Breaking a single-piece armor down to multiple pieces.

[MShoap13]

I recently downloaded an armor/clothing mod that I really like. The only downside to this mod is that the armor is one equipable item. I would like to tear the item down to a chest-piece, gloves, greaves, and boots (It doesn't include a helmet).

 

What tools would I need to accomplish the mesh and texture work, and is there any advice pertaining to the normal body mesh and texture or general dos and don'ts?

 

I've never done any 3d modelling work, though I have a general Idea of what's going on and I often reference files included in the game to see if I'm doing it right. I have a basic understanding of the CS and TES4Edit so the plugin work is mostly under control.

 

Any help is appreciated. :biggrin:

[Nadimos]

Go teach yourself the blender (v2.49) basics. In order the program to run you need to install the blender nifscript aswell as python. Search for blender on tesnexus and use google or youtube, if u wanna know more specific things. There is atleast like ten videos on just about every topic, you ever wanted to know something about. Then go find Mr. Silkas Static Mesh Tutorial and make your first static object work ingame, so you understand the basic process.

 

Armor and Cloth besides having diffrent import/export settings still require one more step, then simple statics, in that you have to reweight each object to the bones(skeleton.nif) individually with the boneweight copy script. So you cannot just split it up in blender, then immediatelly export. That would give you a lot of weird errors.

 

Hope it helps!

Edited July 14, 2011 by Nadimos

[MarkInMKUK]

Grab Blender from HERE along with any other utilities you need

[MShoap13]

So... I've been following a blender tutorial for about two hours now and I've accomplished making a house mesh. A simple 30 face house! :wallbash:

 

The only notable things I've learned that I could possibly apply to what I want to do are basic camera controls and that Blender has multiple "modes".

 

It's not that I don't want to put the time in to learn how to do what I want, it's simply that I feel I'm learning vast amounts of entirely useless information as I have no desire to create my own 3d models from scratch.

 

There has to be a more intuitive way of doing this... Would it be possible to do what I want simply using NifSkope? The biggest problems I've seen with this approach so far are when I remove the mesh for one object, the body mesh underneath it doesn't exist and removing the bones (which I believe are there for attaching the mesh to the skeleton for animation purposes) one by one, is a slow, painful process. It seems like holes in the body mesh would come up with some interesting graphical problems in game. I've yet to find a way to select multiple bones in NifSkope.

 

Edit: After some more playing with NifSkope, I believe I will be able to C&P from one workspace to another to achieve what I want. :biggrin:

 

The only issue I may run into is the chest-piece. I believe I'm going to have to open my unaltered body mesh then C&P the pieces of the chest I want onto that.

 

Edit edit: Ok, so I did run into problems on the chest-piece. There was some serious clipping between the item and my unaltered body, and the body that came with the mod had large chunks removed where the gloves etc. had been. I ended up having to chop and merge pieces from my unaltered HGEC body onto the altered body that came with the mod.

 

Now I've run into a problem exporting the work I've done into a .nif. I get an error stating "multiple bones named bip01_blahblahblah" I can't seem to find any multiple bones in Blender, however.

 

Edit edit edit: I got it exported to a .nif and NifSkope displays it properly... now to put it in game.

Edited July 15, 2011 by MShoap13