Trying to add custom armor gauntlets and problems

[xander2077]

I have been working on a mod for some time now and released the completed pluginless version and prematurely released the gaunlets and had to retact that part.

 

here is why. in morrowind the player character cant wear bracers and gloves together, so this presents a problem, i thought at first i could get away with tricking morrowind into doing that somehow and a friend put them in the CS for me, but you cant wear both bracers and gloces so what to do? well i decided to try and make gauntlets out of the gloves, and made version 3 of them. well they looked good part of the way, and he was able to get them to show all except if they were put on for the 3rd person view the hands were invisible. now the nif looked fine and so we tried the 1st person, then the right hand only was invisible. so back to the drawing board.

 

then i got to looking at the other armors with gauntlets built in. iron, steel and a few others. all of them have one thing in common, they have two files, one names hands.first.nif, and the other is skinned.nif...

 

so i chose the closest donor to what i needed to do and it was the chitin nifs.

 

i decided to take that in blender, remove the cuirass and bracers, and replace them with my own. parented the bracers to the armiture, parented the curiass to the armiture. then i proceeded to weight paint them and everything else i needed to do until it was time ti export. they exported fine, and i took them back in nifskope to check and fix a few issues like possible normals facing wrong way, or texture remapping.

 

then i saved it.

 

then there were more problems, this time nothing worked. so upon examination i found the export had screwed up the heirarchy, so i attempted to replace the missing nodes with the chitin nodes that were missing somehow by copy pasting, but that just made things worse. fixing the heirarchy only put things all out of place and the skeleton was twisted out of shap and the gloves and bracers were now facing opposite ways or one flipped up, one flipped down like a Z. try as i might i cannot figure out how to do this right, and i have no idea how to do this in blender 2.49b, i do not know what i am doing wrong, perhaps a transform that is screwing things up, i dont know. but when i cut and paste enough of the tree from the chitin, it faces 90 degrees from the one i modified, and pastes the whole chitin skinned or hand mesh in the same window in nifskope, so something is way off, and i think it has to be the empties with their messed up xyz coordinates, or the bones are somehow misaligned.

 

if i set the import in blender back to default values, to fix bone roll etc, then the darned thing makes the hands face inward like clasped hands one facing up and one down, so i uncheck the buttons that supposedly put it in bind and fix roll. they only mess the thing up. only way to get the t pose is to uncheck those buttons. but of course the results on export say different, that the mesh is now screwed up.

 

i also have a problem with nifscripts not exporting it as morrowind friendly in the naming heirarchy. it supplants the Bip01, which is supposed to be the first node in nifskope, and instead it makes the name of the nif the first node. so that is why i tried to copy paste it to emulate the vanilla chitin heirarchy. but even when i get it right, the model is all skewed out of place, as in the parts do not sit in the t pose any more, they are in weird arrangements. nothing is stretched but the skeleton. but the rest is way out of place and would look horrible in game. if i could get it to show

 

 

is there anyone who has an idea of how to fix this? how to start out right and how tomake sure things dont get messed up in blender?