Tutorials and/or advice on armor creation?

[JupiterIceMoons]

So I'm brand new to this whole rodeo courtesy of a wonderful friend who's been teaching me, but I don't want to be monopolizing my friend's time.

Short version: I'm creating a mod about resource gathering and economy with one of the main goals being making clutter more fun to be around. I have a few goals in mind ranging from simple to complicated (and HOW complicated, I don't know, see noob status) so I'm curious where would be a good place to seek the wisdom of scholars before me. I checked the wiki tutorials but they have not been necessarily helpful, and so I'm here.

What I would like to learn about, in rough order of 'this should be straightforward' to 'advanced':

• Adding new armor pieces to the game period. I tried following the wiki tutorial and instead of having a helmet on I just gave my test character a toggleable bald spot.
   
• Messing with extant pieces of equipment. I want to promote the woodcutter axe to a 2handed weapon and while my friend can do that, I don't understand the process myself and I'd like to make the handle longer to communicate that, which ties into point #3-
   
• Transferring .nifs to and from blender. I keep trying this but when I put it IN blender, the texture glitches out, and then it won't export to .nif again, citing a laundry list of errors (I can grab a screencap of those if they'd help)
   
• attaching additional effects to armor once the above are stable (one of them is a metal kettle worn as a helmet. In my wildest dreams this would use an SMP-physics type mod to bob around as the character moves and possibly add a comical resonant effect to the character's vocalizations or grunts. I am a very serious person)
   
• New animations / equipment that alters certain animations. Think like how the player can equip a torch and it occupies one hand / affects the character's animations with said torch. This is probably the biggest issue.

I don't play with bodyslides/body mods myself, so I'm not presently interested in incorporating them while I learn the basics.

 

Any advice is welcome, thank you for your time and patience.

-Jupiter (He/him, They/them)

[scorrp10]

You should 'play with BodySlides'  cause BodySlide/OutfitStudio is the prime application for getting armor to work in Skyrim.

As a primer on doing a helmet, assuming you start with a random mesh file:

You generally want to import either malehead or femalehead.nif as reference so you can make sure your helmet mesh is positioned/rotated/scaled properly.   Then in geometry options of helmet mesh, you check Skinned, you weight the mesh to Head bone, and then you assign it a partition.   30 if the helmet completely encloses head, 31 if it replaces hair, leaving face visible, 42 if it is more like a circlet.  You generally need to create helmet versions fitted to male and female heads, khajiit male/female, argonian male/female, and sometimes, orc male/female.

In creation kit, you create the ArmorAddon forms, indicating male/female meshes, and indicating matching partitions.   Any vertices in mesh belonging to a partition not included in ArmoAddon will not render.   

Then you create Armor form that uses those ArmorAddons.   Be sure to set the partition(slot) accordingly.

If you look at say, 'ArmorDragonscaleHelmet', it has 4 ArmorAddons: Argonian, Orc, Khajiit, and 'regular' (Human)

Now, with the axe - just look at any Battleaxe model, note at which points in-game the haft is gripped.   You generally want to model your axe to match an existing batleaxe model, with same spatial positioning.   And copy the weapon record accordingly.

My preffered method is to import a .nif file in Outfit  Studio, and export it as .obj.    Then, I import .obj into Blender - just make sure to indicate that Z axis is up.   This does not include textures, but it does keep the UV maps, so textures can easily be re-added via Shading.    There is also PyNifly for importing nif's straight to Blender, you can try that.

Then, I export the mesh back to obj from Blender - again need to indicate that Z is up.    Now, in OutfitStudio, you want SOME mesh loaded and set as reference before importing an obj you edited in Blender.

An SMP kettle should be fairly trivial, similar to SMP hair - you need to define an extra bone with head as parent, weigh the helmet to this bone, include a virtual head (again, available on pretty much any SMP hair wig mesh), and do an xml file - again using an xml from a wig as guide.    As to voice effect - an ArmorAddon form has a 'Modulates Voice' checkbox, but I think that just muffles it a bit.

Animations are not really my forte, so no comment there.

 

[JupiterIceMoons]

Ooh, thank you! I was curious if OutfitStudio would be relevant to me with only the vanilla body (sorry I mispoke, when I say 'no bodyslides' what I MEANT was lack of experience with CBBE and its contemporaries)

I will absolutely test this out and be sure to pick up OutfitStudio, especially since the .obj might be an excellent workaround to my problems with blender.

[JupiterIceMoons]

I'd like you to be informed that your advice was invaluable and I have entertained the beginnings of success.

Test character enclosed as an expression of my gratitude.