Ammunition alteration and you! or... me, really.

[archiusPendragon]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nb6nlc3xbpwy96y/ScreenShot1.bmp?dl=0

This is what happens when I attempt to alter the smallenergycell mesh to add a glow effect to it (this is rough simple testing right now for proof of concept work). My problem is that the first-person loaded mesh isn't the same as the world mesh, as proven by editing the mesh in the weapon itself.

I want to avoid altering the weapon mesh for several reasons

-Better quality models of these weapons exist and are planned to be compatable with the mod I'm working on.

-Changing the ammo on the model forces me to use one glow color when I'll have several (one for each ammo type for this)

-It is time consuming, tedious, and silly to alter every weapon using the ammo I'm going to add this effect to.

-Avoiding editing the mesh is a priority as it adds extra weight to the mod that we were hoping to avoid.

Now, my thoughts were that there might be a '1stpersonsmallenergycell' somewhere, but that doesn't seem to be the case - it seems as though Bethesda has made the energy cell a unique Ninode in each weapon mesh. To me this seems silly but an understandable thing to do.

Any assistance would be lovely, I know I'm posting this late at night for some, or early in the morning for others, but I'm just positively befuddled by this.

[archiusPendragon]

Bumping slightly due to new information being found

It appears that the meshes with weapons are referencing it (or maybe I'm an idiot I don't know) in the ##PPenergycell ni-node name.

I'll update as I experiment.

[Moraelin]

The ammo and/or magazine mesh is in the weapon itself, as is the spent case mesh (which might also be a battery when you take it out of the gun.) Which is not all bad. It also helps with aligning it, for example. (E.g., I had to shift the battery slightly to fit my assault blasters.) But you can also take a weapon like the break-open .32 (which is still around in NV, just not in the world) as a base, and replace it with a 30mm shell or with a battery. Like I did in the Vladimir and respectively the Cool Lasers.

 

But essentially each gun has its own magazine, and the battery there is the magazine shape for a laser. You can't really get around that. For better or worse.

 

You can change the magazine shape and texture, but that will affect that weapon for all ammo types too. E.g., if you give the Pew Pew a glowing battery, its battery will always glow, regardless of what type of ammo you load into it.

[Moraelin]

As for 1stPerson, all weapons (and a bunch of clothing) has a 1stPerson record. Which MAY have a different mesh (e.g., you could have the fuller actually modelled in the mesh for when your player uses a katana, but it can be just in the normal map to save triangles when someone else uses it and you don't see it up close.) But all I've seen in the vanilla game are just the same mesh with a different texture set applied to it. Mostly the same texture in higher res, really (e.g., 1024x1024 for your player, instead of the usual 512x512 everywhere else), though occasionally it can have some other differences too. E.g. the .32 snub nose mentioned before had a brown wood handle for 1stPerson, but a black handle everywhere else.

 

So, long story short, you could retexture the battery for the 1st person view by just editing its texture set.

 

I should however mention the following 2 details or possibly caveats:

 

1. It really has nothing to do with 1stPerson vs 3rd person, despite the name. The 1stPerson model is used when the player uses that item, regardless of whether it's in first person or third person.

 

2. You don't HAVE to have a different 1stPerson texture set. If you make only the high res textures, you don't have to make a 1stPerson record just to say "use the same in 1st person too." If you leave the 1stPerson model set as NONE, it will just use the regular NIF and textures.