Trying to edit a protectron's legs & hands.

[devinpatterson]

Hello. I'm trying to edit a protectrons (NV) legs and remove a hand. I import the protectron.nif into blender, use <ctrl> L to select the linked vertices and scale them .85 on the x axis. The legs look good. I do the same on the protectrons fingers and delete them. OK this is looking good and is turning out really easy. Export and.......no protectron, the nif doesn't show up in geck. Eventually I go back and import the orginal protectron.nif, don't do a thing to it, just export it. Doesn't work in the geck. Strange, I'v imported and exported weapons. Here is my import export settings. I checked the sticky and browsed through all 12 pages of the blender forum and didn't see any info on editing anmated nif's (is that the correct term?) that applied to my protectron.

 

I tried exporting as an obj and importing to nifskope. It had lost the bsshader texture sets and I had trouble adding the block in. It wouldn't show up in geck either.

 

I see a lot of tutorials about adding equipment to in game actors, but havn't run across anything on editing the actors(creatures) themselves. I'v just started blender 2.49b (havn't gotten past the hat tutorial in blender noob to pro), but have been working with nifskope for a little longer (mostly adding items like hat's, weapons etc to protectrons and other robots). But I am under the impression you can't really edit the meshes in nifskope (other than scale, translate the whole mesh) like you can in blender?

 

So I was hoping someone might be able to help me. I don't see vanilla actor models (except humans) being altered very much, but it seems like changing bots and other creatures dimensions could add a lot of value to the game.

Edited September 3, 2011 by devinpatterson

[Quetzlsacatanango]

You need shadow map for rigged meshes.

Look at another working mesh in nifskope, or the screen in my mashup tutorial to see what all the shader flags should be.

[devinpatterson]

Are you sure you have everything parented to a single armature? Grab it and move it around. If everything doesn't move, you missed a step somewhere.

If the hand/claw/whatever only has a single vertex group you could add that to the gun manually and skip the bone weight copy altogether.

 

OK I'll try moving it around and see if I missed anything. It wouldn't matter if I removed part of the mesh would it? I deleted the speed loader. in re: to doing it manually (I think the claw is one vertex group), I'll focus on the boneweight script since it's so important to future projects, but I do like to know alternate ways to accomplish a goal (in case I get stuck). For manual would it be moving the sequoia over to teh claw and parenting or joining the two. Would it mean weight painting?

 

You need shadow map for rigged meshes.

Look at another working mesh in nifskope, or the screen in my mashup tutorial to see what all the shader flags should be.

 

Shadowmap, OK cool, I'll check that out and your armor mashup. Hoping to get things up and running, so much to do on the mod. Thanks again for the help Quetzlsacatanango.

[devinpatterson]

Thanks Quetzlsacatanango, ticking shadowmap got the new protectron in game/geck. Thanks for the help :thumbsup:

Now I just have to try your suggestions and figure out the boneweight script, then I'll be in business. Although I wonder if a shirt or pants could ever fit over a vanilla protectron with it's body shape? Maybe have to alter chest and head.

Edited September 5, 2011 by devinpatterson