[Adding sighting node to gun in NifSkope messes up first person textures]

Hm. Are you using the separate first person texture (1stpersong3assaultrifle.dds) for it? Not sure that would make a difference, but it might.

[Is ESM-flagging your mod really the only way of fixing the "white bodies" issue?]

I'm not entirely sure. I actually made some aesthetic edits to vanilla npcs in Oxmod, and I generated body/face textures in the geck. Everything works, and Oxmod is an ESP, but the directory for the textures is actually pointing to the FalloutNV ESM. On some level it seems an ESM has to be involved somewhere.

 

But Is there any reason for a mod to not be an ESM? Everything about ESPS appears to be negative. Besides character texture issues, Esps treat all references as persistent, causing save bloat, and navmeshes will break if you reload a save mid-session. The bLoad tweak also supposedly causes performance issues, hence why it's not on by default.

 

Just save a backup of the ESP before you convert it so you don't have to convert it back in the event you want to make an update.

The only reason I don't want to is that in my next mod, I may want to allow some choices to carry-over through a separate, choice-tracking ESM that will be a dependency for both mods. There isn't any technical issue with it, but having two ESMs (plus, I suppose, a third for the next mod) will just bug me. Purely an illogical, "load-order aesthetics" thing. I'll just do it, though- the mismatched bodies will annoy me more than the ESMs.

[Is ESM-flagging your mod really the only way of fixing the "white bodies" issue?]

I've had my mod flagged as an ESM to avoid the bug where new NPCs will appear with the appropriate head texture, but their bodies are white regardless of race. However, I don't see any need for this mod to be an ESM, and I don't want it to be if it doesn't have to. I've seen other mods use .esp and not have this bug, but every single post online just says to use ESMs to fix it (or mentions the bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1 .ini tweak for when you have the opposite issue- proper bodies with white faces). Is there really no other way of fixing this?

[Exterior Optimization]

As far as I know Multibounds only work in interiors. They're basically cubes in which everything inside them is unrendered if you are outside them, and everything outside them is unrendered if you're inside them. Portals are used for letting you see between two cubes,

 

Occlusion planes are basically Fences that serve the same purpose. An example use case for them would be you had an allyway.

 

So am I good to use occlusion planes semi-liberally? Just plunk them down along walls and let them do their thing?

[Exterior Optimization]

Hey all, I'm trying to optimize a town I've built in a new worldspace, but the Geck Wiki isn't exactly clear on how to do it- it explains what multibounds and occlusion planes are/do, but it doesn't really explain how to use them. I've noticed the base-game exteriors seem to only use occlusion planes, but I've also read elsewhere that multibounds are better/more effective/etc. Any tips/tricks/guides you know of?

[Radios not being turned on?]

For some reason, every radio I place in the Geck is off when I load into the game, despite me using the "StartON" variants of the radios. I've even tried ticking the "on by default" box in the reference window, which the base game radios do not use, and that didn't work either. Am I missing something incredibly obvious here? It's not the biggest issue in the world, but it does mess with the ambience a bit.

[Making a static weapon for an armor mesh]

How familiar are you with making armor and rigging things in Blender?

 

The first thing you need to do is make a copy of your nif. Edit your nif copy with NifSkope and remove all of the weapon-y stuff. Get rid of the collision, get rid of all of the various weapon nodes, etc. If it's not part of the weapon mesh itself, get rid of it.

 

Now load up your armor mesh in Blender, and then import your stripped down copy of your nif, making sure to set the import options in Blender so that it will not import animations.

 

It's probably a good idea to join all of the bits of your weapon into a single object in Blender. This will make moving the weapon around easier and will also make the rigging easier. Rotate and move the weapon around until you get it where you want it.

 

Now you need to rig the weapon to the armor's armature (skeleton). Parent the weapon to the armature. You don't want your weapon to bend and deform with the armature, or that is going to look funny, so figure out where the weapon will attach to the armor. If you are attaching it to the back or the chest you'll probably want to use one of the spine bones. Go into weight painting, select the bone you want to attach the weapon to, press F to select face mode, A to select all, set the weight paint value to 1, and press shift-K to assign that value to all vertices.

 

Go back to object mode, select all, and export. Make sure you get the export options correct.

 

Go into NifSkope and fix the shader flags for your weapon and armor, because Blender never sets those correctly for armor.

 

Look up tutorials on making armor for FO3 or FNV if you have never done rigging or made armors before (or clothing or bodies or creature skins, it's all the same thing as far as the game engine is concerned).

There we go, it worked! It's been awhile since I was first trying so I don't know exactly what I was messing up, but I think I was screwing up the parenting. Thanks!

[Making a static weapon for an armor mesh]

That is the first thing I tried, and it does not seem to work.

[Making a static weapon for an armor mesh]

I'm trying to make a static version of a NIF-Bashed gun I made for use in a custom armor for a quest mod character. Despite being very familiar with NifSkope and good enough with Blender to make the regular, usable gun, I am apparently not intelligent enough to figure out how to turn that into a static variant that'll actually show up in an armor mesh. Any help?

[Roughin' It Bedroll Kit indoors]

It was!