Importing actor obj's into Nifskope

[bombchu]

Hello :)

I posted a while back about importing meshes from Blender, and thanks to you guys I was able to understand the process well enough to do it comfortably. Now I have a friend that's trying to do the same thing, only he's made his own Dogmeat mesh by exporting the raider dog to .obj and editing it in blender. It's worth noting real quick that he's already posted about this and gotten no replies, so I told him I would post here about it. Anyway, I showed him the process of pasting the trishape into the raider dog mesh and rerouting the info and all that, and the mesh successfully imported into the CK and appeared in game, with a couple of problems. Or probably one problem with two symptoms. The first is that the mesh does not reflect the scale/orientation changes made in Nifskope to match the original. The second is that only the eyes and head/body caps seem to be animating. I honestly have no idea what it takes to give a mesh bending joints and whatever else it needs for the game to properly animate it, but I guess I assumed the mesh would retain that info the same as it retained the uv mapping.

So I guess I'm asking what this mesh needs in order to animate properly. I'll go ahead and attach it here so you guys can look and see if there are any obvious mistakes made when pasting the trishape into the raider dog mesh.

Thanks a lot for your help :)

[JuJooGuppy]

Animated objects like this have to have the bones properly assigned, in addition to the skin modifiers / weights.. I don't know enough about it to walk you through it or get you started, just know that that is why things don't animate properly.

[bombchu]

Since posting this we have figured out that Outfit Studio is assigning the Female Body Skeleton to the dog mesh. How would we get OFS to attach the proper skeleton to the mesh for the weight painting?

[JonathanOstrus]

Since posting this we have figured out that Outfit Studio is assigning the Female Body Skeleton to the dog mesh. How would we get OFS to attach the proper skeleton to the mesh for the weight painting?

 

Get the skeleton you are going to pair with the right animation from the ba2 archive. Place it somewhere (I suggest the Bodyslide\res folder where the other skeletons are). In BodySlide open the settings and change the skeleton. Down at the bottom, reference skeleton. Load a weighted nif for reference (something that uses the skeleton you've loaded) and then load your new mesh. Proceed to either copy weights if appropriate or manually paint them. Then export without the reference. You should have a new nif with bones related to the dog skeleton.

 

Remember to change the reference skeleton back when you're done or bad things will happen to you later.

Edited June 9, 2016 by BigAndFlabby