General problems with custom meshes

[darthsloth74]

Hello there everyone I'm new around here and I had a few questions if anyone is willing to give me some advice.

 

Fallout 3 ranks as probably one of my favourite games of all time I play it far too much.

 

Now I've tried quite a few awesome mods for this game, I'm pretty amazed by what some people manage to make in their spare time. The thing is I really want to make some of my own.

 

I used to dabble with custom textures in Oblivion and general landscape editing, so the move to the GECK has been fairly straightfoward.

 

I can do armour retextures no problem. However what I want to do is create custom meshes. I have been using 3DS MAX for well over a year now and I think I'm pretty decent with it. I have all the required tools to do this nifskope, mod manager, nif plugins for MAX, dds utilities and normal map maker for Photoshop.

 

The problem arrises in the fact that firstly I don't understand how to export a mesh correctly into Fallout 3 and get it to work in game. Now I'm not stupid, it's just that this seems somewhat problematic when you haven't done this kind of thing before.

 

Firstly I made a basic oil drum, created a uv map for it, did the textures in Photoshop saved in dds format. Now it shows up right in Nifskope with the textures on it, but when it comes to trying to get it in game nothing happens, so I'm sure I'm doing something seriously wrong.

 

Secondly If I try to alter any armour I had an error arrise concerning bones and nodes when I tried to export it. I later realised that this was due to the skin modifier and I managed to export the armour. Still had problems getting UV's to work right. Fallout 3's armour sets seem to have one complete texture set assigned with UV's. However if you look at the models in MAX the armour is broken done into seperate pieces with individual UV sets. How do I combine my UV sets for export without screwing up the skin modifier, since this seems to be neccessary for export.

 

I've had a look around on the net as well as on Nexus. The information regarding this process is a little hit and miss, since a lot of tutorials where written as workaround solutions when people thought there may not be an editor.

 

If any is either willing to offer me some help or just point me in the right direction I would be really appreciative, since I'd really like to make some quality mods for the community.

 

Cheers.