11meister Posted November 3, 2013 Share Posted November 3, 2013 Hey everyone! I'm hard at work on my own original weapon mod for F:NV, and now that I'm nearing the end of my mesh work in Blender 2.6, I'm wondering how to best go about getting my work into 2.49, so I can make use of the stable NifPlugin to export it over to NIFscope. What little information I've been able to gather on this, is largely anecdotal and opinions seem to vary on the best way of doing things. Some say its best to export from 2.5+ to .OBJ and then import into 2.49 - others advise simply opening the 2.5+ .blend with 2.49 and ignoring the warning message. I'd be very appreciative if those of you who have made mods with blender recently, could advise me on the best way to go about this. Would I be better of texturing in 2.6 or 2.49? What about animating? Or doing my low-poly bake? What export settings would be best suited for a weapon? As I have heard differing ones work best depending on whether you're using a skeleton or not. As I'm doing a weapon, I assume it would be best to export from 2.6 as a static mesh, and do texturing and animating in 2.49 - to avoid compatibility issues. Especially seeing as I'm aiming to make a set of custom reload animations as well. Hopefully someone can weigh in with their advice, because despite my ongoing trawls through cyberspace, I'm yet to turn up anything definitive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neomonkeus Posted November 4, 2013 Share Posted November 4, 2013 You can do all your modelling in 2.6+ and just use 2.49 for import/export only. Normally I would be against using .obj but for what you are doing currently it should be fine as the.obj should have all the data required for doing that work. However I generally recommend .3ds or fbx as this allows storage of information that .obj can't. i.e vertex weights. which you may want to do down the road. Better to start with good habits. Using a good interchange format is better than using the .blend file as there is potential for compatibility issues, mainly due to BMesh and the newer animation system. But 99% of the time it should not be a problem. The other things is some data just might not carry across, so you may need to do touch up work in NifSkope. The main piece of advice is to keep saving copies so that if something goes wrong you will have something to start clean from. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
11meister Posted November 5, 2013 Author Share Posted November 5, 2013 (edited) Normally I would be against using .obj but for what you are doing currently it should be fine as the.obj should have all the data required for doing that work. However I generally recommend .3ds or fbx as this allows storage of information that .obj can't. i.e vertex weights. which you may want to do down the road. Better to start with good habits. Using a good interchange format is better than using the .blend file as there is potential for compatibility issues, mainly due to BMesh and the newer animation system. But 99% of the time it should not be a problem. The other things is some data just might not carry across, so you may need to do touch up work in NifSkope. The main piece of advice is to keep saving copies so that if something goes wrong you will have something to start clean from. Thanks for the speedy reply neo, so far I've successfully managed to get my .blend back across to 2.49, by using the legacy format option - and manually converting the few n-gons I had, into tri's and quads. But I'll also give .3ds and fbx a try, I still suspect that once I get onto to animating I'll find the blend hasn't successfully transferred something. Just a quick clarification - once I finish modelling, can I apply my textures and materials in 2.6 - and then go back to 2.49 to add any animations I need - before moving onto nif? Or would it be wiser to do texturing and such in .49 to minimize the chance of lost data? As for keeping multiple copies, already on it ^_^ I think my project folder already has over 62 blends in it. Edited November 5, 2013 by 11meister Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neomonkeus Posted November 5, 2013 Share Posted November 5, 2013 Materials & textures are fine AFAIK. Animation data is definitely lost but not sure abou using legacy mode, think it only goes so far and there will be a point soon where back-comparability may reduced further as Blender moves to 2.7x. In that case you still have the inter-change formats so you should be fine. Another thing to keep an eye out for is additional data that gets imported, e.g StringProperties for collision, is either pull back and forth or replicated on export. Off-hand I am not sure if it is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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