Can I replace Bip01 with a custom armature in Morrowind?

[radarvideolocust]

Howdy, folks! I'm sure some of you are already aware of the OpenMW project. One facet of this project is the creation of a template for non-Bethesda games with non-Bethesda assets. I've already made a set of body parts that work just fine with the default Morrowind armature, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to replace the Morrowind armature with one of my own and get it to work. I've been using Blender for several years, but I'm relatively new to in-depth Morrowind modding. I have an armature that's ready to go, and it would be perfectly usable in other games, and I have body parts to go along with it, but I just don't know what the game wants in order to get them to go together. Basically, I want to completely purge the default character rig (and all other Bethesda assets) so we can use our own, and get the engine to recognize it and know where all of the body parts go so that I can attach my parts to it. Has anybody tried this before? I've been scouring the internet for days with no luck.

 

I've already tried exporting the rig with NIFtools, using Blender 2.49b of course, but it comes out as gibberish when I try to put it into the game, and I don't understand what I'm looking at in NIFskope enough to know what I need to change. Every game has some special way that it expects its assets to be in order for it to read them properly and work with them. I've tried importing base_anim.nif to use it as a reference, and matching up my bone names and mesh names exactly and parenting them in the same way, but still I get visual nonsense or an invisible character.

I've probably put close to 40 hours into this problem and I'm not any closer to a solution than when I started, so any assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

[opengl2]

the entire body is symmetrical you have to replace both sides with the same thing using 3dsmax not blinder

[radarvideolocust]

the entire body is symmetrical

Why is that a problem? Blender can handle symmetry.

 

3dsmax not blinder

Why do you say that?

[radarvideolocust]

We figured it out. We'll make the resulting rig (made in Blender 2.49b) as part of our Example Suite when it gets just a little bit farther along, so that other people can learn from it.