Need a Decent Tutorial or Preferably a Mentor

[lupicatalum]

Hello everyone. I have been modding Oblivion and before that, Morrowind for the better part of ten years now. All of my modding experience however has been confined to the Construction Set (Click and drag and basic item editing). Recently however, I have had ideas swimming around in my head that will require me to step outside the construction set into 3d modeling, at this point, specifically creating my own tilesets for interior and exterior arcitecture. I have spent two days now on multiple search engines scouring the internet for help to no avail. All i was able to find was a tutorial that abruptly ends at the beginning of texturing. I still have no clue how to do anything beyond setting up collision and I dont even know if that works. I am also hoping to learn any other bits of sage wisdom that veterans are willing to share. I am a fast learner and am beyond dedicated to learning as much as possible to be able to help the modding community to the absolute best of my ability. It definitely wouldnt hurt to add another experienced modder to the ranks of the Oblivion community and I would love for that to be me!

[JinixElder]

You will have to bite the bullet and learn Blender for the modelling. Of which I suggest using Youtube vids to learn the program.

 

I, fortunately, have 3dsmax version 8 . Which is how I make models and is perfect (as far as perfect goes) for modeling. For textures and retexturing I use Paint.net to make the textures and NIFskope to apply them. NifSkope does a ton of other things and also requires a great deal of learning and Youtube Vid watching.

It requires spending (for me anyway) many, many hours of what can be tedious learning thru' trial and error. Plus it's really a waste of time as less and less support is out there as everyone moves on to the next way of doing things. NEVER update either your 3d program/texture programs once you have everything working.as updates are useless for these old beth games.and are made to do comp[letely different things.

 

However for me it is a hobby I have played at for many years and I have mods thats I contantly work on that no one will ever see and are larger than the original games - between Morrowind and Oblivion I have 40 gb of data growing as I add more models and textures etc.

Plus I'm not clever at all and my meshes are way to 'heavy' and slow down the mod to a crawl in places. One mod now crashes when I near the town which has 500 NPCs - all with individual AI that keeps them busy all day running around doing things that can crash - I fix - add more etc. So my Mods never are complete.

 

I must have detail - lots of detail - no 2 houses alike - no crates and barrels alike - plants must have variation in color and size. Interiors, of which I have hundreds of, must all look different - all paintings and furniture must be textured differently and windows must all look different.

I also make lots of Interiors that are exteriors so you can walk in and out without opening a door and see thru the windows.

I also make Interiors 'public' so that anyone can and does show up in them.

 

I can (and do) spend hours 'watching' my creations live their lives and with such huge variety I often discover places and people I had completely forgotten about over the years. Lately I have made dozens of different races so I can have completely different looking people. Playing the game for me is to go into my mods - and spend hours watching the action and interaction between NPCS.

 

I could go on and on but it's rather pointless as no-one else could care less I'm sure.

So my advice to you is to do this for your own enjoyment and learn for fun's sake - without expecting any rewards except your own pure enjoyment.

I'm old and retired and have nothing better to do.

My next major step is to learn animation so I can make NPCs do what I want them to do.

 

Spend a LOT of time watching Youtube vids thats a major source of help with modeling and texturing... and goodluck with your modding.