CenterWing

I haven't used mods in a long time and I guess I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Help? Vortex is the new manager right?

So, I'm having trouble with the Body Slider mod. I'm at step 2: "Under the "Supported Tools" drop down at the top of NMM, configurate/launch BodySlide and always run it from there." When I get to support tools it wants me to "select the folder where the BS executable is located" What does that mean?

Erm... how? I can't seem to find it.

Is the GECK out yet?

The most recent thing I heard is that it's in open beta. That was from late April. What's the current status?

I remember this thought! In the beginning the Maya tutorials on their website are actually good enough for the basics. Idk if they tell you things like you don't have mental ray without downloading the Service Pack, or even you have to point Maya to the plugin, then activate the plugin, then select the render engine...Mental Ray is nVidia's iRay really. Either way, it's only complicated cause it's new to you. It's like the inverse of a new gf when even her selfishness is endearing. Then after a few months, you wonder if she's worth the trouble just to be in a queue for a ride. With stuff that's actually valuable, the longer you interact with it, the better it gets, unlike the former. Yeah, I'm figuring things out. Right now I'm just playing around and looking at videos. On that note, what's a tri face? Apparently it's something bad but I don't know why.

ok so apparently maya is alot more complicated than I thought, I don't understand how to open up projects.

Firstly, get Nifskope you'll need it later. This is the program to work with Fallout 4's 3d models. Fallout 4 creates on object on the screen from quite a lot of different things but most of them are lighting information for the space they're in etc. There are only really three things that are used for the object itself. A mesh, stored as a .nif file, which is the 3d shape of the object including animation information, the polygons and instructions about how any textures should be stretched around its surface to fit. The material, stored as a .bgsm or .bgem file, which provides the information about how the object should visually appear and interact with light, etc. The .nif includes instructions about which material the item should use. The textures, which are 2 dimensional art that gets "painted" over the surface of the model. The main texture is the diffuse, which provides a colour map of what colour each piece should be. However there are many more types of textures that can be used. The material file says which textures the object should use and any special details about how they're applied. An .obj file hasn't got anything to do with Fallout 4, it's just a 3d model format which can be read by multiple programs so it's a good way of moving information from one program to another. P.S. Materials are something new in Fallout 4, back in Skyrim there was just the Mesh and the Textures. Ok, here's another question I think you are able to answer. How do I move Maya from my C drive to my D drive? It's been annoying me for over a day now. Despite the fact that I set it up in my D drive everything from the projects to the preferences goes in the C drive. The C drive is far smaller than the D so my reasons are self explanatory. I've already tried to get help on the autodesk forums but haven't gotten any solutions. :/ In my experience, you can't. Trying to change installation location only moves a small part of the installation, the rest is still put on C drive. It's not just Maya, I've run into that with every Autodesk program I have ever installed. ok... any suggestions then? My C: has 63.9 GB of space compared to my D:'s 425. Well, I think making projects in the D: drive helps... I don't know what will happen to my preferences though...

Firstly, get Nifskope you'll need it later. This is the program to work with Fallout 4's 3d models. Fallout 4 creates on object on the screen from quite a lot of different things but most of them are lighting information for the space they're in etc. There are only really three things that are used for the object itself. A mesh, stored as a .nif file, which is the 3d shape of the object including animation information, the polygons and instructions about how any textures should be stretched around its surface to fit. The material, stored as a .bgsm or .bgem file, which provides the information about how the object should visually appear and interact with light, etc. The .nif includes instructions about which material the item should use. The textures, which are 2 dimensional art that gets "painted" over the surface of the model. The main texture is the diffuse, which provides a colour map of what colour each piece should be. However there are many more types of textures that can be used. The material file says which textures the object should use and any special details about how they're applied. An .obj file hasn't got anything to do with Fallout 4, it's just a 3d model format which can be read by multiple programs so it's a good way of moving information from one program to another. P.S. Materials are something new in Fallout 4, back in Skyrim there was just the Mesh and the Textures. Ok, here's another question I think you are able to answer. How do I move Maya from my C drive to my D drive? It's been annoying me for over a day now. Despite the fact that I set it up in my D drive everything from the projects to the preferences goes in the C drive. The C drive is far smaller than the D so my reasons are self explanatory. I've already tried to get help on the autodesk forums but haven't gotten any solutions. :/ In my experience, you can't. Trying to change installation location only moves a small part of the installation, the rest is still put on C drive. It's not just Maya, I've run into that with every Autodesk program I have ever installed. ok... any suggestions then? My C: has 63.9 GB of space compared to my D:'s 425.

Firstly, get Nifskope you'll need it later. This is the program to work with Fallout 4's 3d models. Fallout 4 creates on object on the screen from quite a lot of different things but most of them are lighting information for the space they're in etc. There are only really three things that are used for the object itself. A mesh, stored as a .nif file, which is the 3d shape of the object including animation information, the polygons and instructions about how any textures should be stretched around its surface to fit. The material, stored as a .bgsm or .bgem file, which provides the information about how the object should visually appear and interact with light, etc. The .nif includes instructions about which material the item should use. The textures, which are 2 dimensional art that gets "painted" over the surface of the model. The main texture is the diffuse, which provides a colour map of what colour each piece should be. However there are many more types of textures that can be used. The material file says which textures the object should use and any special details about how they're applied. An .obj file hasn't got anything to do with Fallout 4, it's just a 3d model format which can be read by multiple programs so it's a good way of moving information from one program to another. P.S. Materials are something new in Fallout 4, back in Skyrim there was just the Mesh and the Textures. Ok, here's another question I think you are able to answer. How do I move Maya from my C drive to my D drive? It's been annoying me for over a day now. Despite the fact that I set it up in my D drive everything from the projects to the preferences goes in the C drive. The C drive is far smaller than the D so my reasons are self explanatory. I've already tried to get help on the autodesk forums but haven't gotten any solutions. :/

I'm not sure I'm sorry, but just wanted to offer a tip that may help. If you have Nifskope, you can export FO4 meshes in the .obj format which most 3d programs can load if you want to use in game assets for comparison. Just be aware that exporting is very easy right now, importing is extremely difficult. Your exported copy won't have the collisions, navmesh, physics and other game unique properties if you're trying to put them back in the game again to replace the original. I don't have Nifskope, I don't know what meshes are, nor .obj. I'm just getting into the very basics of 3D design now. ;^^

I'm waiting for the GECK too before I do anything, for now I'm going to try and make 3D objects. On that note how big are the units in FO4?

I'm fallowing the video, but I'm having trouble setting up autodesk maya NVM, I got it working

Could you possibly provide a link to a video that explains it? I have a hard time learning by reading.

I'm not familiar with search indexes, what is it?

To add to this: Don't be afraid to give up on your current path and try a different approach if it just isn't working out. As Reneer said, there's generally many ways to go about solving a problem, and sometimes you stubbornly beat your face against one, when really you should be taking a step back and rethinking things. Relatedly, scrapping the whole thing and going back to redo the entire process the same way you did last time can help you figure out where you're going wrong and why it wouldn't do what you wanted before. Don't fall into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy. Never think of starting over as having wasted all the hours you spent on the first attempt, because while it didn't end up working out, you did learn some things along the way (either how to, or how not to do something are both important!). thanks all for the advice

FO4Edit (sometimes known as xEdit since the same program is used for many other titles) is a third party tool which decodes .esp and .esm files created by the GECK by interpreting the hexadecimal codes inside into a more human readable format and allows the user to edit them. While the Creation Kit is a much more user friendly piece of software with an advanced GUI, it suffers from the same problem as most user friendly pieces of software in that it makes assumptions about what the user wants. This frequently results in minor problems with the mods created through Creation Kit, such as dirty edits (although I'm led to believe that this can mostly be avoided in Creation Kit by following the correct workflow). xEdit however does exactly what you tell it to do, thus following the Garbage In, Garbage Out principle. It won't fix your mistakes, it won't make things easy on you, but it just does what you tell it to. For an inexperienced user this can potentially cause problems and occasionally causes people to think of xEdit and the mods created using it with an unfair level of suspicion. Unlike the Creation Kit however it will never cause problems without the user making a mistake, thus it is actually used by most authors to repair mistakes caused by the Creation Kit. Most modders will develop the more complicated content in Creation Kit, taking advantage of the easier implementation and then use xEdit to "clean" the mods before releasing them to the public. At present, the FO4Edit program is not able to interpret all the records in an .esp or .esm file. It can only recognize the ones that are unchanged from Skyrim or which have been identified by users through a process of trial and error. As such some records will display as "unknown" or just show hexadecimal code. These can still be edited, but of course this is going to be a matter of trial and error in order to get any results. Once the Creation Kit has been released though, FO4Edit will likely be improved and rereleased as it will be much easier to discover what each part of the .esp and .esm files does when you have access to the Creation Kit. thanks all for the advice

Yeah it's going to be a big effort, but that's not to say that you won't get results. Fallout uses a high level object oriented programming language called Papyrus that runs in game to handle complicated events for quests, items in game, that sort of thing. You can write 'scripts' in Papyrus that are called based upon in game events, such as a character dying, activating an object, etc. The Creation Kit usually supplies some sort of developer environment for Papyrus, but there are third party tools as well. Scripts can be attached through FO4Edit without the creation kit being required. The Papyrus functionality is a little limited, because Bethesda frequently cheats a little by handling some of their things inside the game engine, so Papyrus is an incomplete tool. However a 3rd party tool, known as F4SE (Fallout 4 Script Extender) is in development which extends this programming language. This new tool is based off of the SKSE or Skyrim script extender and by the same team. Back in Skyrim days it allowed scripts to do a whole lot more. Papyrus for Fallout is a little more advanced than it was for Skyrim, but the exact details aren't known yet as the documentation has not been fully released. You can find more information by looking at the Creation Kit Wiki, a Tutorial, the Caprica Papyrus Compiler for Fallout 4 and the Champollion Papyrus Decompiler for Fallout 4. So that's what the script extender does huh? And I'll have to look at Papyrus too. Then there's FO4Edit, I'm not familiar with that, isn't it like the GECK?

Nice to know I'm biting off more than I can chew with this... I don't even know what programming language I'm supposed to use.

Well that's the thing, I just see thing wrong or have ideas. I'd like to learn everything I'd need for a given idea. Although I was thinking about starting 3D modelling first, then move onto other areas when the GECK comes out.

I hope I'm posting this in the right section. I just got on the Forum today, and I'm planing on making mods for Fo4, I have experience in the field of programming, but I'm still lost when it comes to something like this. I was wondering if I could ask questions and receive advice about how to begin.

Hi, I'd say my name but it's already up. I joined cause I wanted to learn how to/upload mods for Fallout 4. I thought about using the request sub-forum but I decided this would be better for me. I've already looked at the tutorial page for modding, but it's hard to understand: usually I learn by asking direct questions. On that note, I'd prefer it if someone took me on as an "apprentice" or something along those lines. So, again hi. I hope I'm not breaking any rules in that phone book of a T&S agreement that I'm not confidant I memorized fully... good thing I bookmarked it.