Help Needed with Blender or Nifskope

[n00bie]

I'm kinda new to mesh modding and I'm trying to get the body's from oblivion into fallout. I can get the body i want into fallout no problems. The problem is with the meshes I have joined together coming apart at the mesh seems.... I've edited the meshes buy cutting pieces of the oblivion meshes and join them with the fallout meshes i join them up fine in blender remove all duplicate vertices, attached to a skeleton which works, weight paint it and export but then in nifskope the parts of the mesh are all broken down, and in the game i can see the seems where i have joined the meshes. When I re import the nif into bender it's all one mesh but the vertices where i have joined the parts from different meshes arn't together and i have to remove the doubles again. Also in nifskope it has multiple NiTrishape nodes. I'm sure that is what is causing the problem and i was wondering if there is anything i can do or if this is a problem with the nifscripts or if there is some way in nifskope to merge the NiTriShapeData all into one.

[Baelkin]

I think the problem you have with the parts being in different NiTriShapes nodes is because the parts are in fact separate objects in your 3D editor. Every single object entity gets exported as its own NiTriShapes object, which could also explain why you can't weld the peices together and it shows seams where they are supposed to be joined. To make everything appear on the same NiTriShape node you'll have to attach all the pieces to the same object such that they either are welded together, or become elements of the same object (In 3dsMax at least, don't know how it works in Blender).

[n00bie]

I use a join mesh button in blender which joins all the meshes together. and it's fine while it's in blender it all becomes one mesh. it's just after i export it. i think it might have something to do with the nifscripts for blender at the moment because what i think is happening is because i cut pieces out of 3 different meshes. It's just keeping the old trishapedata branches from the imported nifs instead of creating its own trishapedata branch on export. Maybe i should just get 3ds max.

[SickleYield]

I suspect you're exporting with multiple materials. You need to delete all but one of them in Blender if you want the pieces not to separate again.

 

See This first pic showing the material index? Find yours in the edit buttons in object mode. It probably says something like "3 mat 1." If you flip between them and look at the textures you will see that probably only one has the texture you want.

 

Press delete until you have 1 mat 1. Switch to edit mode, select all verts, and choose "assign."

 

You should then be able to export without problems.

[n00bie]

Thanks a lot that worked. I tried deleting all of the materials but i never assigned all vertices to one group before. I did try to clean the nifs before i imported them the first time by deleting all the texture data and stuff in the original nifs. Not sure if people do that but it seemed like a good idea to me. Also just another question when you parent armatures to the mesh is it better to let make it's own vertex groups and then you go through and change the effected vertices or is it better to make your own and then parent the armatures? because last night when joined the armatures the effected vertices were quite random and some were covering the entire mesh when they were for like the toes or something.

[n00bie]

I see now the effected vertices do come from when you weight paint and even when you paint with 0 weight it's still paints them as effected vertices. Should i go through the vertex groups and select all the effected verts first then weight paint with the vgroup button on or don't worry about it if they are painted 0?

[SickleYield]

2nd-to-last post: I normally do the vert groups separately rather than with the armature. It's usually better to only import the skeleton when you're ready to export and that doesn't give you the option. (Select the mesh, import the skelly and choose the "import skeleton only + parent to selected" option.) Others more Blender-savvy than I am may append a clean skelly from a saved .blend file but I've never learned how.

 

It seems to me that deleting all the texture info is asking for trouble, (as putting it back may be a hassle later), but that's up to you.

 

Last post: There should be no connection between the vert groups and the material settings. If you mean the error message you can get on export ("these verts not assigned to any body part") that usually is fixed by using the bone weight copy script from a body mesh that you import (if you're doing clothes/armor/another body mesh).

 

You use the BWC script by selecting all the verts on your mesh in edit mode, then switching to object mode and holding shift + click intended source mesh. Then mesh--scripts--bone weight copy with "update selected" and quality 3 or less (4 can cause crashes). It can take a while and it does not work well on skirts, but it's great for other stuff.