

 

This is what it appears in the creation kit:

http://i.imgur.com/3F1lo27.png

 

The books appear in the bookshelf, but not necessarily as intended:

http://i.imgur.com/drsgK8u.jpg

 

 

 

Please help!

[eric31415]

The best way to use bookshelves is to copy/paste them from a vanilla player home.

 

Drag a box over a working bookshelf to select all items at once, then right click on any selected item and copy into a dummy cell. Delete all the things that were accidentally selected, then copy/paste into your house.

 

Just remember that you will have to keep all items selected to move and rotate them all together.

[eric31415]

Here is an excerpt from a PM where I explained this process to someone in great detail.

 

But i do find myself with a few minutes right now, so let me lay out my super-easy (and ultra fast) method for displays and other scripted objects. Seriously, if you can copy/paste and delete you can do this.

What you are going to do is create a "warehouse" mod.

First, find WORKING examples of any display, bookshelf, trap, whatever you want to use in the game. Player homes are the only place for usable displays, bookshelves, and mannequins. Note exactly which ones are safe to copy, even do some homework on the wiki.

Now you are ready to make the warehouse mod. This is a stand-alone mod. Do not add it to your current project. Let me explain why; when you are copying things from the game, you are eventually going to accidently move something. It doesn't matter if you put it back exactly where it was before, the CK will store the change as part of your mod. So let's use a player home as an example. While copying a bookshelf from Proudspire Manor, you accidently move a dining room chair. You put it back, thinking no one will ever notice... Until that ultra-popular overhaul of Proudspire comes out. It moved the dining room, along with your chair, to the other side of the house and put a jaccuzzi where the dining room was. So someone is using that popular overhaul, and installs your mod. Now they have a chair floating in the hottub, or just CTD every time they try to enter thier home. This is exactly what people refer to as "dirty" mods.

So that's why its a seperate mod. Now for a couple precautions you must follow to make sure that your future projects are not dependant on the "warehouse mod" as a master. First, vanilla assets only. No modders' resources. Second, don't rename anything or change any editor id's. And lastly, don't make static versions of non-static items for the warehouse. If you follow these rules, you will not have to include the warehouse mod as part of your uploads, and the bit in the preceeding paragraph will not apply. Note that these rules only apply to the warehouse itself. You should absolutely do all of these things when working on your actual mods.

Now for actually making the warehouse mod. Create a new interior cell, leave it completely empty. Now to add a bookshelf. Navigate to the bookshelf that you want to copy and center it up nice and square in the render window. If it's not covered in yellow and orange boxes, hit "m" to toggle markers on. Now just click/drag a box over the whole mess (see those orange boxes in the wall behind the shelf? You need them too). When you let go, you will see that you have selected every object in your box. Right click on any one of the selected objects and hit copy. Then open your new empty warehouse cell, right click and hit paste. You will probably notice that you also picked up some clutter, maybe even a whole chunk of the house. No problem, just click on each and delete untill all you are left with are the bookshelf parts. Follow the same process for mannequins, displays, whatever. To do those shield-only racks, all i did was copy the whole shield/2 weapon rack into my warehouse, cleaned off the clutter, then dragged a box over that and made a new copy right beside it. On the second one, i deleted everything but the shield rack and it's activator. Once you have everything you want for now, save the mod and close the CK.

Now to actually use the warehouse. Open the CK,and select both the warehouse mod and your other project, say, modX. Set modX as the active file. Now open the warehouse, and use the same copy/paste routine you used to put everything into the warehouse to take things from it and put them into modX Note that when you have multiple items selected in the CK (like all the parts of a display, mannequin, etc.) you can move them all as together as one object, just be careful not to select only a single piece, or anything else, until you are absolutely sure that your new display is placed properly. If you do mess up, i find it easiest to delete the mess you made and paste in a fresh one. Also note that when you are moving groups of objects this way, you will have to do the rotation by hand with the right mouse button and the "z" key. You can't double click a group of objects.

And that's really about all there is to it. Copying and pasting groups of objects in the CK just like in Windows. Moving and precisely placing groups of objects can be tricky at first, thankfully you can still use "c" to change your view while keeping everything selected. look from every angle to be sure before daring to click away.

To expand on this idea a little, remember those tables full of dagger racks i did for your mod ? Here's how i did those; For the first table, i pasted in and placed each display on one side of the table, one at a time, lining them up nice. Then i pulled the camera high above the table, dragged a long box over all the displays on the one side, used ctrl+click to un-select the things i didn't want (table and floor), and copy/pasted the whole row to the other side of the table. Right click + "z" to spin it around and line it up. The second table was a breeze, just c/p the first one to the other side of the room. Those two tables took me about 15 minutes to set up, and most of that time was spent setting up the first row.

And now i remember why i decided to help with the displays in your mod... It was faster than explaining how to do it.

Edited November 27, 2013 by eric31415

[IronDusk33]

Thanks for the replys but I actually just figured it out, I simply put the collision markers wrong. Lol