SickleYield

Yep. I've got characters simultaneously in the Thieves' Guild, Fighters' Guild, Mages' Guild, Morag Tong, and House Telvanni with no negative consequences. It's not technically possible to join more than one Great House. The only thing with the others is that you want to wait until after you've got Sottilde's code book in the Fighter's Guild before you join the Thieves, otherwise it breaks that quest. EDIT: I forgot to say. The only thing that carries serious penalties to people interacting with you is if you become a vampire or werewolf in the unmodded game (and with most mods, honestly). Vampires can use the Masque of Clavicus Vile to pass for human, if you can find and get hold of it. I've never done the werewolf thing so I'm not sure if people can tell you're one untransformed or not.

Yeah, it's got to be the games themselves. Last month I bought Disciples II from gog.com and it allows alt-tab switching (the game does pause, but it is still there when I go back to it). Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Morrowind all crash when I alt+tab out of them and back. It's a nice feature when I want to do something else at the same time as I render in DAZ Studio - on a multicore CPU with affinities set up in the task manager it's possible to play with good framerate and still render at a decent speed for most scenes.

There's this.

I don't use them. Took me two playthroughs to figure out how to avoid getting stuck with Prior Maborel's Paint Horse for the whole game. :p

Fantasy Figures (and a jillion clothing/armor mods for it) Robert's Male Body (ditto) Midas Magic: Spells of Aurum After that in terms of favorites I've got a bunch of great quest mods from this list.

Short answer: nope. Long answer: Oblivion uses the .nif file format, which no program exports by default. At present there are three programs for which NIF script import/export packages exist: Blender, Maya and 3ds Max. All are full modeling suites which you will have to spend time learning. Only Blender is free. The other two run from $200 to $300 last I checked, for a "student" version that can be used for noncommercial projects only (i.e. mods or other things you don't get money for). There are ugly workarounds you can use in order to model or texture in another program, but you will still have to have one of the three in order to export working nifs.

Blender and the GIMP are free modeling and texturing programs which can be learned to mastery level in a matter of a few short years, or months if you don't do anything else. (Ha ha.) Modeling and texturing is very addictive. Don't say I didn't warn you. :D If you don't know how to script with the Construction Set, learn. I regret that I never did this. Scripting gives life and interest to quests and events in a totally different way than new art assets do. (And as one who now makes my small living generating 3d art assets, I do not say that lightly.) There are a bunch of tutorials at the Construction Set Wiki and indeed a whole bunch on the Nexus, mostly by LHammonds, who is a lot more thorough than I was when I still modded. Read them. Then read them again. Don't try to do stuff while reading a tutorial through the first time. You will be sorry and your results will be buggy. Don't try to recruit people to help you on a project until you yourself have something to contribute other than giving orders. In fact, don't do it until you're good enough at something to turn down people who don't have what you're looking for. If you're going to do house mods, spend the time to do good clutter. If you're going to do quest mods, check your spelling and keep your exposition short and to the point. If you're going to do clothing, weapons and armor, learn to strip model, optimize your poly counts, and do a good UV map. Learning these things was actually what bumped me from modding to selling my work. Always check the readme for permissions before using somebody else's work in your own. I think that about covers it. :D

3ds Max and Maya are both supported by NIF script versions. They're not free, of course. That's Blender's major advantage vs. other full 3d suites.

No prob, let me try and do better. Ctrl+L only works if the part you're trying to select isn't merged. That is, if the leg has any verts merged to the turntable, the turntable will also be selected. P key will make a section into a separate mesh in blender. This will mean it will export as a separate submesh in the nif. If you want something to just be the same mesh in Blender (it then has to be on the same UV, btw), but separated for easier ctrl+L selection, press V or Y (you may need to experiment with what works best in the particular case). I can't imagine why alt right click wouldn't work, though. Are you holding down alt as you right click? Just pressing it once won't do it. Also, you may have to try it a few times to get the exact vert loop you want (twitch the mouse in the direction you want, vertical or horizontal).

Hallo! Myrmaad asked me to look in. I'm going to suggest a couple of things. If you're concerned about trying this, I suggest saving as a separate file first. It's always best to plan your mesh with the UV map in mind, but that's hard to do when you're starting out. First: Delete three of your outer "leg" supports. Looking at your model, you can probably select them with ctrl+L if you click on one vertex. Select the remaining fourth one the same way and look at the UV screen. Notice that you now see only this part of the mesh there to edit. When you press u and unwrap, you get something totally different from if you do that with everything selected at once. Treat your other pieces the same way. With any part that is completely identical to another part, like those knobs, delete all but one. You can look at them all at once again if you want to make sure everything fits onto one UV. Now UV map different parts of the mesh individually. Parts that you really want separated should be separated with seams - that is, I would suggest putting the seams at the edges of those supports, not at every corner as currently, and/or around the edge of the four square, flat, large sides. VERY IMPORTANT TIP: You an use alt+right click to select an edge loop. You'll see what I mean if you try this. This will make it easy for you to select a bunch of verts along an edge to make a seam. This works in the UV screen as well which is VERY useful. Try to think about the parts of the mesh that will need to be separate meshes for your exported NIF because they'll need different materials - the record, for instance. You can separate those by selecting them and pressing the P key. Remember, you can export as many separated submeshes as part of the nif as you want as long as they are all selected when you start the export script. I hope that's helpful. P, Ctrl+L and alt+right click were pretty huge for me when I learned them.

Mostly you'll need to have at least a couple of pieces broken up for the pipboyon/pipboyoff meshes (so that your outfit will display properly on NPCs and on the player). You can see these on the default meshes on the left arm starting at about the elbow. Otherwise those breaks happen for a few different reasons, but most often to do with the UV. NIFs can't have multiple UVs on one mesh bit, so you have to either fit everything on one texture map or have multiple submeshes for different textures. Sometimes it also happens because it allows accessories to be copied and pasted between meshes to give a new look to an existing outfit (something game makers will do, if not as often as modders). Consider, for example, the difference between the regular vault suit and Dad's vault suit (it's basically the shoes).

[OOC: What's that? Yet another person who didn't bother to read the rules before posting? :rolleyes: CW, are we going forward with this? I haven't seen anything up from the approved players for a while.]

Sure, drop me a line when you want to compare notes or if you have a question on something I might have done already. Probably a limited extent to which we can do that given we'll be using different modeling programs, but you never know. So far I don't actually have to do TK's hack with the positioning to get heads with tongue-slot accessories to show up properly in facegen (albeit the facegen still doesn't work on the custom heads). ATM I'm fighting with my first new idle anim, which for some reason (probably I copied a nitransformcontroller into the wrong place) rotates the dog tail 90 degrees before playing the anim.

I'll probably go ahead and offer the dog/wolf race option anyway since I've already got the tail, head and ears mostly set up (not the fangs yet, but that shouldn't be too hard). I've got a doglike head mesh that is functional in-game but won't work in facegen (that is, you move the sliders and nothing happens). I've been looking at TK's custom .egm/tri tutorial, but I doubt I'll be able to make it work. It requires a level of control I think may not be possible with Blender and its NIF scripts (i.e. export without changing vert order) and I know he's using a different 3d suite. I can't even get the setup of head placement he suggests to work properly, because NifSkope's placement units are different from Blender's (thus writing things down does not help). So what will probably happen will be some default-headed races that work in facegen ("demi" or "half" races) and some fully animal-headed races that don't. My main emphasis will be on the skeleton and the animations. Anyone will be free to use those for their own custom races once finished. As far as actual progress goes, at the moment I'm trying to get the meshes made for all the slots first so I can make sure they look good with the new animations. I currently have the dog ears and tail, scorp tail, and scorp palps. I need to finish the wings to have all my slots covered for the anims. Those will be a bit more time-consuming because I'll have to do the modeling from scratch and I want them to look somewhat accurate (old zoology textbook ftw). Once the first set of idles is done I'll probably start a real WIP thread, sorry for hijacking this one. ;)

Yep, I found the setting for displaying seconds on the timeline. ;) Good to know, I'll snag the combined resource asap.