dreamCloud

Ahh they weren't links they were just tutos I had saved on my online drive since I couldn't find them any more. Oblivion tutorials are being lost left, right, and center these days to dead internet Looks like one of them is still here on the Nexus tho, guess I couldn't find it because I was looking for the tutorial website itself not a mod page ha: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37209

Yeah I got you.

Oh? Nice! I'll download that and have a look through it over the next couple of days.

Awesome, glad one of those was the correct answer!

Sent via DM

Yeah it's all about the morph animations. You can still use your same mesh if you are committed to that, you'll just need to use option 4 and make the tri files for that. As for the neck moving like the vanilla neck, you need to parent it to the skeleton and then weight paint the neck part of the mesh to the neck bone, spine2, clavicle l, and clavicle r the same as the Vanilla head is done. One big downside of using the hair slot for your mesh is also that the hair slot defaults to only being weighted to the head bone (it's something a lot of hair modders complained about early on and their workarounds was to make helmets). I have a bunch of old tutorials I can dig up too if you really want to dive in.

Could be a few things wrong with it from flipped normals (if it's single sided mesh that causes backface culling and it won't show up in the game) to the rigging being off (sometimes that will send the mesh to/through the floor, commonly caused by not selecting it when you import the skeleton or vice versa) or even something wrong with the data block in the .nif file itself. Try checking those things first, if you're still struggling I can take a quick look at it for ya.

To get a proper custom head mesh into Oblivion you need to do one of four things: 1) Edit the vanilla head mesh in a way that does not interrupt the vertex order (CRITICAL). This can be done fairly easily in Blender 2.49b or 3DS Max 8/9 by pinning the vertices at the very bottom (the ones that line up with the neck) and then applying a shrinkwrap modifier to it so that it matches the geo of your custom head mesh and then cleaning things up by hand so everything sits right before exporting. 2) Edit the head06 head mesh the same way as 1. It's here on the Nexus and is also what was used by other people who did big race modifiers. It's basically a vanilla-ish head mesh but with way more geometry applied so you can sculpt it a bit. 3) Create a new head mesh using the Facegen tools that lines up very closely to a basic Facegen mesh. This takes forever, it's prone to errors, the software is extremely old, and it's expensive. Ironically though it's still being used in some current games. But it will give you the correct morphs for the game engine. For some reason I only have a 50/50 success rate using this software though. And then you'll have to probably edit it like option 1 anyways to get it to look right in the engine (especially around the eyes, man this tool has trouble with eyelid animations on anything not super exact to its base mesh lol). 4) Create a brand new head mesh (like you've already done) and then hand-make a tri file for it that includes ALL of the morphs that Oblivion engine expects. This may be the most reliable way for you with your experience, but it takes forever and you can easily mess things up (ask me how I knoooow lol).

Ah ok I sent them a DM. Hopefully they can point me in the right direction.

Thanks Andalay. I managed to extract (most of) the text from the corrupted files at least, but without the images that went with them I'm kind of treading water as the obscure references to the UI for 3DS Max 8 is... not great to navigate for someone who grew up on Blender. I did manage to at least get an animation working in 3DS Max itself, but can't figure out how to export it correctly based on that text alone. Keep getting errors. The only reason I was able to get that far was due to some old 3DS Max 8 videos from a class I found up on VEOH before that site dies (it's getting pulled down... we are losing soo much information recently ) Feels like I hit another dead end. I had created several particle systems in NifSkope based on that old 8 hour long Morrowind tutorial video still floating around (which is a suffering I do not wish on anyone) and tried to change the .nifs around to Oblivion's formats based on existing .nifs in the game. I ended up getting ctd after ctd and with no error messaging to tell me what went wrong I figured I'd try the 3DS Max route. Took a very long time to find a copy of 8 to work with the civ IV exporter which apparently is the only way to get working particle animations from it.

Was called "Oblivion 3DSMax Animation Tutorial" Used to be located at http://saidenstorm.googlepages.com/oblivion3dsmaxanimationtutorial But that page has been down forever and isn't on the Wayback Machine (it has 3 snapshots of a dead referral page 302 response at crawl time error). My local copy got corrupted and I really need the part on the particles set up for something I'm doing... although having the whole thing would be preferable as I can't remember all the setup steps for working in Max to get a proper export with the Civ4 tools anyways.

For vertex colors in Blender 2.49b you edit them in the mode dropdown and choose Vertex Paint. One thing about Oblivion is that it does not have support for Ambient Occlusion (shadow detail maps basically), which is one of the design holdovers from previous generation of game engines. Back then they used to bake the ambient occlusion/shadows into the texture maps themselves or use vertex shading. You can see a lot of good examples of this in the book "3D Game Textures - Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop" by Luke Ahearn (1st-3rd editions) which were published around that generation of games. Oblivion models use a bit of both. If you want to make a vanilla-esque object you have to take that into consideration. It's why a lot of models provided as Modder's Resources on this site often look really out of place in the engine; because they don't have shading details in the color/diffuse texture maps and don't have any vertex coloring to match the vanilla models. To get them or models you make yourself to look correct in the engine you've just got to add those details yourself. Also something to note: when exporting between Blender modern and 2.49b versions or from 3DS Max to Blender back and forth using a 3rd party format like .obj you will have your vertex paint data stripped and it will need to be painted back on.

Ah true enough, forgot about that. I've never done it, just remembered that you can. Just use the refid name you've given in the field for your script (the "player.moveto ReturnHomeMarker" example I gave).

Import the Morrowind NIF file into Blender 2.49b with the niftools scripts. Then export it to an Oblivion nif file. Since it's just book jackets, you can also just try redirecting existing Oblivion book NIFs to those textures using nifskope if the UV layout is similar enough. If you want the actual geometry from those files you can also copy and paste the block structure from the Morrowind nif over to an existing Oblivion book nif in nifskope, replacing the book's geometry. Make sure the texture paths are where you want them and save. Should be good to go either of those methods.

Easiest way is to put in an X-MarkerHeading marker and mark it as persistent and give it a name like "ReturnHomeMarker" or something like that. Then give the player an ability or spell that when used runs a simple script attached to the spell/ability that returns this line: player.moveto ReturnHomeMarker or player.moveto 012324123 (where the number is the reference ID of your ReturnHomeMarker) or you could even just move the player into the cell without a marker. It should place you nearby your door or at the very least the cell's origin (this is also why I like to put the entrance to my interiors near the cell origin just in case of bugs). You could even make the script fancy by detecting if the player is in combat before allowing the portal and returning a message like "Cannot teleport while in combat..." if so. Second easiest way is to have a holding cell and put a door there, can even make it a magic portal door or something and then give it a teleport attachment to another door in your player home, move that door out of reach of the player but move its heading marker into the house proper so they still port inside but can't activate your door that's out of the house to get out to where you ported from (unless you want to for some reason). Then on your script call you'd move the door to the player, offset in front of them a bit, and that door becomes a "magical portal" to enter your player home. To make things clean I'd also suggest moving the door back into the holding cell location after moving through it. There is the downside of NPC's also using the door (upside if a companion NPC I guess) but you can also give yourself or any companions a key and make it require the key to move through it. Third way is to use the rats (or any other disabled creature really) as the Mark and Recall spell workaround so it acts like the Morrowind spell.