Adding sights to weapons.

[thraxas]

I've been converting some meshes from WMK to work with RH Iron Sights and I came across the hunting rifle, which has had sights added to it by RogueHallow in his mod. I was wondering if there's a way of taking those sights from his mesh and putting them onto the WMK meshes.

 

So far copying the branch containing the aperture and barleycorn and pasting it into the WMK meshes has been a complete failure, it looks good on nifskope but crashes the game. Am I going to have to learn to use Blender for this?

[ultskeletor]

I've been converting some meshes from WMK to work with RH Iron Sights and I came across the hunting rifle, which has had sights added to it by RogueHallow in his mod. I was wondering if there's a way of taking those sights from his mesh and putting them onto the WMK meshes.

 

So far copying the branch containing the aperture and barleycorn and pasting it into the WMK meshes has been a complete failure, it looks good on nifskope but crashes the game. Am I going to have to learn to use Blender for this?

 

I don't know the "best practices" for doing this, but I know how I've done it. The sights, the rear Aperture and front Barleycorn, are indeed separate meshes in RH's hunting rifle model, so no Blender necessary. Right-click, Block > Copy Branch on the sight's NiTriStrips node and right-click, Block > Paste Branch into the destination model. As far as where in the model to paste it, I try to stick as closely as possible to whatever conventions that model follows. If all the other meshes are just sitting under the BSFadeNode, I paste the new mesh into the BSFadeNode. If all the non-animating parts are contained under a NiNode like "10MMPistol", that's where I will paste my sights if they, too, will not be animated (obviously, iron sights that are attached to the pistol's slide will animate along with the slide.)

 

Don't forget to rename the node you've pasted in, which may be where you're going wrong. By default, the node's name will still be pointing to whatever number it was in the original model. The number is visible in square brackets after the label associated with that number ("10MMPistol:0 [18]", for example.) You should edit the name and point it to something similar in the new model. For a hunting rifle, I would go with whatever points to "HuntingRifle:0" (which happens to be 14 in this particular model I'm looking at for reference,) because the sights will only move as part of an animation when the rest of the weapon's body moves. The sights do not animate when the bolt moves, so they should not be assigned to "##Bolt:0" (which happens to be 7 in my reference model.)

 

However, the sights mounted on the slide of a weapon may move. If you look at the 10mm pistol, the front sight is non-animating and is basically just attached to the rest of the weapon's body. The front sight, if it was a separate mesh, would be a good candidate for 10MMPistol:0. The rear sight is actually mounted on the weapon's slide, which does animate. Its mesh, if separate, should go under the ##Slide NiNode and should be assigned ##Slide:0 (as the rest of the slide probably is.)

 

Also, consider what is easiest based on the situation. Given how much work goes into lining up a weapon's body and sights for accurate iron sights use, it might actually be easier to paste the WMK accessories onto the RH IS model instead of the reverse. You should learn how to use Blender, too. Most weapons don't have the sights separated out into another mesh for you, but it's usually extremely easy to do in Blender.

[thraxas]

You've pretty much covered all the bases there. Thanks very much! I didn't rename anything when I pasted the sights over so that's probably the cause of the crashes I guess. I've tried pasting the parts from WMK onto the RH mesh and that has worked great, although the fingers on the left hand are now gripping a little oddly. Cheers for the help.