FO4 Character Import to Blender

[kkim1975]

Folks,

 

My question pertains to this modding tutorial, and I am using the same exact list of tools as specified in the tutorial.

 

Anyway, I grabbed a character NIF mesh from the game folder, imported it into 3DS Max and exported it as a Blender-friendly mesh. Then I imported it in Blender 2.75.

 

Just to reiterate, I carefully followed every step as instructed in the tutorial.

 

Once the mesh is imported in Blender, I noticed two alarming things:

 

1. The mesh is really big. I used to mod for Skyrim and the imported character mesh was no where near this big. Is this simply a matter of resizing the mesh? I remember that for Skyrim mods I've never messed with the character mesh size, so I am wondering if resizing the imported mesh will lead to other unintended consequences down the road.

 

2. The body mesh is in pitch black. Again, I've never had this issue with Skyrim modding. And I didn't have to do anything to make the mesh have the appropriate lighting on its surface. I'm not even sure if it's simply a matter of adding a light source to the scene or what.

 

Did any FO4-Blender modders run into the same/similar issue? Any help/tips/insight will be greatly appreciated!

Edited June 8, 2016 by kkim1975

[KaelVirum]

I have the same issue when dealing with character meshes from FO4 except for them being pitch black. They are over sized and oriented wrong for me and once I take them through the process to get them back in game the animations do not transfer over, which is really annoying. I wish I could help other than to lament with you on these things.

[kkim1975]

Bump -- Someone must have done this before and this is probably the best place to find the answer, so I won't back down until I'm enlightened. :devil:

[kkim1975]

Just wanted to add what I think might be a clue on why my imported character mesh is huge and in pitch black.

 

I didn't notice this before but while I was trying various import/export settings, I got the following warning when I imported the mesh in Blender:

 

"Texture '{Full path truncated} ...\femalebody_n.dds (Normal Bump)' not found or not supported and no alternate available"

"Texture '{Full path truncated} ...\femalebody_n_n.dds (Normal Bump)' not found or not supported and no alternate available"

"Texture '{Full path truncated} ...\femalebody_n_g.dds (Normal Bump)' not found or not supported and no alternate available"

 

So, okay, the original texture isn't properly associated with the imported mesh... but I doubt that it would cause the mesh to appear in pitch black (nevermind the overblown size). Especially when adding a light source doesn't seem to make any difference.

 

On a related note, the tutorial I mentioned in my initial post doesn't cover any of the import option settings when the mesh gets imported to Blender. Maybe it's because there's no need to change anything. Or... could it be that the import options need to be tweaked a bit? I tried different options, but have been out of luck so far.

 

Still waiting for someone to shed some light on this. :confused:

Edited June 9, 2016 by kkim1975

[KaelVirum]

I do know that you do have to make changes to the mesh after you get it to Blender. I took the mesh I'm trying to work with from the game, loaded it in Nifskope, exported it as an OBJ, opened it in Blender, made my changes and imported the altered mesh back to Nifskope without changing the scaling at all and the thing was way bigger than the original mesh when I loaded it into Nifskope as well. I think I figured out why it isn't the correct scaling, however. Blender OBJs, indeed I think OBJs in general, do not retain the bone data or the weight painting of the skeleton. So essentially, in order to get it to OBJ format, you have to discard all of that. And I know from working with other formats that do include the skeleton and weight painting that if you delete the skeleton sometimes the mesh itself gets really huge and can even be oriented wrong.

 

The fact of your meshes showing up black in Blender might actually be a different problem than the textures. When you create an object in Blender each face has a light and dark side. The light side is usually what you want facing outward when making more than just a plane so it could be that your Blender is reading the faces as being reversed when it shouldn't. I'm not really sure about that, but I have messed up a time or two on a model and part of the mesh was darker than the rest and light didn't shine on it properly, for Blender, so I had to figure out how to reverse those faces so it looked right.

[kkim1975]

@Kael - Thanks for the comments. In my case though, I haven't deviated at all from the tesnexus wiki tutorial. So, there was no conversion from the in-game NIF to any other file format, including OBJ. Also, the skeleton was kept intact until the mesh was fully imported into Blender and that's when I removed it (again) as instructed in the tutorial. As for your theory of mesh's face facing the wrong direction, it's definitely possible and I thought of that possibility myself. But, I discounted that scenario for a reason I will explain below.

 

@Everyone: So, I did further experiments with this whole import/export business (seriously, it shouldn't be THIS complicated). I'm not even thinking about the overblown mesh size at this point - that's after I figure out why the mesh is in pitch black.

 

After the mesh is imported into Blender, I deleted the skeleton and selected the mesh itself. Looking at the mesh material attributes, I noticed that there are three materials that are already associated to the mesh. And these seemed to be exactly what I mentioned in my earlier posting (remember how 3 warnings were thrown immediately after import?) These mats had nothing but pitch black colors on them, so I removed them from the mesh and assigned a new material to the mesh. As soon as I did that, I noticed that a small area of the (huge) mesh near a spot light was somewhat lit. Well, that's a change! :happy: So, the mesh became more visible as I strengthened the brightness of the spot light. I even tried applying the default body texture from FO4 and I confirmed that the texture could be seen -- where the spot light was near, anyway. (At least the faces are facing the right direction, which is outward, I guess...)

 

But I also noticed that the color of the default square mesh that gets loaded when Blender is initially launched is also affected when the NIF mesh is imported. I thought it might be due to external scene information being loaded along with the mesh, so I also tried unchecking the "Override Scene Information" checkbox before importing the mesh. It didn't make any difference. In fact, I had the same exact light source (one spot light) that was lighting the square mesh from all directions. As soon as the NIF mesh is loaded, the shading of the square mesh changes (half of it gets really dark) but everything else is still the same, including the attributes of the spot light.

 

And I thought Skyrim modding workflow was tedious.

 

 

TL;DR - I still need help with importing FO4 mesh into Blender 2.75 (via 3DS Max); or at least point me in the right direction. Please. :confused:

[KaelVirum]

@Kim - Hey, that's what we're here for, to help each other figure this stuff out. Regretfully my ideas aren't helping as much as I'd like but at least you can rule them out as possible scenarios. Which is a step in the right direction. I'm currently installing 3DS Max right now and I think I'm going to, at least for modding, switch over to that for all of my mesh altering as there seems to be more support and help guides for 3DS Max than there are for Blender. In fact, most of the help guides for Blender include a 3DS Max step so why not just cut out Blender altogether? I don't know if it is actually true or not but it seems to me that if Max can open the NIFs as they are then you could just make changes to that without losing any data at all, other than the data that you're altering that is. Which, you shouldn't be "losing" just changing, if that makes sense. Once I get it installed I'll check back here and let you know if my idea was correct or not.

[KaelVirum]

My idea worked for what I am trying to do. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to use 3DS Max to edit a mesh because all of the tuts I could find were either way too beginner or assumed that I knew at least the basics of Max. Anyway, I've got my problem solved, of course I ran into one with the texture but that should be fixed before the day's out. I, personally, Kim, would recommend just learning how to do what you want to do in Max instead of trying to use Blender. You don't have to worry about losing any data, over-sized meshes or the pitch black thing you're talking about. It is still easy to work in Max, though, having used both programs now, it doesn't seem as intuitive as Blender. Still, as long as you can do what you want that is beside the point. Just my two cents.

[kkim1975]

Hey Kael, I really appreciate your following up on this thread and providing an update on your progress.

 

So, I definitely thought of just sticking to 3DS Max for my custom mesh (armors and such) creation, but what I'm really worried about is the bone weighting part. I've done this with Blender when I was modding for Skyrim, but I'm a newbie when it comes to 3DS Max. And I tried to find a good tutorial on how to weight your custom mesh for FO4 using 3DS Max to no avail. If you know of any good tuts on this topic, I'd love to know about it.

 

I'm kinda feeling discouraged at this point, because I see all these postings about what folks did with their custom meshes but no one (except you, of course) seems to care enough to provide a useful pointer or two on HOW they were able to create custom meshes for FO4. :confused:

Edited June 11, 2016 by kkim1975

[KaelVirum]

I won't say that I'm a whiz at figuring out this kind of stuff but I am fairly decent. It only took me around 5 days to find out how to fix my own problem. Give me some time to figure out how to weight paint with Max and I will definitely get back with you on this.