Mesh and Texture issues

[Egypt9]

Ok, so i've pretty much been beating my head against a wall here, I've followed every tutorial I can find and i'm stumped. I have this mesh thats pretty much done and needs to get into Nifskope. The problem is whenever, however, I export it, it comes up blank in Nifskope. Every tutorial says that I should see my texture there and I dont, just big white dumbness. In blender, my shield is already seamed and unwrapped in the UV window, I save it into c:\. Then I go ahead and Join the handle and the shield mesh together, which causes the UVmeshing to go a lil crazy. Unless this is the reason its not showing up, i'm currently ignoring it because i dont know how ti fix it. I could have sworn they said you didn't have to UVmesh the handle but if I export without Joining, my shield ends up 5 feet from the handle. I go into the material section and I turn on "textface" set the one button from Orco to UV, and then make the Tex an Image file and load my image in, its 512X512. Export script is set to 1. When I export, I get whiteness. Anybody see a step I'm missing here? There's also this big weird white line in my dumbwhite .nif when i get done and i dont really understand that either.

 

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/Egy...notworking2.jpg

 

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/Egypt9/notworking.jpg

[SickleYield]

1. For you to see your texture in Blender (as in the pic), it has to be a jpg, bmp, targa, etc. For you to see it in NifSkope, it has to be a .dds. Anything else will show up white. If you use a Bethesda texture it will also show up white, because it's packed in the BSA so NifSkope can't find the folder, but if you used your own that shouldn't be a problem.

 

2. Everthing has to be UV mapped, period. You might not have needed to do it to the handle in this particular case because you used a Bethesda handle that was already mapped. If you want to fix the overlap, select just the handle and edit its UV map - move it over to the right and shrink it so it doesn't overlap the shield pieces. You can edit vertices in the UV window much like in the 3d.

 

Joining two objects also joins their UV maps, which will overlap unless they were originally made not to.

 

3. See that long white thing in your NifSkope picture? That usually indicates transformation was not applied. Looks to me like you didn't apply scale and rotation before you exported. (Common mistake, I do it all the time. ;) ) Go back to blender and press ctrl-a before you export and see if that fixes the problem.

[Egypt9]

Thank you SO much! This was exactly what I needed.

 

I've editied this post probably about 7 times now, but I have to say that I am very pleased this time around! I found a program on the oblivion wiki (DDS converter 2) that will totally convert my pictures from Jpeg to DDS, im using Dx1c or something like that because I read that it will be the most compatable since i dont have any transaprences. I'm a little worried about the lighting but other then that, i got great results!

 

1. I mapped the handle in UV just like you said, took 5 minutes, i had to unwrap it twice and rescale but it worked!

 

2. I struggled really hard because even though the system script was set to force a dds creation, it was not happening, as soon as i found DDS converter 2, problem solved!!

 

3. I controled Aed and well, the white line shrunk slightly but its not quite gone, you be the judge on whether there is a problem.

 

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/Egy...lmostthere2.jpg

 

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/Egy...lmostthere1.jpg

 

So now its textured, the only problem is when i go into Mesh> it only has smooth and prune triangle as an option. Stripify shows up but the other one, Update Tangent Space, does not. Strippify didn't show up until i changed the version 20.0.0.4....man...i should really quit reading over things ;p. How can i get the other one to show up?

[IamBatosai]

1. For you to see your texture in Blender (as in the pic), it has to be a jpg, bmp, targa, etc. For you to see it in NifSkope, it has to be a .dds. Anything else will show up white. If you use a Bethesda texture it will also show up white, because it's packed in the BSA so NifSkope can't find the folder, but if you used your own that shouldn't be a problem.

 

Actually, with my modeling and texturing for Morrowind, I have found that NifSkope accepts .bmp textures just fine. I haven't tried other kinds but I will soon. I don't know if it's because of a newer version that I have or what. This is good though because I can't get my .dds scripts to work for Gimp.

[Egypt9]

Yeah, try googling DDS Converter 2, its really nice and it will let you ping pong between image formats really easy. You should be able to get your images into the GIMP no problem. I think they have a working plugin for PSP9 out. There is another one called IRfan something....i forget what it was called as it was late when I stumbled upon the post that helped me. There are options out there though!

[SickleYield]

You don't need DDS converter to get images into GIMP. GIMP will natively open a ridiculously large number of file types, and there is a .dds plugin you can download for converting files to and from .dds:

 

http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=4816

 

There's a plugin for making normal maps, too (elsewhere).

 

Even if you can view .bmp in NifSkope, you still won't be able to use it in Oblivion - unlike Morrowind, the game engine will only accept .dds.

 

Your transform looks fine, Egypt - but only playtest will tell. ;) As for the tangent space thing: did you copy your exported mesh into an existing game mesh to bring it up to nif version 20.0.0.5? It won't work ingame otherwise. With actual clothes/armor we have to create a new skin partition, too, but you won't have to do that with a shield.

 

Also, your nif appears not to have collision. You'd need to open another shield, copy it over, and delete the other one and re-save in order to use collisions without 3ds Max (which can make collision and export it). Without that the shield will be useless. That's what the web of orange lines you see when you open a game shield is for.