How do you turn something into armor?

[CinnamonMods]

I remember this mod that had several costumes. With one of them being one that turned you into a teddy bear. A companion mod also uses this mod to make it look like a teddy bear was your companion by having the NPC just be really short I think.

Well, the mod that had the costume is no longer available and I would love to know how to make a teddy bear costume myself.

Right now when I want a teddy bear to talk I just have it as an activator. Which worked alright for that mod but I have an idea for a mod that requires the teddies to walk around so that solution no longer works.

Thanks in advance and any help is very much appreciated!

[madmongo]

You need a 3d modeling program like Blender or 3ds Max. I use Blender so I will go through the basic procedure using that. 3ds Max or some other modeling program may use slightly different terminology but the procedure should be similar.

 

The teddy bear has an existing armature so that it can ragdoll, so the first thing you need to do is remove that. Load the nif into Blender and unparent it from the armature, then delete the armature. Now save the teddy bear mesh. I typically will save it as an obj but as long as you have completely removed the armature you can save it as a nif.

 

The next step is to load up the human skeleton (Blender calls it an armature, FNV calls it a skeleton, same thing). Sometimes it helps to load a human body containing the skeleton or something like the radiation suit so that you can use that mesh as a guide for where you want your costume or armor to fit around. With that loaded, next load the teddy bear mesh without an armature that you saved earlier. Edit the mesh and rotate it around and resize it as necessary to make it fit your skeleton. If you loaded something like the radiation suit to help mold your teddy bear costume around that, delete the radiation suit mesh as soon as you are done adjusting the size and proportions of your teddy bear mesh.

 

Now that you have your mesh adjusted so that it properly fits your human skeleton, parent the teddy bear mesh to the human skeleton/armature. Creating the bone weights from the bone heat will get you most of the way there, but Blender tends to screw up the bone weights a bit so you'll probably have to go into weight paint and adjust the bone weights a bit. Once you have some experience with Blender you'll be able to predict which parts Blender will probably not weight very well.

 

Export you rmesh, and make sure that you select all when exporting. Use the same basic export settings as for any armor/clothing/creature skin. Blender doesn't usually export the shader flags properly so you'll need to fix those using NifSkope. Otherwise the mesh will be invisible in-game.

 

Blender Noob to Pro has a good tutorial on rigging and weight painting.

 

You will need Blender 2.49b if you want this to work properly. Don't use a newer version of Blender. You can find Blender 2.49b with all of the nif import/export tools and everything else you need here: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/12248

 

Creating armor from scratch basically follows most of the same steps, so any armor or clothing tutorial for FNV should be useful. Armor, clothing, bodies, and creature skins are basically all the same thing as far as the game engine is concerned. It's just a mesh rigged to a skeleton.

[JimboUK]

Is this the mod you remember? https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/49235

[CinnamonMods]

Is this the mod you remember? https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/49235

It is!

Which is great since I didn't have much success trying to do it myself.

I hope they're still active so I can ask for permission to use the bear suit :0