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As far as I can tell there are no ways of adding textures through the CK. If someone is taking a model straight to the CK, then it's either already been textured beforehand or it uses vanilla textures. FO4 uses something that resembles PBR shading, but retains pieces of the traditional Specular / Glossiness workfow from Bethesda's older games. I don't know how 3ds max can do in terms of converting one texture to another, so I'm not entirely sure. I use Substance Painter which textures using Metallic and Roughness materials and later convert these materials to Diffuse and Specular (with Roughness on green channel). My Substance Painter workflow uses the equivalent of "Physical Material" in 3ds. Fallout 4 uses something in between "Physical Material" and "Standard Material". The channels you'll need for utilizing most of FO4's shading capability is 1. Diffuse/Base color 2. Metalness/Specular 3. Roughness/Glossiness 4. Normal Map

Imagine if there existed a type of texture that you could project onto a low-poly mesh, so that it appears high poly in-game. So instead of having the GPU calculate all the polys, it takes surface normals from a map instead. The only thing it can't do is change the silhouette and sharp contours within the model, which is why most polys should go towards that. For your first weapon it doesn't really matter. As long as it's not 50K or something ridiculously high. Just for reference, I think the CBBE body has something like 50K, but it has a LOT of curves and is meant to be morphed substantially.

Turbosmooth on the game model itself, nope. Turbosmooth on the high-poly you'll be using to bake normal maps for the game model, yep. High poly is anything from 10k to 10 million. The numbers are purely arbitrary, it really is contextual. You could have a 20k poly driftwood plank in-game and from a functional perspective it doesn't make a difference. 5k is still fine, it'll work fine in-game, just not as optimized as it probably could be.

To delete an edge loop, select one edge, hold SHIFT and select the next edge. This will make an edge loop selection. Now you can dissolve using CTRL+Backspace. When you dissolve topology, you need to watch out so that you aren't leaving edges or vertices floating without being properly connected. For low-poly, you use smoothing groups to define those surfaces. For high-poly, support loops/edges close to eachother will sharpen the edge between them. Smoothing groups doesn't touch topology. It lets you decide where to let normals flow and where to cut them off. It is used to define which surfaces are smooth shaded and which are flat. When you're making low-poly, it's good for visual representation to assign smoothing groups. When you make a proper high-poly, you'll most of the time only use smoothing group 1 (aka all smooth), because you can control how sharp something looks by using support edges. After modeling comes the UV unwrapping and texturing stage. Some people hate UV unwrapping. I personally love it. Once that is done, you export to a nif and get it set up before adding the weapon through the CK. You're using turbosmooth, that's why. Remember, turbosmooth divides the entire mesh so you will have four times the polygon density of the control mesh. Only use turbosmooth for the high-poly. Also, with turbosmooth active in your stack the polycount is already showing tris. To triangulate a mesh, add a Turn To Poly modifier and set Limit Polygon Size to 3.

Pretty cool. I like the design. You have a few too many edge loops on the pommel. I would take off a couple that aren't doing anything to the geometry. Every loop adds a crapton of polys on cylindrical objects. You also have one in the middle of the shaft. Only use them if the topology needs it, or to create support edges in order to sharpen up topology that is softened due to turbosmooth. The turbosmooth creases you're getting are because of two things; the mesh has triangles, and you've got edge loops too close of each other. You'll want to stay in the range of 5-20K tris for the in-game model. You could go higher/lower - there aren't really any fixed values. 50K is insane and highly redundant for a melee weapon, just to throw you some numbers. The usual workflow is to model only so that the silhouette/outline of the model looks OK, and then you fill in the rest of the details with a normal map from a more higher poly version. Whether you create the hi-poly or low-poly first is up to you. Keeping the tri count down is an art in itself. As for a wrapped handle, it depends on the type of wrapping. Like, if it's a spiral wrap, paracord or braided. I would probably make a braided mesh in hipoly, then bake the normals onto a cylinder for the low poly to use ingame. If you search for "3ds max braided" you'll find a few tutorials on youtube.

Looking forward to the release. Maybe it's the angle, I can't tell from the pictures, but it looks like the muzzle is just a barrel extension. Pure compensators are top open or have slots on the 12'o clock to compensate muzzle climb. To expand on that, muzzle brakes have large straight edged openings on the sides and flash hiders are either prongs or have slits all around. And then you have all the in-betweener hybrids, of course. Muzzles are fun to model and easy to make. I hope to see more options down the line.

Reference images in 3ds max are textures projected onto a plane. So you'll be creating a plane, a new material with the image, then assigning the material to the plane. That's how you'll see the image while modeling. But before that, you should use an imaging program to rotate the image so the blade is completely horizontal, and crop the image down to just the blade. For a simple blade, only a single reference image is really needed. I recommend watching a tutorial on how to set up reference images in 3ds max. I'd give you a step-by-step myself, but I'm more proficient with Blender than 3ds max.

You could edit the mesh to resemble the one in the picture, but it depends on how accurate you want it to be. Simple scaling will lead to UV stretching. I would personally delete the blade part of the mesh and make a new one that followed the contours of the knife edge. However, it would involve a UV re-unwrap and retexture because of the new mesh information added. You can't really ruin the mesh unless you set out to do it. The only thing that you'll inevitably ruin, is the existing UV map if you add or remove polys (moving/rotating/scaling is fine, though). Either way, this is a good occasion as any to learn UV unwrapping. Eventually placing it in Data/Meshes would make it a replacer, yes. Given that you have prepared the mesh in NifSkope beforehand.

Something is calling for it to compile in a folder that doesn't exist. You should be able to ignore any and all ioapi.h errors. Click the third option, "always ignore this assertion, and then Continue. Do not click "Try to Save, then Quit". It's a trick choice that crashes 3ds max. Always click Continue.

Work in 4K or even 8K, then release it with 2K and have 4K textures as optional download. However, trying to fit everything into one texture will make you have to compromise a lot of UV space because of the size of the blades. It's best that you create a new material for them. It's pretty common to have materials spanning across multiple textures on weapons.

Looks about right. They should point to the sub-folders inside the Data folder. So, yep.

I believe you need to edit the object's template by adding your helmet mod to the Default template. There's a button called Object Template in the item's property window. In there, you should also be able to set so that the mod is non-optional. That way it should always spawn with a mod.

I'm just gonna leave this here.

I don't know how your current workflow is, but the general idea is to model using concepts and reference images. You usually can't model something entirely freestyle or make design decisions on-the-fly. Maybe someone can, but it cannot be considered typical. You need minimum a front view T-pose reference image with your design to effectively model. I suggest importing the mesh of either a vault suit or the body itself, so you can get the right proportions from the get go. You can then save a screenshot of the orthographic front view, and start drawing your ideas. Use mash-ups or whatever to get your ideas into a concrete reference. Whatever you do, you need a finished concept / reference before you model. If you google concept images for, let's say armor, you'll see that a good portion of the results are images of character in their T-poses, aka arms elevated. This is the default pose modelers work with for 99% of clothing assets in general.

You won't find all the nif files, because they are packed inside ba2 archives in your Fallout 4/Data folder. The one you specifically need to open is the "Fallout 4 - Meshes.ba2" one. Just get the lastest version of B.A.E, extract it to any folder and make a desktop shortcut so it's easily accessible. You then either drag and drop a ba2 file onto the window (it literally says "Drag archives here" in the main window), or navigate to your Fallout 4 Data directory through File > Open and open said ba2 file. You just need the nif plugin I linked earlier correctly installed in order to open nif files directly in 3ds max.You don't need NifSkope unless you have trouble importing the nif. To open a nif in 3ds max you go File > Import.

The nif link is to an installer where you just tick the 3ds max version version you have and it'll install to the plugin folder of 3ds max. You can use something like Bethesda Archive Extractor https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/78/? to open the file "Fallout4 - Meshes.ba2" in your Fallout 4/Data folder. The sledgehammer should be in Meshes/Weapons/Sledgehammer inside the archive.

If you're gonna animate and/or add collision* to your meshes, 2015 is the highest you can go for the extra plugins support. Otherwise 2018 is fine. There's a nif plugin compiled for later 3ds max versions available here https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/84041/ *Collision is a frame on top of the mesh that is used to calculate in-game physics, like when the object is dropped or shot at. You don't need to make new collision for weapons (just copy from vanilla weapons when editing in NifSkope), unless it's something that is very oddly shaped. I personally keep copies of 2015 and 2018 simultaneously. 2018 for animating and 2015 for exporting the animation. If you're just gonna make weapons to start out, 2018 is fine. It feels smoother, too. You don't necessarily set out to make the object specifically for FO4 in the modeling stage. You're making a game asset, so you'll be following pretty generic guidelines for game asset creation. Any tutorial that revolves around game assets will be relevant to you. You can make any kinds of geometry, as long as the object is triangulated before making it into a nif. Most game engines need to render triangles for fastest possible rendering. It's an automated process and easy to do towards the end.

I'm not sure what you're able to get there. The best way to find out is to just log into Autodesk and see. There should be some way to affiliate your Autodesk account with your uni through Autodesk. You then go to Free Software section and get the Autodesk product you want. Myself, I got access to all the major titles when I was majoring linguistics, so it doesn't appear to depend on you studying CG at all. You should in theory be able to most things in FO4Edit, and I bet some would even say it's easier than CK. In my case, though, it's more about CK being the first place I made my own weapon, so I'm just more familiar with it. Ah, mesh is the actual 3D model with the vertices and polygons. I disambiguate mesh from nif, because a nif is a container that can hold different types of data, including the mesh.

Your asset workflow depends on what you have access to in terms of modeling and texturing software. If you are a student, I personally recommend going the 3ds max / Substance Painter route. 3ds max has best support for importing/exporting nifs, and SP just has a generally decent texturing workflow where you paint directly onto a mesh. Autodesk and Allegorithmic both allow for free student licensing. SP also has a 30 day evaluation trial. Otherwise you can go Blender for modeling. I started with Blender myself, and it's great for getting the mesh and UV unwrapping done. For texturing, Blender leaves a lot to be desired, and if you want good results you'll need to learn compositing and texture baking in Blender. Nif support for Blender stopped years ago and you are forced to use an older version when turning your mesh into a nif. You can use other softwares like Maya for modeling and texturing, too. It should also have nif support through a plugin, but I have not used it myself so I cannot attest for how well it works. Exporting to a nif is one thing, but when you want to make your nif readable by FO4, it needs to follow a specific convention, and that'ss done through NifSkope. The usual procedure is (oversimplified) to open an existing asset, copy over your meshes and save it as a new nif. You'll also need Material Editor by ousnius that edits BGEM/BGSM files your new asset. You then start integrating the asset into a mod through the CK. Similar to the procedure in NifSkope, you essentially duplicate entries of an existing weapon, rename it to yours, point it to your own nif, and give it whatever properties you feel is right. So to recap for software (note, this is just my personal preference) Modeling: Either Blender, 3ds max or Maya. Or anything that can export to OBJ.Recommended: Latest Blender or 3ds max. Texturing: Blender, 3ds max, Maya, Substance Painter, PhotoshopRecommended: Substance Painter for texturing, Photoshop DDS conversion: Photoshop with DDS plugin, GIMP, Paint.NET, CompressonatorRecommended: Either works fine. I use Photoshop. Turn into nif: 3ds max with nif plugin, Blender 2.49b with nif plugin, Outfit StudioRecommended: 3ds max, or Outfit Studio if you can't get 3ds max. Nif editing: Nifskope 2.0 BGSM/BGEM editing: Material Editor by ousnius Getting the nif into game: Creation Kit That's about it. You can do without ever touching FO4Edit. In fact, I only use FO4Edit when I suspect I've made dirty edits. In which case I'll run my esp through FO4Edit to clean it.

It'll most likely be something using HUDFramework by registrator2000. He has a sticky with some mods by other people that uses his framework. https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/20309/?tab=posts

Getting textures to show in Blender the first time was a pain. If the object is already UV unwrapped, all you need to do is select your object, go into Edit Mode, split a new window and open UV/Image Editor. If the object is UV unwrapped, you'll see it there. Then you just open the image and it will apply it to the object. Also make sure the viewport is in Texture mode. Viewport Texture mode will only show textures when an object is UV unwrapped. Otherwise you'll have to apply the texture as a Material, which I'll describe below. Setting up a material is usually done through the Node Editor and can be daunting if you've never done compositing before. However, Blender should have a material ready to go from the default start-up cube, and we'll use that. Make sure viewport shading is set to Material Mode. With the object selected, go to Material tab, and instead of clicking New, click the Material icon (with the up/down arrows) next to it and choose Material. Now go to Texture tab and a texture block called "Tex" should already be assigned the material. Then, just below, in the Type dropdown, choose "Image or Movie", and open your texture. If the object shows up black in Material shading, either add lights to the scene, or scroll down to Influence in the same tab and apply Emi(ssion) under Shading, which will make the object show a flat color.

Don't know if you're using ENB, but random low resolution textures is typical of ENB video memory setting being set too high.

I think either your nifskope is outdated, or you are looking at the wong file or have altered it. Just to be sure, are you on skeleton.nif and using nifskope 2.0? https://imgur.com/a/7L47g

Try looking at Block 3 in the nif, BSConnectPoint::Parents, and in Block Details, expand Connect Points.

The problem is that the connect point for laser isn't aligned with the rest of the skeleton. Look in skeleton.nif for "P-EyebotZapper". It should probably be a lot higher, like 100 on the Z axis.