Help making skeletons wear armor (blender-related)

[tinylampe]

Hello there,

 

As the title says, I'm trying to equip a piece of armor (more precisely a cuirass) to skeletons.

 

After doing some research I learnt that this is not straighforward to do since armor is meant to be used with the skeleton.nif found in meshes/characters/_male and not with the skeleton.nif found in meshes/creatures/skeleton. So I need to adapt the mesh of the cuirass to the new skeleton and as far as I know, one can use blender to do that.

 

Unfortunately I know nothing of Blender.

 

Fortunately, I found a tutorial by LHammonds that guided me through the process quite nicely... until the exporting part, in which Blender started to complain. Link to the tutorial: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Blender_import_and_export_armor_for_Oblivion

 

What I've done so far in Blender 2.49b:

 

1. Loaded the cuirass and got rid of the default skeleton

2. Imported the right skeleton

3. Added armature. This part was a bit confusing: in the tutorial LHammonds went to a menu to add armature and then he instructed us to type 'scene root'. However, in my version of blender (his was 2.46 when making the tutorial) this whole process seemed to be done by default. I attach a picture to illustrate. The picture shows how my blender window looked before starting to 'add armature'. Has blender become more automatic perhaps or amb I misunderstanding something? How can I check that the cuirass is indeed adapted to the new skeleton?

 

Ignoring step 3 for a moment (I assumed that blender was indeed more automatic than before), the program complained when I tried to export my adapted armor. The message I received was this:

 

"Non-UV texture in mesh 'Cube', matieral 'Material'. Either delete all non-UV textures, or in the Shading Panel, under Matieral Buttons, set texture 'Map Input' to 'UV'"

 

Now I mentioned that I'm a complete noob at Blender right? So, exactly, this message was (is) confusing. The funny thing is that I went to the aforementioned shading Panel and the 'Map Inout' was ser to UV (and not to Orco). I tried to learnt a little bit more about UV maps (I found a video-tutorial also by LHammonds about this topic) but it didn't help much.

 

Any kind soul who cares to enlighten me? (the skeletons from my game really want their cuirasses :biggrin: )

[Quetzlsacatanango]

When you first open blender it has a default shape there, called 'cube'. Delete it.

[tinylampe]

When you first open blender it has a default shape there, called 'cube'. Delete it.

 

Wow, what a noob mistake!

 

'Fortunately' there are still some problems left (and I say fortunately because it would be really embarrassing if they only problem had been the small cube in the blender window...)

 

when I tried to equip the adapted cuirass using the CS the following message popped up (see attached pic)

 

In order to fix that I tried two things:

1) Delete the skeleton using nifskope. Didn't work

2) In Blender, exporting the cuirass without selecting the skeleton. This didn't work either, but at least the CS rewarded me with a different message:

 

"Could not find parent node extra data for 'Base/creatures/skeleton/skironcuirass"

(skironcuirass is the name of the cuirass)

 

Any other ideas?

Edited July 27, 2011 by tiny lampe

[Quetzlsacatanango]

Sorry, never messed much with the oblivion CS personally.

[tinylampe]

Sorry, never messed much with the oblivion CS personally.

 

Wow, I think I got it right this time!

 

My first armored skeleton as it appears in the rendering window of the CS:

 

Time for making a mod! ^^