Modeling and texturing for Morrowind...is Blender enough or do I really need Nifskope?

[SamHe11]

I've got the basics down in terms of modeling in Blender (2.49 & above) and applying a single material and base texture and getting my items, weapons, etc into the CS and, ultimately, into my game. I'd like to now take a stab at doing some more advanced things like adding bump maps and glow maps to give my new toys a finishing touch. So I'm going through some Blender tutorials to do just that. Most of them seem to always finish with "export your nif from Blender, then open up your nif and look at it in NIfskope and poke around with some settings in there." Is Nifskope really necessary to get your nifs into Morrowind? I find it a little confusing with all those nodes and block properties and my head spins just looking at it. With the basics I mentioned above (not doing bump or glow maps yet), I have no problem exporting with Blender and going straight into the game. Is it imperative that after additional maps in Blender, I open the nif in Nifskope to tweak it around some more? I've seen some map tutorials exclusively use Nifskope, changing and adding settings/filters on blocks to create the desired maps.

 

For instance, this tutorial mentions adding the glow map in the texture properties in the BSShaderTextureSet block. But none of my custom nifs exported from Blender have this property. When I tried the Blender tutorials and looked at my nifs in Nifskope, they do, however, have a NiTextureProperty & NiMaterialProperty that my glow map falls under. So I guess I'm ok? I loaded up the meshes in game and they seemed to work fine. Is there some kind of advantage to running your meshes through Nifskope after finishing them in a separate modeling program? Like, does it make your mesh more compatible for Morrowind or Oblivion to render?

 

Thanks

 

 

[tauiin]

I Belive There is a Plugin for Blender That converts them into NIfs.