BadPup

No worries. I understand liking a stable dev environment, but some of the fixes might be useful to you.

OMG. As the "stubborn author" of pynifly, I have to say there's a fair amount of misinformation on this thread. Pynifly does read the materials file and gets textures from there, has for quite a while. Pynifly looks for textures in two places: first, the file tree that the nif was loaded from. So if the nif is in C:/something/meshes/etc/foo.nif then the textures should be in C:/something/textures/... Then, if that fails, it looks in Blender's textures file directory (Edit > Preferences > File Paths > Data > Textures). That's new behavior as of, like, a year and a half ago, at the urging of people like the above posters. (@RoNin1971 did you file a bug report? And are you sure I didn't close it as "fixed"?) (It should probably look in the game folder and doesn't. I'd have to figure out how to find the game folder and mostly Fallout 4 archives aren't unpacked, anyway.) I'd have to read the code to be sure how absolute paths are handled. RoNin1971 says everything up to data is truncated and if the remainder is handled like a relative path I would consider that correct. Pynifly does check to see if the texture is there. If it can't find one it creates an empty image node so you can put in the texture yourself. @Crash180, you're doing exactly what I intended. As RoNin1971 points out, the way FO4 works any texture paths you put in the nifs--so any texture paths in your shader nodes--is entirely ignored by the game engine if you link to a materials file. The materials file rules. RoNin1971's pointers for how to handle blender materials when you have multiple meshes that share a FO4 materials file (make all the meshes share one materials file) are sensible and how I handle mine. I suppose it would be possible to have the importer look for materials that reference the same materials file and reuse them on import. But I can think of a lot of ways that could screw up, too. For things to show up correctly in Blender, the thing that matters is the shader node tree. Look there for problems. The workflow of: Unpack all vanilla (+ DLCs, + mods you care about) to a folder tree outside the game folder; Do all your work in your own folder tree; Have vanilla textures loaded by pynifly automatically through the File Paths mechanism ...works, and is how I work. Works for both Skyrim and FO4. If you want my attention, the place to post is the github issues or discussion tabs. That's github FROM WHERE YOU DOWNLOADED pynifly, so I know you know where it is. Anyplace else, I might find it or might not.

I sorta lost this thread... I respond more quickly to github or the main mod page. I started out supporting 2.78 but as things have progressed, it's gotten harder to maintain compatibility. If there's a lot of interest I could look at it, but we're two major versions of Blender on by now.

Um, like, it's there already. Read the section of the wiki that talks about partitions.

Speculars are just the alpha channel, which photoshop will let you manipulate directly. Separate pants and top aren't a thing in vanilla skyrim. You'll have to look at the unofficial slot assignments (nifskope shows them) and choose a different slot for either bottom or top. Make sure both nif and AA record reference the same slot. Dunno what's up with the boots, but there is a calf vs foot armor slot and it's possible that they were partially knocked out because of that.

Applying modifiers on export is on the wishlist. If by "color map" you mean the UV map, the game shows that bright pink/purple when it can't find the texture file. Have a look in the nif to see what texture files got written, if any. Make sure they aren't overwritten by a texture set in the esp (unless you want them to be). There's a few things that can cause armor parts to not show up. Check it in CK and see that you can see the mesh itself in the armor addon. If that works, it's probably the body part numbers--check that the one in the nif matches the AA.

(1) load it up in game (2) get the latest version of nifskope and see if it looks right there. If you're doing any serious modding you want nifskope.

Just export. Anything selected will be exported. The name will be taken from the active object. If you select multiple meshes they will all be exported to the same nif. If they're all parented to the same armature, that will be used whether you select it or not.

2.92. Won't support 2.7x because Blender thinks backwards compatibility is for pussies.

Yup.

Yup.

K I'll have a look not immediately now but real soon now. I've got max but never installed it, so I'll have to do all the things just to get to the point where I can look at it. The other alternative is Anton's havok tools which are maybe independent of the Max route? I've used them for Skyrim (VERY minimally) but do they work for FO4 at all?

Yup there it is. And yuck, it's an installer. Have to see what it creates. I can't do much with an exe. Collisions are on my want-to-do list too, but FO4 collisions are represented as a byte array in the nif and I have *no* clue what's in there.

I'm in contact with DocClox. What I'm thinking is, a plugin doesn't care who calls it and it's designed to be called from an external program. So if I can reverse-engineer the 3DS Max side of the plugin, I might be able to figure out how to call it. Then I could build a Blender plugin that calls it the same way. I have CK but I'm not seeing a Tools folder. It should just be there, no special download required?

Does anybody know how the 3ds max plugin works? Wondering if I could make a blender plugin for it, whatever it is.