New Texture mod WIP

[xander2077]

well thats cool. i have not played sims 2 in a while, but i bet you added some nice content.

[RubberMan01]

Much easier in the Sims because you are not restricted to lore!

 

How are you doing on the boots?

[xander2077]

well, i took a break last night so nothing new. been busy trying to organize my external drives and WIP so they are in the top tier and easier to get to. i had them nested way deep in the drive and it just makes sense to have them closer to the top. plus i had to move a bunch of files between drives to organize those better. that takes time. moving, deleting unneccessary junk i dont use any more. old programs that wont run in linux. crap i cant remember why i had in the first place. duplicate files. (which i still have a ton of) all take up drive space and make a general mess of things.

 

plus i want to see if i can try out this python script called seamstress, and see if it will help me unwrap things better in blender. if it does it will make doing the boots a lot easier. of course i may have to start over on them, but no big deal. it was not hard to edit the model the first time, and i think when i was messing with the tools in blender thats when i mucked up the tree and changed materials and such i wasnt supposed to, so a redo is not a bad idea. plus it would take them back to the default settings, as long as i dont change anything like i did by messing with the settings before. i may have to do a search on exporting it back out so it retains the same settings as the import, it may not be smart to just export it by the default setting for the game, but instead preserve the format it was imported as.

 

i was also reading up on how to save settings in blender for the portable app, which there is a way to do it besides trying to save the settings. they posted in the how to documents on blender website that you can open the program, delete the box, and then not make a model at all, but just adjust the settings and then save it to a blend file, and that way you have a blank window with your preferences simply by loading the blank blend file. its different, but worth a shot. it would be better than trying to remember everything i changed prior to importing a nif file. and i would not have to keep deleting the default box every time and possibly change the orientation of the imported nif.

Edited February 23, 2016 by xander2077

[RubberMan01]

Never really tried Blender. I have it installed but didn't ever get to grips with the camera so I threw it aside in the hope I would never need it.

 

I have been thinking about coming over to the dark side recently and using LINUX as I now use Vista 64 at a last ditch attempt to avoid a newer Windows (hate the bubbley console style they've adopted that make you out to be an idiot - If you can't use a damn computer then you shouldn't have software that wipes your arse)

 

My methods are rather odd for meshing nifs I'm afraid.

 

Mesh obj files in Wings3D (or Maya) then import them into Milkshape to texture (not seen another better for the job yet)

Then I attach the textures to the nifs with Nifskope and adjust the ambience settings etc

Finally I can add them to Morrowind!! TaDa!!!

 

Sounds a pain I know but I'm now used to it. The Sims 2 was much easier though.

 

When I design real things for people (for work) then obj is what I want so I've stuck to working with them.

[xander2077]

dont get me wrong, i WISH i could use 3ds max 9, that was my favorite 3D modeling program. it is so intuitive, i can literally do it in my sleep. and i do not mind the obj file at all, but for my setup now, it would just make more problems than solve them, and i am huge on workflow, maximizing the time i have to model or mod period.

 

i first tried out blender back in 2005, and i didnt really like it at all back then, along with lightwave, both of them were like a foreign country to me after using max for so long. so i never really tried them out much. the only reason i even used lightwave was to import models i could not convert to OBJ any other way and then export them so i could use them in max. blender kind of got the cold shoulder, but i guess i should have at least familiarized myself with its controls a bit more. it is bass ackwards compared t max or milkshape, so that is what makes it so difficult to use.

 

i read a good article one itme recently as to why this is, and a software developer who wrote the article said they guess it is because the people who made blender forgot to take into account that 99% of the modeling world uses different behavior patterns in their software, and that certain behaviors are not only cross platform but cross software, and the developers of blender completely ignored this fact in order to be "different", and gimp is plagued with the same flaw, some of the keys you press for combos are just the opposite of photoshop. anyway, if they would stop tryig to be different because of licensing issues they fear from mocrosoft and other mainstream develkopers, then perhaps more people would stay with blender, but many are bailing for things like Maya now that they have a linux port, although i have not been able to make it work on my system.

 

Maya was something i dabbled in only very little. back when it was brand spankin new, i tried messing around a bit in there, and i returned to max, simply because it was too much of a leap from the old control set. but i did appreciate the ability to model in nurbs and sculpt. Mudbox was also something i wish i could have mastered. Im used to the old "make a shape and then extrude thingies from it" school of modeling. wich i did extensively for freeworlds (a star wars total conversion of freelancer, since combined with tides of war into one huge modding community, but im not sure if its still going) i left that a long time ago when real life got in the way and i lost over 3000 models to dev host server negligence and a computer thief. so i kind of lost touch with modeling for a while.

 

when i started modeling i was a windows user, and slow to make the transition from 98 to XP because i wanted the bugs to work themselves out first. but once i did, i hung on to the bitter end with XP until i got my laptop, which was loaded with vista. i had all sorts of cool programs (expensive too) that were designed for XP and vista, and when they pulled the support for vista and XP, and forced me to upgrade to 7, i was very disappointed to find out it broke all those programs i could not afford to replace. so after years of trying to find a way to downgrade my laptop to XP unsuccesfully, i decided to give windows the boot and never looked back, until recently when i found out that even with wine, i cant get 3Dsmax working, and now i wish i had a second computer just for Max 9. or even 8 or 7. Thats all i see windows really good for, besides phtoshop. everything else i can do great in linux.

 

Now that is not to say linux is all peaches and cream, it has its duds as well. Mint being one of the biggest. it works great ot of the box, but becomes unstable later on. and i grew tired of having to reinstall every few months because of some reason or another where i needed something installed and it broke the system. So i switched to lubuntu, which runs quieter than mint. now it took a lot of tweaking and special library installs to get it working the way i want, but i think it was worth the effort. The hardest thing to get used to in linux is the extensive use of the terminal (linux equivalent to the command prompt in windows) but that is normally for downloading and installing things you cant find on the software center or repository manager. but for the average user they probably wont need to do that.

 

the strong points are you dont need to download drivers for your system at all, they install with the OS, so unlike windows, where you can spend hours trying to track down a driver nobody supports any more, this takes that mess away. i cant find any drivers for vista unless i pay for them now ($50 a pop) but i dont have to do that in linux and everything i had working before on my laptop after a 3 hour windows setup, works after a 15 min install of linux. talk about time saving.

 

the weak points are depending on linux version, and there are a lot of them, you usually have to trade off speed for customization. if you are a user who gets off on your desktop looking flashy and cool, and a full suite of customization features, then you are limited in that regard by the version of linux you get. the more features it has, the heavier a system it will be and the more memory and processing it will take to run. if you want something lighter, then you have to sacrifice all that glitz and glam for a simpler interface with less control over how it looks.

 

some versions give you more access to control over admin priveleges, and some babysit you and make it harder to gain that access, but user priveleges are a bit different than in windows, and usually you dont need them unless you are doing something very special to tweak system folders or install a new type of software. and when you need those priveleges, you just have to type in your password for a temporary elevation and then it goes back to normal.

 

one thing that irks me about linux is they seem so concerned with trying to maintain security on my system, they make it difficult to have more complex programs, like max, work in wine. this is because they nerf the functionality of dotnet and other things that run unhindered in actual windows. there are workarounds but they make it difficult because windows is full of exploits out of the box and continues to create new ones with every update that are easier to block by not allowing them in wine, so linux devs dont like to make full ports of these windows system packages because of that. they also seem more concerned about aesthetics these days than functionality. like the huge argument over why windows borders are not wider so they are easier to resize in linux, and the typical devs answer is to use the key combination method, which is not only stupid to limit people to, but harder for people with touchpads to use. so they just made a whole lot of people mad by that ignorance.

 

along with linux, python goes hand in hand. many things linux run off of py scripts, and i hate python. why? well those particular devs are stuck in tunnel vision mode. they upgrade or clean the code so much, that they leave older versions of python in the dust and do not have the forsight to make newer versions not only backward compatible, but at the very least they could script in redirects to older versions for programs that need older versions. so for instance, if i have a prgram that needs python 2.6, and i also have a program with python 3.4 as dependencies, installing python 3.4 might break the program that depends on 2.6... especially if i need to force 3.4 as system default just to run that program that needs python 3.4... and just now ( a day late and a dollar short) they are finally waking up to a long neglected need to backport the code, or make a patch that converts older python dependent programs so they can use the newer versions... and the silly thing is the python installs dont overwrite the older python. it is still there in its own folder, so even if it is there, a program may not see it because the newer python hijacks the system and forces all programs to only look for the new version. talk about a selfsih dictatorial scripting system...

 

which brings me back to blender. the only version i can use to mod for morrowind, or any bethesda games, is blender 2.49b, which has the only working version of nifscripts. unlike max or maya, nifscripts wont work in all versions of blender. and the latest version of nifscripts was released and cut short because they released it too early. they jumped the gun and made it compatible with python 3. now the only way to install it (which is broken) is to go through github, create a user account there, then go through 20 million hoops to make a personal key code... fork the repository, and then attempt to install it over the net through the command prompt and hope you have it right. then you have to install several dependencies or suffer a bunch of error messages, and then only to find out that the links they have to download critical dependencies was purposely broken and instead of downloading the necessary python scripts, it downloads html4 code. so they dont even tell you up front that it was put on hold til they iron out whatever they have to fix, they just leave you hanging or going on a wild goose chase to nowhere... that is my biggest beef with coders is the need to keep everything so top secret that it wastes my time. just be honest for crissakes, and say you screwed up. dont waste my time by not being up front and saying it is not ready or you got ahead of yourself...

 

well after finding out i had screwed up my python for no reason just to get the latest version of nifscripts working with blender 2.8 (?) and it was not going to work anyway, i tried to revert and install python 2.5 for blender 2.49 and then upgrade python 2.5 to 2.6 so nifscripts would work, and i find out it broke another program i need to keep my morrowind directory clean (metamorphose2 renamer) and it still would not work. so i am forced to use a portable version of blender under wine (its for windows) and it already has nifscripts and the appropriate python self contained in the program folder, and runs flawlessly under wine.

 

and the biggest reason why i have to use that is because it took a workaround for me to even install max 7 on linux under wine. i had to dig through my backup drives to find my old install in a folder i saved, with the licese already activated, and copy/paste that set of files in the appropriate folder, just to activate max. and once i fired it up, it runs, but it is broken. i cant model anything in it. just stare at a simple geometry. none of the controls work.

 

so im stuck with blender and nifskope, but at least i have those. i got the itch ot learn blender now since it is the only way i am able to even modify a mesh let alone make a new one. im still learning both. yes it takes some getting used to, and the support for nifskope for morrowind sucks, all the tutorials are based on older versions and the actions and names of things have changed since then. so i have to find things out by trial and error, and it has taucht me to save, save save... just today i messed up the helmet mesh and had to do all the UV work i had done before all over. and that was from following instructions on how to add reflection that were either incomplete, or outdated... and im not very familiar with the terminology of nifskope either so that comes into play.

 

what i am learning is there is a few tried and true methods of adding models or converting them in nifskope and blender. and there are some things i am just going to have to learn on my own. but i guess i have to, and that is motivation enough.

Edited February 24, 2016 by xander2077

[RubberMan01]

Wow long reply lol

 

Quite lucky here. Have several machines to work with and test on over a few platforms including Windows 10.

 

The one I'm using now is Vista 64 and the only issue I've got is I can't get DDS files to save via PSP >.<

 

I do have a DDS converter that does it but again it slows me down.

 

Oh yes. Can't get Python to work on the 64 either for some dumb arse reason. I think that's me though lol as my son has it running on his 64........

 

 

Right. Finished work early today so going to jump onto my mod. I'm sure I will think of something to mesh while I'm doing the dialogue rofl I always do.

[xander2077]

well it is not always the python that wont work, but the program that wont recognize the version of python you want to install... like for instance, the only working nifscripts for blender, is the one that works with blender 2.49 or 2.49b... those depend on python 2.5 to install the blender program, and 2.6 to install nifscripts, which doesnt have 64 bit compatibility... so you have to install and run blender with nifscritps in a virtual machine that is 32 bit, which is the only way i could do it... so im running it in a 32 bit version of the wine prefix so it tricks the program into thinking it is running in 32 bit. then it works... if i were to try and run it in 64 bit linux or wine, then it would give an error and not run at all...

 

but that is part of the problem with the development for python... it is incomplete and spotty, they forget to support 64 bit or just decide to leave it hanging and get distracted by the newer prettier python 3 like kids in a toy store... their attention span is very low i guess... maybe thats just the meticulous side of me coming out, but you would think they would cover all the bases before moving on to the nest thing... but no...

 

have you tried finding photoshop protable? in windows i could use that and install the dds plugin from nvidia and it worked great. PSP was never one of my favorite things... i used it sparingly, and usually only for plugins that were different from photoshop, it had some cool features that photoshop did not, so i typically moved files between both of them so i could apply different filters to a texture... so sometimes i would do an operation in PSP and then move it back to photoshop for finalizing... but to make a dds file it worked better to do it in photoshop... that goes for gimp too, but the plugin for dds works well enough now in gimp that i really dont need the dds capabilities for photoshop... the only deficiency gimp really has now is for TGA files and some of the encoding for that, which is necessary for normal maps and things in KOTOR, but can be avoided in morrowind simply by making a dds texture instead of a tga...

 

as far as you being a dumb arse, i think not... since you are running vista 64 bit, that is probably the issue... the operating system is no longer supported by microsoft or any computer manufactureres for drivers, and i can imagine that the python for it doesnt work as well either... there is something in how the operating system is built that prevents it from working with things designed for windows 7, which a lot of the coding is based off of now...

 

so the python you want to run has left vista in the dust so to speak, and there is not much you can do to change that problem besides upgrading to windows 7, where the support is still fairly fresh... but just be aware they intend to drop support for 7 as well in the future...

 

if i were to fix my desktop system, which was designed for xp, i could probably do it with little issue, but i am also aware that i may be forced to just install windows 7 if the drivers for it are now missing. its funny, but drivers i used to be able to get for my laptop are scrubbed from the web, to force people to upgrade, but if you really nsist on geting them and sticking to vista, they either make you pay for them through a third party, or you have to go by trial and error for hours until you find the right driver from the manufacturer of one of the components that the vendor used when they made the computer... most people just capitulate and upgrade... i admit if i were to get windows on anything right now i would have to just go with windows 7 because the drivers are still freely available for now, and it is less of a headache to install than vista or xp...

 

im not sure if i will encounter those problems when on a desktop system, perhaps i can still get away with xp, but if things need to be updated, like dotnet, or java, or even the video drivers, and because of a new software standard they wont work well with the current networking standard, then it may just be wiser to go with 7. unfortunately unless you have a stand alone system that doesnt need to get on the web, you are stuck complying with the latest software standards or you end up with a system that runs hot all the time, and is basically crying for all the software upgrades before it will get back to normal... what it is doing when it does that (run hot) is the processor is trying to match up the old code with the new code, and it takes more processing power, which runs the fan harder... one little thing out of place (like the latest flash) can cause a system to do this, even in linux... even the slightest difference in code behavior... so if you want to stick to an older OS without running the fan, it has to be an offline one... or something will mismatch and cause the CPU to run more to try and make things work...

[RubberMan01]

Got Windows 10 available to me but I don't like what I see. I was hoping for another Windows Server xxx to be released that didn't have the stupid touch screen thing going on and the ridiculous amount of processor time being used and dumb things I will never use.

 

Bring back Server 2003! That was awesome lol... used it until 2011 haha

 

Still banging out Dialogue here mate a day later. Had to throw a couple of meshes together in between but apart from that it's all typing.... which I HATE.

 

I really wanted someone to help me with the internals to but no takers :'(

 

Coming back to do a "quick" mod for Morrowind may have been a mistake lol but started now so have to finish. Quest is huge and has radiants as well. Hope your boots are showing more progress!

 

Maybe you could sort me out a new shield so I don't have to haha

[xander2077]

well if you want interiors for your buildings you can always just use the existing ones in the CS and change the textures for them. its a short cut, but might actualy be an ok idea.

[xander2077]

here is progress on te boots so far. i just took the vanilla mesh and reworked it so it looks less blocky in certain places. im still learning blender but i am surprised at how fast i am picking it up. is it as fast as max? not really, theres still actions i miss from that, but i guess if i have to use this then i cant really complain a whole lot. it works... just have to get used to a different work flow pattern.

 

http://i.share.pho.to/e605d1ee_o.png