How to make a necklace for Fallout New Vegas

[LaurellaBellaBean]

Hello, anyone reading this. 

As the subject line states, I'd like to make some necklaces that will cover the neckseam so often seen. 

For starters, I am experienced with Blender and Photoshop. I can make a mesh, and weight paint it and I can make textures without a problem. I've been able to install the nif addon in Blender 2.82 so that's been taken care of.

What I need to know is what exactly do I need to do in Blender? Other than making the mesh and UV unwrapping, I'm thinking I need to import a FNV body and will need to use the body to transfer over the weight paint to my mesh. Is that correct? And is there anything special I need to know regarding that? And how would I export my mesh? Anything important I need to know? 

I know I'll need Nifskope and that's where I need some handholding. All I know is that Nifskope is needed to apply texture sets for my mesh but I'm not clear on that at all. And there may be considerations that I need to be aware of. 

I don't need any help with GECK. Just not clear on the Blender and Nifskope part of the process. 

[madmongo]

If you want things to actually work, you need Blender 2.49b, especially for anything involving rigging. I've seen folks make statics using the later nif tools, but rigging never seems to work right. There is a mod that has Blender with all of the proper versions of tools for 2.49b somewhere on the Nexus, I think under Oblivion. Make sure to follow the instructions when installing it. You can have Blender 2.49b on your computer along with later versions. They won't interfere with each other.

What I would do is import the FNV body into Blender, then create the new necklace mesh around that body. Create a texture for the necklace in dds format. I don't use photoshop, but I have seen textures created in photoshop that don't work correctly, especially if using lesser quality textures in the game to keep the memory usage down and prevent crashing. It's probably related to mipmap generation so make sure you export that correctly when you create your dds file.

Once you create your mesh and UV map it to your dds texture, parent the mesh to the body's skeleton and weight paint it so that it will move correctly as the skeleton moves around.

At this point I usually save the mesh in Blender, then delete the body, make sure to select all (Blender only exports what is selected), and export as nif. In the export options you are going to want to start with the defaults for Fallout 3, then click on Creature under Collision Options (top, center), select Skin under that, then make sure Use BSFadeNodeRoot is de-selected under Shader Options (top, right).

Blender never seems to export the shader flags correctly, so you'll need Nifskope to fix those. You'll also need it to add a normal map texture. Under the shader flags for your necklace, you'll want to have the Shader Type set to SHADER_DEFAULT, and you will want to check SF_Skinned and SF_Shadow_Map under the Shader Flags. Blender usually exports the rest of the flags correctly.

Ad your necklace under Armor in the GECK, and have it use the Necklace body slot.

By the way, if you are creating clothing or armor that includes human body parts, the human parts will use SHADER_SKIN instead of SHADER_DEFAULT and you'll check SF_Skinned and SF_Facegen instead.