Tutorial: Custom Weapon - Blender to Skyrim using blender 2.71

[BlazeLeeDragon]

Greetings,

 

I was trying to find a tutorial on getting custom weapons into Skyrim and was not able to find a method that worked for me. After playing around with blender and nifskope I finally found a method that works without having to use the old version of blender. That's right a method that utilizes blender 2.71.

 

so here is how I did it.

I used Blender 2.71 when I tried this

You need the following:
blender: http://www.blender.org/
nifskope: http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope
FO3: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/34/?

 

1) Model your weapon in blender (2.71)

2) UV Unwrap your model

3) Create your texture .dds files

4) Use FO3 archive utility and find a skyrim mesh that is close to the weapon you modeled

5) Open mesh with nifskope and locate the nitrishape data under the weapon name

6) Export this as a .obj file

7) with your model open in blender import the .obj

8) size and orient your model using the obj as a guide

9) delete the imported .obj and save your blender file

10) again open nifskope, but this time export the nitrishape data as a .dae file

11) import the .dae into your adjusted blender mesh

12) NOTE: the .dae is tiny, tiny, tiny compared. Just use it to rotate your blender mesh around the center (use curser rotation) so it's laying the same way as the weapon

13) again delete the .dae and this time export your blender mesh as a .3ds

14) In nifskope highlight the weapon name and import the .3ds

15) right click the name of your weapon you imported over the old one and click transform then edit

16) adjust and align the mesh (I only had to zero out all the positions to center my sword)

17) with your blender mesh still open you can delete everything except what would be covered by blood and repeat the above steps for blood effect and lighting

18) blood effect and lighting requires you to rename the string to blood effect and lightning after importing the .3ds

19) for the scabbard you will also have to rename the string to default scabbard and you will also have to play around more with the transform edit

20) under your BS shaders select your texture location and file names

21) save the .nif under it's new name

22) utilize skyrim creation kit and create your .esp with your new weapon...

 

DONE.

 

I hope this made sense if not, here is a video tutorial I made on youtube:

http://youtu.be/MwJDy5rNTmo

 

[ResolveThatChord]

Nice contribution! A lot of modders recommend simply learning Blender 2.49 because it has the .nif scripts. It's a shame because keeping up with more current tech can open up all kinds of opportunities for new kinds of projects.

[BlazeLeeDragon]

Thanks ResolveThatChord,

 

I've seen a lot of the same, to go back to 2.49. However I like modeling in the current version of Blender. I hope people find this useful.

[Ceruulean]

Wow, this is a nice find! Hopefully there are ways to get this to work for helmets and armor.

[fadingsignal]

Great work! I think this will work with static objects, as well (houses, etc.) Where it gets tricky is when skin partitions and bone weights come into play. Anything that needs a _0 and _1 version of the NIF to deal with the body weight slider (including necklaces, as I am painfully finding out) is extremely delicate.

 

If someone buckled down and wrote some Python scripts for properly importing/exporting NIFs in Blender 1.71+ that include all bones/skin partitions, they would be the heroes of the land!

[olnorton]

Does anybody know if you can import nif's into Blender 2.71?

[BlazeLeeDragon]

Wow, this is a nice find! Hopefully there are ways to get this to work for helmets and armor.

Yeah that would be pretty cool. Unfortunately I am a major NOOB when it comes to modding and have only played with the weapons so far. Hopefully this techinique can be expanded into all custom models.

[BlazeLeeDragon]

Does anybody know if you can import nif's into Blender 2.71?

As far as I know Olnorton, no... The old blender needed a nifscript to import them properly and python etc. If someone makes those types of additional files for an updated version of blender than maybe. However as of today I don't think it's possible.

[olnorton]

As far as I know Olnorton, no... The old blender needed a nifscript to import them properly and python etc. If someone makes those types of additional files for an updated version of blender than maybe. However as of today I don't think it's possible.

Thanks for the reply BlazeLeeDragon, I was lucky, a "real" modder named Tamira edited some nif's for me.

[neomonkeus]

If someone buckled down and wrote some Python scripts for properly importing/exporting NIFs in Blender 1.71+ that include all bones/skin partitions, they would be the heroes of the land!

 

Here is the thing, the code has always been open source so anyone could, but nobody has.

Our devs are working on updates, when/if they can, but their time is limited.

The fact they still continue to make updates over the long-term, given their constraints is more of a "buckling down" than anyone else does.

 

@BlazeLeeDragon - Some good stuff. You can definitely optimise your workflow by using one formation, .3ds would be preferential. Also the flower icon beside the texture path, its opens a file selector *don't ask me why its a flower, before my time*. I would suggest checking out the NIftools 1.2 alpha build, much better than the version you are currently using. https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/releases/tag/v1.2.0-alpha.2