Need mod help - Invisible armor (Meshes not showing up)

[LHammonds]

chaospearl, that is called Hard-Coded Texture Paths.

 

The 1st thing you should do after installing NifSkope is to configure it to point to your Oblivion's Data folder...and then have it point to where you have your extracted files (such as the "out" folder for BSA Commander) if you extracted all the Meshes and Textures from the Oblivion BSA files as noted on this tutorial

 

I wouldn't ever recommend having your textures hard-coded in Blender to someplace like your desktop (yuck). I typically place my texture directly to Oblivion's Data\Texture folder path where it will be used in the mod...then import the texture using that path. It will be "hard-coded" while in Blender to that path but when you export, the NIF Scripts will strip the texture path below "Textures" and thus make it relative to Oblivion's Data folder. If NifSkope is configured to look in Oblivion's Data folder to find textures, you should be able to immediately open the NIF and the texture will display as well as being game-ready with no changes necessary! If done right, the ONLY things you should normally touch after export is the material color settings and the cleanup spells.

 

LHammonds

[chaospearl]

What I ended up doing is (I think) pretty much what you described... I set up my work folder directly inside the Oblivion textures directory and just popped a shortcut to that folder on my desktop so I can get into it quickly. It's what I should have done in the first place, and would have if I'd stopped to think that every single mod I've ever seen that includes original items comes with those items neatly tucked away into folders named "meshes" and "textures" which the readme instructs you to unzip into your Oblivion Data folder. If it weren't necessary for all the files to be within those folders, you can bet people would be naming the folder structures all kinds of weird things. Of course, I didn't stop to think, I just ran headfirst off the cliff in my fevered desire to have a purple velvet outfit. (sheepishly)

 

I just figure that if I made that mistake, perhaps I'm not the first new modder in the history of Oblivion to have done so. It's always a good thing to learn from your mistakes, but it's even better to learn from somebody else's!

 

I haven't taken the plunge into Blender yet, though. I'm only working with NifSkope and playing with color maps in Paintshop. Once I'm comfortable with that, then I'll see about learning to Blenderize stuff. Really, the main reason I want to teach myself to work in Blender is because I keep running into meshes that feature, for example, a velvet shirt edged in decorative braid, with the braid being a part of the color map rather than a separate branch that I could delete in NifSkope to get rid of that part and only that part. I have your tutorial bookmarked -- the one where you show how to remove an arm from a cuirass -- but I'm going to spend a few more days messing with retextures before I download Blender and get started. I know better than to try running a marathon when I'm still holding onto furniture in order to walk. ;)

[LHammonds]

I just figure that if I made that mistake, perhaps I'm not the first new modder in the history of Oblivion to have done so.

Nope, I think you're the 1st. hahahaha :biggrin:

 

It's always a good thing to learn from your mistakes, but it's even better to learn from somebody else's!

Great minds think alike!

 

I have your tutorial bookmarked -- the one where you show how to remove an arm from a cuirass -- but I'm going to spend a few more days messing with retextures before I download Blender and get started.

After getting that tutorial to the point it is right now, I am not too happy with it and will probably change it up a bit. That is one tutorial that I'd really like to make into a video equivalent...however, the text version needs to be spot-on for how I want it done. But I've been holding off creating a bunch of Blender videos because the interface is going to do a 360 turn in version 2.5 and I'd rather show newbies how to do things in that interface rather than everyone scratching their head trying to use the 2.4x version.

 

LHammonds