Blender, Nifskope, meshes, etc. in 2016

[zajoru]

Hi, folks.

 

I know I'm kind of late to the party on this, but I'm trying to breathe new life into my Fallout 3 experience by trying to do some modding of my own. I'm having some trouble getting started, though.

 

I've been following some tutorials and videos on using Blender and that's going fairly well. It's still pretty tricky, but I'm learning and getting better at editing meshes. I'm basically at the point where I can do almost everything in Blender that I want to do and it's just a matter of figuring out better and faster ways to do it. I can get the meshes from the game into blender no problem.

 

The problem is getting the meshes from blender back into the game. All of the tutorials on how to work with meshes for Fallout 3 seem to be over five years old. This is a problem because a tutorial may say you need the "latest" version of Blender for example, but then it turns out the actual latest version isn't compatible with something else you need to use and it's hard to figure out what version they actually meant by "latest". There may be a link to a script extension to allow Blender to work with .nif files, but the link just goes to a page that says basically the princess is in another castle and links to a github repository with like twenty files with vague descriptions that I have no idea what to do with.

 

What I have been doing so far is this:

import .nif to Nifskope

export as .obj from Nifskope

import to Blender as .obj

edit in Blender

export as .obj from Blender

import as .obj to Nifskope

receive a bunch of errors and the object looks all shiny, but not good shiny like Firefly. Bad shiny like it isn't being displayed correctly

 

I've come across forum posts where people say there is one problem or another with with working with .obj files but if they suggest alternatives they are either extremely vague or run into the same obsolescence problems I outlined in the third paragraph of this post. There are also posts that suggest converting to .obj files and back, but apparently are lacking in some crucial steps of the process. There is also a frustrating amount of "just do this like you would for Oblivion," which is not very useful for me.

 

Obviously I am doing something wrong, but I don't know enough about this to figure it out on my own and if there are any up-to-date resources, I haven't been able to find them among all of the old information.

 

Can anybody point me in a better direction?

[M48A5]

You are making it more difficult than necessary. You don't have all the tools you need. With the files from "Blender at Fallout3 Nexus" you can download everything you need.

 

There are newer versions of some of these, but the ones here have worked for me: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/30/?

 

I use Python 2.6.5, Blender 2.49 (the only one stable and usable for importing/exporting .nif files without conversion), PYFFI 2.1.5, NifScripts 2.5.5 and NifSkope 1.1.3.

 

INSTALL ORDER IS VITAL. MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS ON THE DESCRIPTION PAGE.

[zajoru]

Thank you. At least one of the links in the description is dead/broken, but it looks like all of the files are downloadable from the files section, so it should work.

 

I appreciate the help.