Weight Painting?

[Shredator]

I've been on a little journey making and fixing bugs, trying to get a simple custom armor mesh into the game for a few days now. I've been able to get just about everything in correctly now, textures and mesh, but I haven't been able to get my armor to bind 100% correctly to the skeleton.

 

Right now I'm going

Maya > .nif exporter > nifskope > TES cs > Oblivion

The clothing pieces were also created from the ground up.

 

I've tried all three linking methods detailed here

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Making_New_Armor_Using_NifSkope

but none seem to have any effect. I was able to link easily with different ingame meshes, so I believe my trouble with that is simply from mine being entirely custom.

Would going back and rebinding all of the skin as well as the clothing pieces work, or would that cause problems?

 

What would be the best way to go about this? My attempts haven't gotten me anywhere.

 

Edit: Tried rebinding all of the skin and armor, but the deformations were unacceptable. I'll definitely need to find a way to sync with the game's binding.

[razorpony]

I'll start by saying that while I've never used Maya, the overall steps should be the same to get a mesh rigged properly.

In blender (which I'm familiar with) you need to import the skeleton.nif file from the characters\_male directory and parent your cuirass to the skeleton, then use weight painting to get it to move properly with your character before you export. I believe the 3 Nifskope methods you linked to are for editing existing pieces that have already been rigged to a skeleton before, not completely custom items.

 

Here are some tutorials I found that may help with getting your mesh rigged in Maya:

 

Link1

Link2

Link3

 

Good luck.

 

-Razorpony

[Shredator]

Got it! Thanks for the response.

 

The problem ended up being what looks like a glitch caused by Maya not being able to work very well with .nifs. The program has trouble editing weights painted as a .nif, so I had to convert and import a few files around. From there it was a simple process of copying and reapplying some of the game's weight data to the new meshes, and everything's right as rain!

 

I'm happy that's finally figured out, time to start modding for real :thumbsup: .