Unable to export from Blender with Blender nifscripts

[SickleYield]

Surely someone else must have had this problem?

 

Okay, hang on while I get as technical as a noob can get...

 

I've made a new skirt and a simple new bed mesh, and UV mapped them, and made sure the normals were pointing the right way. I textured them in blender with a .jpeg, the way tutorials always say to do. I export the bed. It has no texture, and it's half as big as it should be. What am I doing wrong?

 

I weight paint the skirt. I UV map it. I give it a simple texture. I export it. The resulting .nif has no bone ninodes or nitristrips and no texture. I can't import it into a skirt mesh that uses the same bones, because all that happens is they both disappear. Same result with importing it into another mesh as an .obj.

 

Can anyone help? I know I'm using the latest version of nifskope.

[Senus]

Surely someone else must have had this problem?

 

Okay, hang on while I get as technical as a noob can get...

 

I've made a new skirt and a simple new bed mesh, and UV mapped them, and made sure the normals were pointing the right way. I textured them in blender with a .jpeg, the way tutorials always say to do. I export the bed. It has no texture, and it's half as big as it should be. What am I doing wrong?

 

I weight paint the skirt. I UV map it. I give it a simple texture. I export it. The resulting .nif has no bone ninodes or nitristrips and no texture. I can't import it into a skirt mesh that uses the same bones, because all that happens is they both disappear. Same result with importing it into another mesh as an .obj.

 

Can anyone help? I know I'm using the latest version of nifskope.

 

 

With textures in blender there are 2 places to define textures. I assign textures both ways.

 

One is in the UV editor window under the image menu, assigning an image here is only for viewing in the 3D window and it wont be rendered or exported by the nif script.

 

The other way is to assign your object a material and then assign the material a texture. This way will get rendered by blender and exported by the nif scripts. You need to make sure that the map to tab in the materials button bar is set to UV otherwise the nif scripts wont export it.

 

Also Oblivion will only work with a dds texture, no other formats will work. Blender however can not use a dds texture. So what u do is make a jpg or tga for display in blender, then configure the export scripts with the "force dds" option turned on. This way when you export it will make your nif look for a dds file with the same name as the jpg or tga image you use in blender.

 

With the size there is an option for a scale factor when you configure the nif scripts, I set this to 1 and my sizes come out fine.

 

 

Rigging your mesh for use with bones is a whole other story. Cuteunit's rigging tutorial for blender explains it all. You can find it here. If you follow this tute exactly it works. Its just there are many places that things can go wrong so you have to be very careful to follow it exactly.

 

Some common problems with rigging to look out for are;

 

Each mesh piece must have an armature to the bones, called Scene Root. And must be paranted to the bones.

 

Make sure you create your vertex groups manualy with the names having the exact same spelling as the bone names.

 

Every single vertex must have a weighting.

 

No vertex can be weighted to more than 4 bones.

 

 

When exporting from blender make sure you have the bones and your mesh(es) selected.

 

 

In nifskope you need to copy and paste your trishapes into an original bethesda nif. Dont forget to cast the SKin partition spell on your trishape(s) after you paste them in and also make sure you parant your trishapes to the correct NiNode.

 

Its sounds harder than it really is. If your carefull it does work, just so many places to go wrong.

[SickleYield]

With textures in blender there are 2 places to define textures. I assign textures both ways.

 

The other way is to assign your object a material and then assign the material a texture. This way will get rendered by blender and exported by the nif scripts. You need to make sure that the map to tab in the materials button bar is set to UV otherwise the nif scripts wont export it.

 

Also Oblivion will only work with a dds texture, no other formats will work. Blender however can not use a dds texture. So what u do is make a jpg or tga for display in blender, then configure the export scripts with the "force dds" option turned on. This way when you export it will make your nif look for a dds file with the same name as the jpg or tga image you use in blender.

 

With the size there is an option for a scale factor when you configure the nif scripts, I set this to 1 and my sizes come out fine.

 

In nifskope you need to copy and paste your trishapes into an original bethesda nif. Dont forget to cast the SKin partition spell on your trishape(s) after you paste them in and also make sure you parant your trishapes to the correct NiNode.

 

Its sounds harder than it really is. If your carefull it does work, just so many places to go wrong.

 

 

Thanks for replying, I really appreciate it. I did CuteUnit's tutorial, and I know all the vertexes are covered. Apparently I need to REconfigure my Blender nif scripts, but I can't figure out how to do that - they don't show up in the scripts window (it just says "export nif" and then sends me to a file window). I'll go look again.

 

Anyone care to enlighten me further? In a way that does not involve the n00b to pro tutorial, because that one only covers your first config and doesn't work after that?

[Senus]

Go here for a tutorial on configuring the blender nif scripts.

 

Important:

 

Before you can configure the scripts you need to use them at least once to initialise. Dumb i know but just make a box and export it to nif before you try to configure the export scripts. Then forget about the box you exported and then go follow the tute.

 

Also if you want to configure the import script you'll need to use it at least once before configuring.

[SickleYield]

Before you can configure the scripts you need to use them at least once to initialise. Dumb i know but just make a box and export it to nif before you try to configure the export scripts. Then forget about the box you exported and then go follow the tute.

Also if you want to configure the import script you'll need to use it at least once before configuring.

 

Thanks for your continued interest, but the scripts have been in use for a long time. I've been using Blender for months now (teaching it to myself is a long, slow process even with tutorials) and importing/exporting all that time with varying degrees of success. The problem came when I got the newest version of nifskope and needed to configure them again in order to export a later nif version.

 

I finally figured it out. You have to go to the Scripts window, then the scripts menu, then system, then the script configure utility.

 

I don't know why, when everyone keeps telling me to set the scale to 1, but I have to set it to 10 for things to be the same size as game objects.

 

Thanks to a couple hours' fiddling around and the above excellent texture advice, I can now export textured, visible objects. I succeeded in getting a helmet in the CS also, though it showed up pink and I'll have to go back and review the alpha properties. Still no luck with the skirt, but I think it's a weight painting problem. I'll start over with a smaller, simpler one and work my way up.

 

At the very least, this should allow me to succeed in making the furniture I keep planning on, and a couple of physicked silk blankets through blender and nifskope (I also figured out the bsxflags, I think.) If so, I'll be producing a darker house mod with some original furniture and objects.

 

 

One last question, and thanks for reading and replying:

 

When you're fiddling in nifskope after export, what do you do with flags to set up clothing? When you right click the node and choose "flags," Is it skin influence with triangles or bounding box or what? CuteUnit's tutorial seems a little confusing on this point.