DixiePig

Q1: Typically I import the body I want into blender, model the armor around it, and delete all but the exposed faces. I then export it like any other armor part. If you just want the whole body in there, it's easiest to just copy over the branch in Nifskope from the body.nif. Q2. I think that head is for the *_1 body. There should be a head.nif that fits the *_0 body; try one of the beggar NPCs. Q3. For the *_0 and *_1 meshes to interpolate correctly, I can think of 2 things you'll need to check: That vertex order is maintained (as you say, no adding or deleting of vertices). I have personally found that the best way to ensure this is to model one version first, and then model the second version as a shape key of the first one, so even deleting vertices will not cause a difference in vertex order. The branches in nifskope should have identical names. It may be that other details may also need to be identical so you may want to compare them for differences.Edit: Also, thanks for posting this. Your work is really great. Keep posting whatever issues you come across, if you need any in-depth answers I'd be happy to help. Sorry I haven't gone into much detail here; I don't currently have access to my PC.

How I make a basic diffuse texture: First thing you need to do: UV wrap your model. Next, export the UV map to a .png and load it up in photoshop/GIMP/whatever you like to use. Next: Base colors. Choose a color palette. Remember: Not too bright, and not too saturated.make a new layer and paint where you would like the base colors to be (I like to save time by assigning colored diffuse materials to mesh faces in blender and baking out a diffuse color map). Next: Ambient Occlusion map, and Cavity map. The AO map is mostly white, and gets darker in crevices. The less exposed an area, the darker. AO is great for making the form of your model read clearly. It can also be used to control where dirt or corrosion occur.The cavity map is mostly black, and gets brighter at sharp corners. Great for controlling where wear, scratches, fraying etc. occur.You'll use these two textures to make blending masks to control details like dirt, scratches, rough edges, etc.You can create these textures by baking them in blender.Place a copy of your AO map in a layer above the color map, and set the blend mode to "multiply". Adjust the strength to your preference.place a copy of your Cavity map in a layer about that and set the blend mode to "screen". Adjust strength to your preference.Now you should start to see your textures taking on a form to complement the mesh.Next: texture photos. hit up CGTextures and browse for some textural detail you like the look of.Wood grain photos are good for wood, but for metal you want something with some even, subtle roughness like concrete photos.You'll need a greyscale noise texture. Never use gausian or perlin noise (clouds filter). Use a picture of snow or something instead.Small scratches such as on wood or metal are sometimes easier to paint by hand.You'll want some dirt and rust for the crevices. Even if you want to make a clean dagger, the important thing is that it mustn't look sterile, so always have just a little bit.Next: blending. The simplest way is to desaturate your texture photo and give it an overlay blend over your color. Constrain its effect to the areas you want using masking, or something like photoshop's "blend if" feature.Once you're more comfortable with blending modes, you may want to do something more complex, like, for example, using the wood grain texture to blend between two colors.Next: weathering Weathering will make your textures actually good.Create a dirt texture: choose a dirt color, and mix it with a dirty/rusty photo. Place it over your other layers with a normal blend mode.create a dirt map by mixing your noise texture and an inverted copy of your AO texture. the dirt map is a mask to the dirt texture: The whiter the dirtmap, the dirtier that part of the texture. How you mix is up to you; if you want it to be very dirty then use a screen blend to make the dirt go beyond your crevices. A Multiply blend will make the dirt occupy less than 100% of the crevices. You may want to mix a couple of noise textures to do both.you can fine-tune the influence of your dirt map by using a color-curves adjustment.Copy the dirtmap into the dirt texture's layer mask. Dirt done.For wear you want to do a similar thing with the cavity map and noise textures to make a wear-map. Often it's enough to simply screen-blend the wear map over the other layers.For scratches it's the same: mix the Cavity map, noise maps, and your scratches texture.There are many more things you can do to make your texture look good. I recommend you seek out materials in real life and study them, and think about how you can emulate them. Most materials have noisy variation in hue. Many metals have brightness variation in the shape of splashes. In most cases the principle is the same: use overlay, multiply and screen to blend in the photos, or use the photos to mask other textures.

Update: Mod is complete! Even supports Bodyslide. I had to remodel the mesh to fit the CBBE body in blender. Enjoy: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/8233/?

The workflow I've been advised on uses Caliente's Outfit Studio (A utility bundled with bodyslide) Which imports an .obj and can copy bone weights from the CBBE body, then export a .nif. it also has some painting tools for touching up on bone weights. Ideally I would weight paint in blender, but for the moment this workflow works very well. It's far better than using blender 2.49 for nif import and export. I have been having trouble with the specular+gloss map and have discovered that an experimental .dds photoshop plugin from intel is required to view and save *_s.dds maps correctly. So unfortunately at this stage I can't eliminate photoshop entirely, but I can have it used only as an exporter to .dds.

Update: Progress. http://i.imgur.com/x3a25Ut.png http://i.imgur.com/x3a25Ut.png So I looked at the histograms for a few vanilla specular maps. For some reason it seems that the red and green values are never below 50%, and the blue channel never goes under 75%. This is a little strange, as they're only using half the range. Maybe it has something to do with the shader calculations? Anyway, shifting the range of my channels to match has produced working results, as seen above. It's still not behaving like I want it to, for example the specular power on the leather parts is very high and I don't know how to change it. My plan is to do a couple experiments to see just exactly what each channel is doing. If someone has already made a guide, please link it me, that would save me a bit of effort.

Update: SUCCESS http://i.imgur.com/89wxyO1.png http://i.imgur.com/X5uwLhH.png Next I'll be adding the body parts and boots. I have to say I'm very impressed with Caliente's Outfit Studio. I used to have to use the ancient blender v2.49 for it's .nif export scripts. The workflow was awful. This is fantastic news for the tutorial project; this will be much easier to learn. The textures here have DXT1 compression. I understand that fallout 4 uses something else. If anyone knows how to get that working I'd love to hear about it. Also, as you can see in these screenshots there are some strange shader artifacts that look kinda like normal map errors (seen here as black spots on the hip bones and weird behavior around the inner calves). I think my normal map is fine (excepting the thing about the compression method) but I'm suspicious of the specular map. According to this, the reflectiveness, specularity, and sub-surface scattering are separated into the red, green, and blue channels respectively. However, looking at the Mister Handy texture showed that the blue (SSS) channel was uniformly light-gray. Since metals should have zero sub-surface scattering, this is a little confusing. If anyone knows anything about how this works I would love some help. Once I grasp how this works, I can make a tool for the node-texturing system to bake out these channels in one easy step which will be great for the tutorial. Thanks again everyone for taking an interest. We're looking at an alpha release very soon.

As has been said before, save your 2.7x mesh with the "legacy mesh format" box ticked - I like to save as a separate file because if you have any ngons you haven't noticed they will be deleted. Niftools recomends working in the latest blender and using 2.49 to export. So do I (at least until niftools supports the current blender version). I thought that this would be the one thing that 2.49 has but 2.7x doesn't, but in fact 2.7x has bone weight copy and it's better. Here's how to do it: Mesh A is your custom mesh.Mesh B is the mesh with the bone weights you want to transfer to you custom meshSelect mesh B, then mesh A. This will make mesh A your active mesh.Change from "Object Mode" to "Weight Paint Mode"In the tool menu (hotkey T) click "Transfer Weights"Set "Source Layer" to "All layers".Set "Mix mode" to "Replace"Done.There are also many options for blending between multiple source meshes and other helpful features.

Update: Nifskope http://i.imgur.com/cqcTvma.png So it seems that nifSkope partially supports FO4 now. Excellent. However, my grasp of .nif files isn't great. I've spent some time with it and so far I still haven't been able to get anything into blender. Looking around the niftools forums, I'm not sure that anyone has done this yet. To get the jumpsuit into the game I need to reshape the mesh to match up with the vanilla neck and hands, and skin it to the vanilla skeleton. To do this, I need that vanilla body mesh. This isn't my area of expertise so if anyone has had success in this area, I'd love some help. As it is, I may not be able to continue until someone posts some explicit instructions, but I'd rather not keep you all waiting. Another thing: If I can get this out before the GECK, it will have to be a replacer. What vanilla outfit should I replace? I'd prefer to avoid common items like the vault jumpsuit. I've been enjoying the game a lot but taking it slow so I don't know the full range of options I have. Cheers for the encouragement.

Blender 2.49 is the only version of blender compatible with the nif import/export scripts for blender, which is a crime since we're now up to blender 2.76. If you're using 3DSMax you don't need to worry about that.

Leading up to Fallout 4 I've been working on a custom outfit. All the modelling and texturing is done, so now I'm just waiting on the import/export tools so I can rig it and put it in the game. While I wait, I hope to create armor addons for it. http://i.imgur.com/IfFai1g.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sCtuNjB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/1AD00Pq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/bykmR4x.jpg Made in Blender. It has 10343 triangles. I expect that the proportions will have to be modified to fit the vanilla skeleton. With this project I wanted to see if I could eliminate photoshop from my work flow. All the textures were created using blender's node system, and I have to say I'm very impressed with what it can do. When this mod is published I will include the source files for anyone who is interested to see how it works, and I am happy to answer any questions about the process. I'd also appreciate any comments and criticisms on the design/implementation so far. Also, if anyone knows anyone who's working on viewing, importing and exporting the new .nifs I'd like to get in touch.

The stages are as follows: For the mesh: -Make a mesh -UV unwrap the lowpoly mesh -export to .nif using blender2.49 and legacy save format + niftools plugin -use nifscope to make it compatible with FONV, assign textures, shaders, etc. -save in your folder in Data/Meshes I suppose in this case you'll be replacing a vanilla mesh / texture so you'll save the .nif file to a filepath corresponding to the path of the beer bottle in the .bsa files. And since you're making a mesh for the sake of learning you probably don't need to bother with lowpoly/highpoly normal map baking, or textures at all: you can just UV unwrap it to match the vanilla texture. I realise this doesn't tell you many useful specifics. Feel free to ask about anything you don't know/can't find tutorials on.

Ctrl-B is the chamfering (bevel) tool. Alternatively there's a bevel modifier that can bevel everything over a certain angle, or lets you mark out specific edges by canging their bevel weight (select edge, hit spacebar and type bevel to change bevel weight). I prefer this method over using the bevel tool because it makes it easier to edit or adjust afterward.

Hi, I don't recognise your specific problem but in the past I found that a UV map would not be exported UNLESS the blender object has a material with a texture assigned. Hope that helps!