Help with Nifskope

[Campaigner]

Over the past month or so, balancing time between College, World of Warcraft, and figuring out how to make mods, I've pretty much got everything down except for companions (can't find tutorial), scripts (they don't save, even with GECK Powered Up), and combinations of items in Nifskope. Now, ignoring the first two parts of what I said, I've run into MANY problems with combining meshes in Nifskope. With weapons and random objects, I can make a gun have skulls all over it, I can set them ablaze, and I can even do a few other silly things. The problems that I run into, however, are as follows:

 

- (using an example) I try to make a mace out of a Baseball Bat using a generator, motorcycle handle, and the baseball bat as the base. It's simply a Baseball Bat with some nice new features. The bat will be held upside down with the generator stabbing me in the chest, rather than how I saved it with the generator at the end of the bat and the bat in the same position as it originally was.

 

- I want to take the brain from Rex and put it in a bowl, simply for humor. When I do so, the brain is under the bowl for some reason.

 

- I cannot make objects transparent. Adjusting the alpha slider does absolutely nothing on most objects, and it will only work with anything that has glass or thin materials. Why is this? I want my glowing green ghost pistol!

- As an addendum to the above, what do I need to do to give an object a glow, such as the Glowing One glow? I like the radiated look, but can't find that mesh!

 

- EDIT: Where can I find the gibs of an object? I want to have a placeable alien head, but can't find the mesh for just the head. Basically the same thing as the Deathclaw hand, but with other creatures.

 

 

These are my problems. Can anyone assist me in figuring out why they persist on saving right, but coming in the game wrong?

Edited March 26, 2011 by Campaigner

[baduk]

Hi!

 

I think 2 of your questions is related. The ones about after you have pasted the geometry onto the other nif and then it is positioned wrong in game. Try applying the translation and rotation onto the object data with nifskoep!

just selecting your nitristrips or nitrishape node right click > transform > apply. It will be fine for you unless you are working with skinned geometry (unless its weighted to an armature or somethign)

 

Making stuff transparent works just fine but u gotta add a nialphaproperty to the nitristrips or nitrishape node. select it and right click > node > add property > nialphaproperty. Then select the nialphaproperty u added and in the block details window for it you can see flags set to 237, change it to 4845. Then of course tho on the diffuse (color) texture for that object you will need to be having an alpha channel with a greyscale map on it to control what parts are transparent, translucent, or opaque. black makes it transparent and white makes it opaque. U can fiddle with the threshold setting in the nialphaproperty also to adjust.

 

Last one is the gibs. Actually fo3 and new vegas implemented dismemberment in a very similar way to the deadly reflex mod for oblivion. So instead of having just parts objects that fly off it clones the whole nif but only renders the part that is supposed to be visible. Instead of whatever skycaptain did tho, in fo3 and nv they use a special set of vertex groups in the bsdismembermentskininstance of the nitristrips node to assign the different faces to each body part for vats targeting and dismemberment. Basically it means u want to import the nif into blender and create a gibs object u need by deleting the unwanted parts of the geometry, removing all vertex groups, adding a collision mesh, and exporting it as a clutter type of object.

 

Ok i read your bottom sig part. I think the simple exercise of making these gib objects is a good start for you if you want to start gaining 3d modeling experience. Each of us has a different learning style so working through a tutorial may not work for you. For me i started modding on 3d modeling and there are many tutorials for that. Some tutorials are outdated, others are very long like noob to pro. I read only parts of noob to pro as i needed information, just searching for the part i wanted. I started out tho reading a tutorial by malo on making clothing and that was the right one for me. But for you.. I think u need to know how to go into edit mode and select vertices, trying out some stuff like scale and extrude and whatever but for the alien head gib, delete everything except for the alien body geometry object.

 

Get blender installed properly with nifscripts.Installation

 

edit mode, select everything below the neck part and delete it. Select the bottom vertices of the neck and with proportional editing on at a low radius setting scale it to 0. This stuff you can use as keywords to search in noob to pro and it will let you know how to do em.

 

After you have prepared your 3d model then you add a collision mesh to it. I think easiest tutorial Is the hull script video one, try different shapes like sphere collision video.

 

Exporting stuff also can be an issue sometimes cause u gotta learn the settings, anyway if u get stuck go ahead and post on the thread and i would be happy to give you some advice.

Edited March 27, 2011 by baduk