blender Error when exporting to .nif from Blender

[Lukazilla]

I've been trying to make a new shield for Oblivion which uses the texture and shape of the Fighters Guild wall decoration. But now that I'm finally making progress, I try to export the shield to a .nif and it doesn't let me. I'm not entirely sure what it means by "'Object' object has no attribute 'face_maps'". Anyone know how to fix this?

[chambcra]

I didn't think the newer versions of blender have the proper scripts to export an Oblivion nif. I think I've read you can use newer versions to do your modeling but then open your .blend file with blender 2.49 to do the exporting.

[dreamCloud]

The newer Blender nif scripts only properly export back to Skyrim's versions of NIF unfortunately, unless something changes in the future. 

To get a nif file Oblivion can use from a newer version of Blender is quite the process but is totally possible (I do it all the time). You'll want to save your file as an .obj file, then import that into Blender 2.49b then adjust things as necessary (rotation is a big one since .obj tends to switch the x and z and I've noticed scale can be a problem too), apply rotation and scale, make your collision in 2.49b and then export to nif from there choosing the Oblivion options.

 

As for your direct question, I'm afraid I've never heard of "face maps" either until now so I did some digging. According to this post face maps are like vertex groups but for faces. They are used for quick rigging animations... so not sure why that is being brought up as an issue for your file by the exporter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://blenderartists.org/t/what-are-face-maps/1252657

[chambcra]

Okay, gotcha. You're way beyond me then.

I appreciate your answer but I don't remember asking about face maps. It's possible though, I getting fairly senile. I've never heard of face maps either and don't recall anything about an issue with a file exporter. Thanks

[dreamCloud]

No worries, facemaps was in the original poster's error logs as the source of the error on export.