How to edit meshes and export them as nif

[EdwardTheVampire]

Hello everyone [who reads this]
Before I start I must warn you I am not the best person in the world, I'm pretty much fed up with life so I can get a little [very] aggressive/rude. Either ignore it or forgive me for it, but honestly, this post is my last resort, my last resort about something I both hate and am very passionate about.

These days we don't have fun games anymore, so I have to rely on 11 year old Skyrim LE and such. Obviously I got bored of the vanilla. At first, in 2015-ish when I was discovering mods I was happy with how the things were, I would just download a mod and enjoy it. Now just downloading mods is what I would describe as "great, but not perfect". I keep coming up with things I want in my game and as I download new mods I keep seeking perfection or even better immersion. Unfortunately, many modders have moved on from the game, or contacting them is troublesome (imagine emailing a professional modder saying "hey, could you please make it so one spell does this, that and this, and also glows and makes the character do this and that with their hands") so I started modding myself. That's where my bad side shows since I usually ignore all the "don't edit my stuff without my permission", but again, I never publish my mods. I just want to have maximum fun in my game, other people will like other things and thus sharing my mods isn't really needed.

 

So, recently I found a piece of armor I liked, but I wanted to remove some elements. When I went to NifSkope to remove them I realized that the mod creator combined that element with some other parts of the armor (example, when a belt and pants are the same mesh, so removing the belt would remove the pants as well). I don't need that. I exported my armor nif to obj and tried to edit it with Blender. But for the sake of junk, this was a dire experience: not only did the armor's mesh became many times bigger, but it had lost all the textures as well. Even more, the obj I got in the end was broken or something so that the NifSkope couldn't import it. Then I got my hands on Outfit Studio hoping to just convert my obj to nif (not nif to obj, mind you). OS kept losing the texture as well.

So far I could not anything online that could help me. Maybe I had not looked well enough, maybe I found what I needed but messed up somewhere. So, the question is, how do I just take a nif file and delete some vertices? Can I edit the mesh in NifSkope alone? Do I need 3ds Max? Why do textures break? Why does blender make the mesh bigger? I am pretty noob at both modding and 3d editing, so if you're willing to help, write a step-by-step tutorial, all the buttons, all the moves.

(I am using Blender 2.69 since later versions don't support Windows 7, so the UI might have differences, I don't know.)
And thank you for helping. Or at least listening. I've gone through such frustration I feel sorry for the modders out there.

[Hanaisse]

By far, the easiest way to edit meshes is in Outfit Studio (yes, that's subject to opinion). I barely open Blender any more unless I want to create something since that's about the only thing OS can't do, add verts/polys.

 

I wrote this tutorial a while back on how to delete verts in OS. It's specific to static meshes but same applies to armor with a few caveats. If the armor you are adjusting has a Bodyslide "project" file all the better. Use Load Project instead of Import from nif and that way you won't have to do both the _0 and the _1 nifs, the "project" does it for you.

 

If you do want to continue using Blender check out the Arcane University tutorials.

[EdwardTheVampire]

Thank you for the tutorial, you really should put it somewhere where search engines would find it. However, I tried it in the game and now the entire armor mesh is gone. I rechecked it with NifSkope, it says the edited, fully working armor mesh is there and should be visible, but I ended up with having untouched parts removed as well. I assume I might have exported just a single layer instead of the whole scene, I reexported it and the same thing happened.
I am going to redo everything I just did again, just because I found an anomaly. For some reason there were two same meshes, one called "glow", so maybe it's the glowing part (I thought it should've been some mask, like a texture effect that makes it ignore the shading and always be full bright) and when I deleted the vertices the glow tree completely disappeared. So, maybe I should do the same thing to both. However, why the untouched parts got removed I don't know

Thanks for helping, again

Edited February 3, 2022 by EdwardTheVampire