Getinthyvan

It looks good enough for the first weapon I've ever made for a TES game... I'd upload a few screenshots but I'm the middle of reinstalling everything to fix a few issues with my game, and also to switch from NMM to Mod Organizer. No hate for the Nexus Manager but it made my data folder a complete mess... and having to keep the downloaded files for every mod I use is simply too much for my 200GB hard drive. But as soon as I'm done restoring my Skyrim to it's former glory I'll come back to post a few images... and with some luck I'll also have my first outfit ready by then c:

Writting without sleeping... I feel you there... I was on a coffee-drinking binge myself when I started this thread! Broke my own record by the way, fifty-four hours before I finally fell into my bed. I didn't even touch the shader type and flags; used 1stpersonsteelsword.nif as template and that file already has those. Side-by-side comparisons between my .nif and the original don't reveal any errors on my part, so this is most probably an issue with the Creation Kit. I've already redone the .nif for my weapon and encountered no more problems, but just to be sure something like this doesn't happen again I'll see if there's any patch or minor fix for the CK around the web that I've missed. Just noticed the armor on your siggy, so quick question: compatibility-wise, is it safe to rig my armors using the vanilla skeleton? I really don't want to use those half-a-million node custom ones, painting the weights for that would be way too time consuming.

Hmm, alright... but the vanilla .nif I used as template says otherwise... http://i322.photobucket.com/albums/nn406/akiraDan/Untitled_zpsb7vf2ben.png Not to mention around 90% of the enviroment maps found in SkyrimTextures.bsa have _e in their filename...

If you did properly revert back to vanilla during reinstall then I'd say that the glitch is unrelated to game files -- maybe it's your old saves that are messed up.

My game is pretty dangerous so I'm glad there's this many followers to choose from. I currently have Wildcat + Enemy Encounter installed (my two favourite mods, btw) and the difficulty set up to Legendary, which means realistic levels of damage both dealt and received plus random enemy spawns anywhere, anytime, and there's another mod in my load order (sorry, don't know which one) that likes to spawn high-level mass-murderers in the middle of cities from the very moment I start the game. In addition to all of this, bEssentialTakeNoDamage has always been ZERO in my skyrim.ini and I don't believe in resurrections so, naturally, if I'm ambushed and an arrow flies straight into one of my companion's face he or she stays dead (unless I die as well of course, in that case they'll be resurrected alongside me when the game loads. Can't bother with Dead is Dead... I'd have to create a new character every day, it'd just be annoying). The point is, if I was playing with just vanilla followers this would be a pretty big problem, but with such abundance of potential henchmen scattered throughout the world I'm certain I'll pretty much never run out of NPCs to fight by my side, and since I always forget about all the stuff I download I'm always randomly stumbling uppon new characters that I didn't even remember existed, and that's also nice. Plus, I like tits.

Howdy! Been on this site for years but silly and shy old me never bothered posting or interacting with others. Nice to meet you all c: I've spent the last few weeks building models from scratch; my mind is set on building a large pack of custom content including everything from weapons and armor to hairstyles, beards, scars and eyes, plus spells, enchantments and custom shaders, and might even couple it with a new land and a campaign-sized questline I wrote a long time ago. The plan here is simple: create new content, release the whole thing as a Nexus exclusive and make all of my assets free, for anyone to use for their own work without limitations. I've got a good chunk of pieces finished already, and I just need some help doing things the hacky way with NifSkope and the CK. On a side note, I'm also interested in (eventually, once I'm experienced enough) making a revamped mod-making guide for Skyrim. Why? Because most of the material on the net is outdated and involve fiddling with older, unstable versions of various programs, which can be very confussing for a lot of people; the software at our disposal [except maybe the Creation Kit (sorry Bethesda, you know I love you)] seems to have come a long way since the old days and methinks a complete, modern-day source of reference for modders needs to be compiled and properly organized, and I'm willing and able to help make it happen. If a proper team was to be assembled, we could collectively figure out bug-proofs ways to get every single thing done with the latest -- and my opinion, more efficient -- versions of every tool, so that people who just want to get into modding and have some fun making spells that shoot out pink fireballs that turn your enemies into dancing chickens don't have to go through insufferable headaches shuffling through thousands of topics on google... just tell me dear, wouldn't that be sweet? ANYWAY, ON TOPIC I succesfully exported my models from Blender as .nif files without any problems. I was eager to get a particular sword in-game, so I opened up NifSkope and copied the NiTriShapeData for the blade, scabbard and blood object into a Skyrim .nif (specifically, steelsword.nif) and pasted them over their respective counterparts. I then adjusted the texture paths and saved it as a separate file into my mod folder (data\meshes\GETINTHYVAN\weapons). I closed NifSkope and reopened it, loaded the new .nif and did some adjustments to BSlightingshaderproperty (namely, changing the value of Vertex Colors from no to yes and tweaking colors and glossiness), saved it again, and went into the CK. Duplicated a silver sword, changed the third and first person models for my .nif, adjusted the weapon's stats, removed the SilverSword script and named my sword. After that, I added a simple magic effect, created my own custom shader for it, and put it into a new enchantment. I enchanted the sword, saved, and went ingame. So far, so good. I added the sword to my inventory via console commands and everything was working fine; I noticed a few positioning errors on the weapon (my character wasn't holding it properly), but it wasn't much of a big deal at that point in time. I saved the game, went back into the CK and created another magic effect for a spell I was planning to use later on; I played around with it for a while, and once I was done testing, I moved on to correct the weapon's position in NifSkope. This is when things started going downhill. Right off the bat, as soon as I got the weapon in place, the CK begun going nuts on the sword missing an environment map (just the blade itself -- the scabbard had the exact same textures and it all rendered okay), so I checked the texture paths, but everything was looking fine in NifSkope. Just for good measure, I created a texture set for my weapon in the Creation Kit, but even then, it kept telling me I was missing an environment map! I kind of freaked out because it was there, I double, triple and quadra checked it. I thought it could be an error with the .dds, so I opened it up in Photoshop and made sure it was saved in a proper format (tried what google recomended, DXT1 RGB 4 bpp, no alpha, and then another couple formats suggested by Fallout modders) but the Creation Kit kept telling me it was missing. I checked the sword's .nif in NifSkope to see if the mesh had all the proper flags attached to it, and it did. I was pretty tired of trying by that point, but I kept making adjustments to the weapon's color and reflectivity in NifSkope as I did some further testing on my custom shader. Here's where I believe I screwed up; as I ran my tests ingame, I had the Creation Kit and NifSkope open simultaneously to save time; I noticed that whenever I adjusted a value in NifSkope, the CK would catch up to the changes I made to the sword's .nif file. And just like I should have anticipated, that route led to disaster! At one point, the CK freaked out. I didn't touch anything in the .nif outside of BSlightingshaderproperty; I just tried lighter and darker colors as I tweaked my custom shader in the CK, keeping both programs running as I launched Skyrim to see how the weapon looked ingame. After about two hours of testing, the sword started refusing to be unsheathed! whenever I equip it and hit R, my character raises his hands (as if he was unnarmed), and re-equipping only makes him hold an invisible weapon, while the model for the sword stays in the scabbard. That's frustrating enough, but as soon as I tried to fix it, the Creation Kit went nuts on me again and stopped acknowledging the existence of the textures for the scabbard! Just like it did with the environment map! (warning after warning of telling me I'm missing textures that are exactly where they are supposed to be! I PENTA checked those texture paths!) And now I have a really pretty and shiney sword with an awesome custom shader... that cannot be unsheated from it's solid white scabbard! Ugh! Soooo, I have no idea what caused the missing environment maps in the first place (I thought maybe the texture paths for those are hardcoded, so I tried using "cubemaps" in my sword_e.dds' file structure, but that didn't work), so my guess right now is that messing around with shading in NifSkope can cause a file to get corrupted somehow (if that makes any sense). I don't know a way to fix this particular issue, and I mean "fix" in a traditional sense -- after all, at this point it's all a matter of deleting the item in question (the record itself is apparently broken beyond repair, as new instances of the same item yield the exact same results) and recreating it (and just to be sure, recreating the .nif for the sword as well); the real question here is how to avoid the Creation Kit from flipping out like this. I could really use a hand right now: is it possible to safely edit an object multiple times without my testing leading to broken records? Is there a, let's say, more hacky way of doing things that I am not taking into account? For now, I have come to some logical conclusions from my experimenting that I'll try to use as guidelines in the future: #1 - Creating duplicates of items for testing is a must, IF recklessly messing around with shaders, effects, explosions, magic effects and the like can get the record for an item screwed up then I need duplicates whenever I go on a rampage of trial and error. #2 - Backing up .nifs (and .dds-es, just for good measure), also a must, IF somehow repeatedly changing the colors on the BSlightingshaderproperty block can somehow awaken the dormant unstability issues of NifSkope then I need to mess around with discardable files and take note of the values I need (this could also help discover which settings can lead a .nif to get messed up). #3 - Keeping a log so I can organize my notes more efficiently and reflect on where I went wrong would be helpful (guess this topic could be used for that purpose, IF that doesn't go against some forum rule I am not aware of). Finally, and to conclude this wall of text, any sort of advice is more than welcome. Like I said at the beggining of this post, I'd be more than willing to help compile a comprehensive, clear and detailed series of up-to-date guides on mod-making once I get through my newbie stage. From 3D modelling to UV Mapping and texture painting, from importing .nifs to fiddling in NifSkope and creating quirky stuff in the Creation Kit, and so forth. And mind you, I'm no lazy bum! I'll take this whole task uppon myself if need be. *most likely scenario*

I changed my mind on the armors; I wanted to create mashups of different pieces of vanilla apparel, but I've grown fond of another method. Instead of fusing existing armors, I'm modeling cuirasses, belts, scarves, pauldrons, greaves, gauntlets and so forth out of the meshes of the bodies themselves. It does take more time, but I'm really getting into it -- the method gives me freedom to create whatever pieces I fancy and allows for any number of combinations I can think of. It's sort of mind-numbing, spending hours and hours giving shape to some bloody suits of metal, but I really enjoy the designing process. I'll stick with working on the map one city at a time, and see where I go from there. I'll keep focusing on meshes and textures for now and try to get everything to look the way I want, maybe I'll come back to start a proper thread once I've got some good material for testing. Anyway, thanks folks, you've been most helpful. c:

Thanks for your replies! I do realize that this is a massive undertaking, and I obviously plan to start off with simple things (Like a follower, short quest or tiny dungeon) to serve as introduction to my universe and to build some experience before I jump into the thick of things. I'm a ridiculously fast learner though, so stay tuned -- I might upload some of my very first files pretty soon.

Hello there, people. Utter nerd here, TES lore junkie and long-time roleplayer. I've taken to writing tons and tons of lines for my characters' backstories over the years, a habit that eventually got me to create my own fantasy setting, which in turn drove me to write a novel that occurs in this world of mine, and there's just so much content in it that's directly related to my adventures in Tamriel, that I've been really getting into the idea of making a mod for Skyrim that connects Mundus and my universe. I'm a game developer (just as a hobby; I make a living from baking :B) so I'm no stranger to scripting and mapping, already know some basic 3D modeling and I also worked on a few obscure projects back in the day. Right now I have my sights on eventually creating my own game someday, but for the time being I'd like to start off simple and do something with the Skyrim engine. I'd be lying if I said I was familiar with the CK, but I've been going through a bunch of tutorials and it doesn't look like I won't be able to hold my own. I do however have a few doubts, so I thought I'd drop by the forums to introduce myself and ask for some advice, as I'd really like to keep my inexperience from making me commit dull mistakes. Right now, I'm a bit confussed about these three things: 1) I'll be using vanilla assets as base for my custom armors (weapon models will probably be made from scratch); would this negatively affect people using body replacers? 2) I have some wairpaints and tattoos of my own design, is there a way I can add them to my NPCs? Is it possible to do it without having to make my mod dependant on someone else's? 3) I'll mostly be using RaceMenu to edit faces ingame and then export them into the CK. I'd really like to use KSHairdos, Dwemer Beards, Northborn Scars and the Eyes of Beauty for the creation process, as those mods really help me get the aesthetics right. Do I need to ask their authors for permission to do so? Where should I contact them? Any piece of advice will be greatly appreciated. Many thanks! c: