marthgun

i cant wait to play your mod! looks good!

the interiors look amazing, i am hoping work is going strong on this, cant wait!

from what I gathered WB purchased the rights to tolkiens work, which means they own how it can be portrayed and adapted. They would naturally be against MERP b/c it was attempting to follow perfectly that which they have purchased. Its like buying a floor plan from an architect with exclusivity rights only to watch the mason guild build the same thing with community labor. WB made a substantial investment into LOTR and anything that would or could harm their investment would be enemy no. 1. aside from that, WB as an entity probably doesn't care or gave much thought to this project. It was probably picked up by thier lawyers and copyright department. Both sides have a case, WB can't let someone use for free what they paid, probably millions for and they can't isolate a potential market for their product. I had thought that MERP would take creative license, which is why I joined initially. When I found out they were sticking to the lore verbatim I became a little weary of how the copyright owners may do if they found out. Unfortunately for MERP its a mega conglomerate that owns the rights. worst case scenario imo. at best MERP will be given the green light but that may take years of battling, most likely they'll want some form of egregious compensation. At the end of the day its MERP's fault for taking someone else's work w/o permission but it probably would've ended the same since WB owns the rights or w/e even if they had taken serious creative license. I wouldn't look for it to be started up anytime soon

I was just at the dev forum, where things are being kept tight lipped. I did write a few quest lines for them but at the time they weren't far enough along to yay or nay. I come back and all hell had broken loose. i think you updated everyone as far as its known outside their immediate circle. tbh it looks bad, but merp is playing along. Personally I would ignore them and keep the project moving, but its not my decision. Their argument is based on fair use and idk enough about it, if they were confident they could easily push forward and just accept the inevitable lawsuit. However, when I was there the main aim was to represent tolkien as close as possible, so much so that some of my quests were axed in the outline stages. Part of why I stopped for a bit was not just b/c they weren't ready for quests but b/c their lore demands were too strict. Ultimately that is probably why they haven't pushed forward, b/c its premise is to represent LOTR faithfully w/o any artistic license. B/c of this I doubt they will win any form of petition unless they hand over all of their work to WB. Its a stale mate that probably won't be resolved.

I traveled to a far away land to discover the secrets of a black cube and I have recently returned, I see that nifskope was just updated, I am using 3dsmax, nifskope and ck all fully updated. Last time I was here there were substantial problems with some modding aspects related to custom meshes, animation, exporting from 3d prog to nifskope then importing to ck, and quest mods. Much of the modding was difficult and time consuming even for some of the better modders, I am wondering how much was fixed and especially how much easier it now is relating to my setup. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

i just installed skyre, so i'll probably get dawnguard when its one dollar or free

I mostly made very detailed buildings, whole buildings. But then i abandoned it for the time being because of how much time it would take to tear them apart. I did attempt Sakata Gintoki's Robe and underclothes, an anime character. I wanted the covering robe to move and ripple while the character walked. collision was never an issue for me, you can make an 'invisible' container around other parts you dont want it to collide with or take your time and do some tweaks in exporting/nifskope. but afaik, dynamic meshes cannot be imported/exported from the 3d engine to ck/engine. it just isn't supported or simply doesn't work like that, or i'd like to hear if you got convex shapes in game or ck to work. what i was told/read, was that you had to create an animation of the ripple/moving and then import it correctly. the amount of labor it would take for a noob like me to pull that off was a joke.

Thanks for that insight David, When Skyrim came out i bought it and just wanted to start making a big mod for the first year so i could wait on all the really great quest mods. i was doing, what i thought were supposed to be very simple things, but as I saw oblivion modders struggle with the same issues i had, I got disheartened. Coming back after a few months, and finding out not much has changed, is a little frustrating.

yes, i was trying to do it the easy way, as i've never ran NMM before with any other game. I usually just manually d/l and install. but i thought it would be easier. guess not :(

i am now premium

So, i began downloading mods with Nexus Mod Manager. I have a 180kb/s download speed, which is pretty terrible, i want to get the Monsters Mod, so it takes about 1 hour for me to download. The first time I tried to download this mod, it stopped at 71%. So I push the PLAY button to resume it; NMM say it start to resume, but no, it lies, it just starts it over. OK np bro, i'll wait. it stops again at 71% So now im frustrated, so i push the Cancel button and the Delete button to remove it from the screen. I then go back to the Nexus and click the download button on the actual mod page. It then loads up and it say: resuming download, and say 71% and it just sits there, saying nothing, except resuming download. however, it is actually downlaoding the file FROM SCRATCH, from 0%. so i pause and then hit play button again, it now shows the correct percentage, and it now gets past the 71% mark after another hour. except this time it decides to stop at 99%. ..... ..... ... . . Any help would be greatly appreciated tl;dr version: NMM doesn't resume downloads, no matter if you try to resume it or delete the file and re-download it. i dont want to keep tying up my slow-ass internet on a gamble. help me.

i got custom meshes in a few months ago, you just need to use nifskope and some plugins what sucks about custom meshes is the texturing. you have to use 1 map per mesh. which either means a lot of fine texturing skills or breaking your buildings into pieces. and nifskope isnt optimized yet for skyrim apparently. so it makes transferring to the ck more difficult

gimp is like photoshop, except its free, and that is used exclusively for texture maps. I didn't even know you could edit meshes in nifskope, that sounds very difficult. When its actually very easy to do in blender. With blender, its just about knowing the program, you can use a few youtube videos that take you through how to model various objects, its very, very easy once you get the hang of it. importing them is the frustrating part. i'd go back to blender and start with some tutorials if I were you, i don't if those edits will even hold over in nifskope.

I had half a mesh completed, and I successfully imported it into the ck, so i figured I would finish the mesh and then use the same method. except it didn't work. Where o where did i go wrong? 1) Using 3ds max, I imported the skeleton.nif, then imported and used the Malebody_0.nif as a template and made a mesh around it, 2) I then imported beggars clothing torsom_0.nif into 3ds and took its SKIN modifier and pasted onto my clothing mesh. 3) I exported using the prescribed method into a .nif file. 4) I opened up 3 windows in the CK, the first for my CUSTOM mesh, the second for the MALEBODY nif, the third for the TORSOM_0.NIF 5) I had two NiTriShapes and a host of NiNodes for the skeleton pop up, the two Trishapes are for the body and for my custom clothing mesh. 6) I copied the bslightingshaderproperties from malebody_0.nif in nifskope, and then replaced it with the body I imported into NS (nifskope) 7) I then copied the bslightingshaderproperties from torsom_0.nif and replaced it with my custom mesh, **because I read the bslight props are broken when exported. 8) I saved a copy into the beggarclothes dir, under the correct data<mesh path, as it is correct in nifskope. 9) loaded into ck and it brings up a red warning w/ exclamation mark and nothing else shows up. This is exactly the method I used for the first successful import, except I accidently used the female torso in 3ds to steal its skin modifier. Other than that, its the same thing. Before when I had the red exclamation mark, it was due to the textures being pathed incorrectly. This time however, i used both the torso.dds and torso_n.dds, as there are only two mapped initially in the beggar outfit, and I also used my own texture map and my own normal. I have tweaked every value I can think of that is used to troubleshoot, ive toggled the vertex colors off, on both the body and custom mesh and alternated...nothing. I changed the bs num uv sets to 4097...nothing. I changed the num of vertices to match the original meshes, body and beggars...nothing. I'm very lost. hlep and thank you.

I'm an amateur writer and i've never seen anyone volunteer to be an editor :wacko: i wouldn't pass this up if I had need of it, the best writers are only as good as their editors :tongue:

ok thanks, i've read and watched all those tutorials, the most important one on the list is the exporting animation to havok, which is a video set to private. from what I gathered so far, i need the havok tools, which are free from havok website. But so far, only a few, very knowledgable people have been successful and they haven't divulged all their secrets. i messed up using barkeep torso_0.nif, because apparently their isn't any vanilla actor that uses that mesh, from what i gathered in the ck. so i'll have to use another model and start over from scratch, :wallbash:

Hello, I've been making Gintoki's outfit from Gintama, and I've almost got the mesh completed, http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/1884/gintokicloth.jpg I've scoured the interwebs for any type of tutorial on how to import completely custom clothing meshes into the game, I did use the barkeep outfit as a template, which is what I'm going to use in nifskope. but one of the issues I have is that I want a dynamic mesh for the robe, I want it to move when the player walks, blow in the wind, etc. I have no clue how I would do that, its been suggested that I could make an animation for it using the skeleton, but that seems like it would take forever to get all the angles right. Is there any tutorials or help that I could get, youtube and google have yielded very little on this, i think because most custom clothes and armor are edits, and since I'm using cloth modifier in 3ds max, i want to keep it as I export it over, otherwise it won't be right. Any advice is appreciated!

Yet less flexible. 3ds max is made to be customized. Hotkeys are customizable. Max's layout is perfect. While learning it is usefull to use all 4 windows, whilst a more experienced only works in 1 window. Cheers, Matth i agree with the first point, but because its less flexible than 3ds, it makes it more interactive, so you have to think outside the box, which is good for modelling, i just found that I had a lot more control but that it took more time and effort. The second point is true, but is annoying you can't use the Tab button for a hotkey. idk if there is a plugin, but it just isn't set up, there isn't even an initial hotkey to change from create mode to modify mode. I immediately found the x button to be worthless and annoying, a whole 30 minutes to figure out why my transform thing was changed lol. anyways, its the modify mode now I only use 1 window, unless i have to be exact, but the main issue I have w/ Max's layout is that the units are confusing and you can't really make the same box on the same spot twice. they have the snap toggles, but they just aren't as simple. In fact, that's my biggest beef, it just isn't as simple, I'm sure I'll come to be a rabid fan boy though, I'm already starting to like some things more.

i started on blender, and then switched to 3ds max because i heard that blender had problems with uv mapping and rendering and just wasn't as advanced. with that said, on just the modelling side, like making shapes, blender destroys 3ds, its much easier to use, the hotkeys make sense and the layout is good. as far as texturing, 3ds is far more advanced. In the short term, blender is great, in the long term when you get more advanced, I'd say hands down 3ds. but im just learning too, i've heard that all the programs will work well for low poly game stuff

So, I have a .3ds file of a sword that had been meshed and textured. I imported it into nifskope, so that i could save it as a .nif file. I removed all the textures from it. It is much like the aakvari katana, so i thought to follow along here : so that i could keep the skeleton and animations and what not. as soon as I try to save it anywhere it says: http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/8949/wrongblock.png so ok whateva, i then go to 3ds and import, it says http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/9295/3dstroll.png and doesn't import. If i just open the .3ds file in 3ds max, it won't show any textures and the sword is completely whited. When i try to apply the skin wrap modifier, it says there is no data from the aakvari sword, even though i can see the textures on the aakvari sword, i know it was imported in. So i can only assume there is something wrong with the original woodsword file. Without the skin data I can't make it work in nifskope, apparently i need it, and then i can revert back the original textures.

any other suggestions would be good too, especially on nifskope. my brain has taken in too much info trying to learn the CK, then 3ds, then nifskope all in the last week.

:woot: wow those voice actors are good :dance:

im no expert, but if you mean taking Skyrim vanilla files and using them in Skyrim mods, then I don't think that's a problem at all. obviously you can't say you modelled them and congratulate yourself, but a lot of mods on here are edits. I'm editing a few of the shack walls here in a bit.

Ok, thank you very much, the first 2 I will take care of. I take it I do need textures for it to properly render in the CK, as well as the game. I imported the .nif from 3ds, then saved it again inside nifskope. that's why the file names are different.

i was trying to help the merp project back in winter, because i'm a writer, but they were really distant and they wanted to keep the lore very pure, not that any of that was a bad thing, I just started my own project, but last i was there it looked like they had a long way to go. but everything on the modelling and texturing end looked amazing