Creating armor mashups in fallout3 with blender

[Site Bot]

Article link: Creating armor mashups in fallout3 with blender

 

I have gotten a lot of questions related to this lately, so sorry to all my e-pals who asked and I never replied.

 

This is how I do armor mods. I don't know jack about weapons, besides pointy end goes toward bad guy.

These instructions are for blender, I don't know anything else. These instructions are also really only for using existing meshes in your armor. Not for creating anything from scratch. I am the Christopher Tolkein of meshes, what can I say? I can't make anything new.

 

It should be read as basic info, to do relatively simple things (if I know how to do it, it's basic :))

 

1) Import the body you want your armor to fit (type3, breeze, etc). Hide it. and all the meatcaps.

2) Import the armor that has the piece(s) you want. Delete everything of the old body, the meatcaps from this body, and all the bits of armor you don't want. Repeat step 2 until you have all the bits of armor you want.

3) Unhide everything. This should leave you with a body and an armor that probably doesn't fit.

4) Hide the meatcaps on your body.

5) Tricky part - Massage the armor as necessary so that it fits the new body. It will be relatively easy if it's a mesh from FO3, a bit harder if it's from Oblivion or some other game. Remember that the part of the body that you cant see doesn't matter, you can delete those vertices if they clip through.

6) Once everything is fitting ad looks how you want it in game, unhide your meatcaps.

7) Select all meshes

8) Import the fallout 3 skeleton and click the "import skelton only + parent selected meshes" button. By default, it is in the Fallout - Meshes.BSA, so you will have to extract it with FOMM. It should be located in meshes/characters/_male.

9) Select skeleton only and export.

Here are the export settings I use successfully:

http://fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/1316332-1274899907.jpg

 

10) Open in nifskope, select the body portion and change the shader to shader_skin. Make sure shader flags shadow_map and sf_window_environment_mapping are checked. To find the shader info, expand the nitrishape/nitristrip, and highilght BSSHaderPPLightingProperty In the block details, you will see shader_type and shader_flags.

11) Under spells, select 'update all tangent spaces', otherwise you may see weird rings and whatnot on the skin.

12) Save.

13) Right click on your nif and view in geck.

If it showed up both in nifskope and geck it will most likely work in game, which is the next step. You can create a new esp that adds it to game, replace an existing armor with it, etc. You will most likely want to put the armor through various contortions and see what clips, and have to go back to blender a few times to fix what you see.

14) Share your new creation on Nexus.

 

Main keystrokes needed for Step 5:

 

hold down middle mouse button and drag to move view

right click - select

mouse wheel - zoom

tab - change modes (edit mode, object mode)

g - grab

r - rotate

s - scale

c - center on cursor

h - hide

 

In edit mode, look for an icon that looks like a bullseye. This is proportional edit, and it is your friend. Mouse wheel adjusts the edit radius. It took me about a year to discover proportional edit.

 

Most of the time you are good to stop here. But what if you don't want it to look just like regular armors? Here's how to go about a retexture:

 

1) Open mesh in nifskope

2) Highlight the part you want to change. This will also highlight the nitristrip/shape. Expand that and expand BSShaderPPLightingProperty. Highlight BSShaderTextureSet. In the block details, expand 'Textures'. You will see a purple flower, and most likely the path to the textures the mesh is already using. First will the be diffuse map, which is the one you want. Go to that directory in explorer (or extract it from the BSA) and save it in a new place.

3) Edit it in photoshop, or gimp, or paint.net PS and Gimp need a dds plugin to read dds files. Paint.net reads them natively.

4) Save your new texture IN A NEW PATH/FILENAME

5) Change that path in your nif to the new texture you just made.

6) Save the nif.

There is also a way to make new texture sets in GECK, but I think it's kind of crappy because no one else can use it unless they use your esp.

 

FAQ

Q - "I get an error on export, vertex does not belong to a body part."

A - In the lower left you will see a vertex group menu. Body parts will start with "BP_". Choose the one that is appropriate for the offending vertex, and click "assign".

 

Q - "I get an error on export, vertex is unweighted."

A - Right next to vertex groups is Materials. Just click "assign".

 

Q - Going into the game every time to test is a PITA. Is there a better way?

A - Select the skeleton and press ctrl-tab. Then use your g and r keys on various bones to grab and/or rotate them. This is a quick way to check for obvious issues. If you see clipping here you will almost certainly see it in game. Make sure you don't save any of those movements. You just want to check.

 

Q - I moved some vertices (especially on the z axis) and now I get unsolvable boobage/cooter clipping or male equivalent.

A - In object mode, select the part of the armor, then select the body, and go to object -> scripts -> bone weight copy. Try quality 3, update selected, and click OK. This is actually a good thing to do on anything that should strictly stick to the body.

 

Q - I can't even install blender/nif scripts/etc to get started

A -I always just try to install blender first (32bit only, nifscripts don't work in 64bit blender). The installer tells you what is missing, and I go install those things as they come up. They take you right to the download page in most cases.

 

 

[GrindedStone]

The apply alternate texture method built in the GECK is crappy like you said. However in cases where you have one mesh, but 30 different texture versions for it. It's the more easy way to skin them, otherwise you would need 30 meshes an 30 different folder paths placed in the .NIF which is more work in these rare cases of one mesh but 30 textures for that shape.

 

So set a item to use the one mesh, but create 30 alternate textures, create 30 versions of the item, and when you pick the model (or re-pick) double click on the empty collums next to the shape names in the preview window, an then pick the textures you created. Which it helps to have named the textures something starting with 0001AAA or ZZZ so when the list is displayed you save time an just scroll down to yer prefix.

 

OH yah, thanks for the article!

[ThD17gj692]

An exercise in futility...but here goes. Your attempt to explain how to use blender to modify existing armor to fit other body meshes is laudable---we noobies need all the help we can get. Unfortunately, your tutorial only helped through step 4 (with the aid of Ashara's Clothing Tutorial). You do not provide any detail as to how to "massage the armor as necessary" which is the most important part of the process. If we already knew how to do that step, we wouldn't need your help in the first place. The subsequent steps are equally lacking in detail and therefor just as unhelpful. Thanks for making some kind of an effort to help others, but since you obviously know how to use blender for this purpose, it would have been great if you were more forthcoming about the actual process that you have perfected.

[Riven1978]

I found this to be EXTREMELY helpful and useful. I had never used Blender before i tried it right beside this tutorial and was able to get the EXACT outcome i wanted after spending many months trying to figure out how to do it with 3dsmax which seemed to be step forward now run back 10 steps then repeat. If you follow his steps precisely they work. Now I can start converting some more. Salute to you!

[Kaya47]

An exercise in futility...but here goes. Your attempt to explain how to use blender to modify existing armor to fit other body meshes is laudable---we noobies need all the help we can get. Unfortunately, your tutorial only helped through step 4 (with the aid of Ashara's Clothing Tutorial). You do not provide any detail as to how to "massage the armor as necessary" which is the most important part of the process. If we already knew how to do that step, we wouldn't need your help in the first place. The subsequent steps are equally lacking in detail and therefor just as unhelpful. Thanks for making some kind of an effort to help others, but since you obviously know how to use blender for this purpose, it would have been great if you were more forthcoming about the actual process that you have perfected.

 

I`m sorry but this tutorial helped me out very much.. It wasn`t easy at first, but everything is explained very good. Trust me, i`ve used only this tutorial and now i know how to mashup stuff. At step 5 he refers to position the parts properly on the body, make some adjustments to avoid clipping.. that kind of stuff.

 

I would like to add something: bodyparts are not necessary - like torso, arms, legs, feet. You may delete them if the armor/clothes cover those parts. At the beginning his feet were clipping through his boots.. i struggled to make his feet smaller so the boots fit his legs. After a while i realised that you can just simply delete his legs. You may delete every part of his body except his scene root, bodycaps/limbcaps, and neck - wich is visible -> so don`t delete it. You can see the parts` name you have selected in the lower left corner of the screen.

 

You will have two modes wich you`ll use most: Object Mode and Edite Mode. You can skip through them by pressing [Tab].

In OBJECT MODE you can:

-select parts [Right click] you wish to edit

-deselect parts(objects) with [A]

-move them by pressing [G] - if you wish to move them on one specific axis (X, Y or Z) -> while you`re grabbing the object, long press the middle click.

-scale the object - if you wish to scale on one specific axis (flatten the object or whatever) -> long press the middle click (as you can see, middle click locks you on one axis).

-merge two parts(objects) by pressing [Ctrl] + [J]

In EDIT MODE you can:

-select vertices with right click (those purple dots - after selecting they will turn yellow), select an area of vertices - wich i use it all the time - with or by pressing the [Ctrl] + [left click]

-deselect vertices with [A] or by pressing [Ctrl] + [shift] + [left click] to deselect an area of vertices

-you may want to select lines or even faces -> press [Ctrl] + [Tab] and select vertices, lines or faces.

-grab vertices with [G]

-scale vertices with - very practical - you can select two vertices (or more) and space them out (for example to shrink or enlarge pants at knee area)

-ONE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE THAT WILL SAVE YOU TIME AND EFFORT: you can select smaller parts of the object by selecting a vertex and then pressing [L] - this will select all linked vertices. Let`s say you want to remove some pockets atached to an armor -> enter Edit Mode select a single vertex that belongs to the pocket and press [L] - the entire pocket will be selected without the rest of the armor -> now you can delete it by pressing [X]. Or scale it by pressing or do whatever you want with it.

 

There are more stuff you can do, these are only basics. Remeber that Blender is for editing meshes and NifSkope for adding textures. And sorry for my english :) hope it`s understandable

Edited January 11, 2011 by Kaya47

[Kaya47]

Bad post sorry Edited January 11, 2011 by Kaya47

[tomasan]

Excellent!

Thanks to you i managed to make the link between blender and nifskope. That was the last thing missing to make an armor mod.

 

Believe me or not, you are (one of) the lone source of knowledge about this.

 

Thank you so much for this article.

[Quetzlsacatanango]

Thanks, glad it is useful to you guys. To the guy who had a hard time, the important keystrokes are at the bottom of the article. It is not meant to be a fully in-depth blender tutorial.

Also, I put this up on the wiki a couple weeks ago, so it is there as well.

-Q

[nicanutz]

Does anyone know how to do this for blender 2.78? A lot of the terms and setting options are way different.