Helpfull Tutorials Wanted.

[wolfpack91]

i have Decided I want to Try my hand at Modleing and Texture Mapping for some a Mod i want but i know others have asked for as well. Drinkable Monster energy and or others as well but mostly i Want my monsters, any help on scripting them in and the Hard Core effects creation, would be cool but also, how to's for 3D modleing and texture creation, for example my setup is a Two fold one my main Rig is a Nvidia GTX 770, AMD 8 Core 8350 Driven system as such has the horse power to run most anything, further more i also have access to a Macbook Pro with all the Essential Photo editing and Creation Software that Adobe has to offer any thing else i can get Opensource for both Mac And Windows 7 that i will need would be Nice too. but as a First step into this feild i wanted to do something simple like cans the Next project would be recreating My Smith and Wesson MP9, MP45, and MP40 since its the only pistol left that millenia and his crew have yet to tackle so if you are all reading as well any advice from pro's to a Newb on the weapon side would be awesome.

[madmongo]

What you need in order to do 3d modeling and texturing is some sort of modeling program that has the ability to deal with nif files, and something that can edit dds image files.

 

For modeling, there are only two packages that work that I know of, Blender and 3ds Max. Blender is free. 3ds Max isn't. I use Blender, because of the cost issue. I can't tell you how to set up 3ds Max.

 

For Blender, you need Blender itself, and you also need the nif import and export tools to plug into it. Somewhere on the nexus (might be on the fallout 3 section instead of new vegas) there's a download that has Blender 2.49 with a matching set of nif tools and nifscope all included. It's an older version of Blender, but you just take those files and install them, and everything works together. If you try to use a newer version of Blender, you can run into a lot of trouble finding a set of nif tools that works properly.

 

There's a decent Blender tutorial called from Noob to Pro (or something like that). I recommend starting there. Once you get the basic hang of Blender, then you can look up specific tutorials like how to make Fallout weapons using Blender and how to make Fallout statics and clothing, etc.

 

For editing textures, you can use either Paint.net or Gimp. Each has a dds plugin that you will need to install. Paint.net is simpler and is both easier to learn and easier to use. However, Gimp has more features and can handle normal maps, which Paint.net can't do.

 

To create your own monsters, what you'll definitely want to do at first is start with an existing monster of some sort. That way you can use its basic skeleton and all of its animations. All you need to do in Blender is create your new monster model, parent that model to the monster skeleton, adjust the bone weights (because Blender's defaults never seem to get it right) and export it as a nif, and you're done modeling. Then add the model in the GECK, create any special scripts you may want, add in any special sounds that you want, and you have a monster.

 

Creating a simple static is probably the best place to start. That's about as simple as it gets.

[wolfpack91]

you said Paint and Gimp How About Adobe Photoshop. we Have a MacBook Pro With a Full Adobe Suite On it including Photoshop CSS. is there a DDS plug in for it

[madmongo]

There is a dds plugin available for photoshop. I don't have any personal experience with it so I can't tell you how well it works, whether or not it can handle normal maps, or how easy it is to get it working.

 

Also, note that paint.net is not the same as ms paint that comes with windows. Paint.net may be downloaded for free.

Edited May 19, 2015 by madmongo

[ArekkusuStorm]

The DDS/Normal map plugin doesn't work for Photoshop CC (You can still open and save DDS files but generating normal maps will result in a crash) but is fine for CS6 or 5, so what I do is use GIMP to generate the normal map and load that into Photoshop to do any editing there. Saving it in Photoshop also seems to lower the file size by quite a lot.

 

Edit: Oh and to add on to MadMongo's previous comment regarding Blender - that is if you're planning on using it. I don't have links for gun tutorials, but the Nexus has a few tutorials linked for creating armour or melee weapons here but uh, some of the info they give is false so don't hesitate to ask the community if something doesn't work. The Fallout 3 tutorials can be applied to New Vegas so don't worry about that.

Edited May 19, 2015 by ArekkusuStorm