Creation Kit mod lessons

[Mediolanum]

The title speaks by itself. Don't forget to vote.

 

With the incoming release of the Creation Kit, what about a clean and well organized step by step list of tutorials, divided by category?

 

i.e.: [This is a work in progress, it is not intended to be the ultimate tutorial guide or so, just a starting point.]

 

- First steps: The Creation Kit

 

- The interface;

- Moving inside the Kit/ useful shorcuts;

- Basic operations;

- ...

 

- World building

 

- Finding and modifing a cell;

- Terrain editor, trees, water, rocks...

- Texturing the terrain;

- Saving your work and testing in-game;

- Interiors - pathfinding, doors etc...;

 

- NPCs and AI

 

- Creating a new NPC;

- Adding AI and routines;

- ...

 

- Modeling

 

- Useful information - The polygon count;

- Useful information - Avoiding tris, ngons, overlapping and inverted faces;

- Useful information - Thinking about animation while modeling;

- Useful information - Getting a nice silhouette;

- Importing a custom character mesh into your 3d application

- Modifying the mesh and linking bones to the vertices;

- Creating a mesh from scratch;

- Weapon creation example;

- Armor creation example;

- Creature creation example;

- Preparing the base mesh;

- Sculpting the mesh in high polycount programs;

- Retopology and back to lowpoly;

- Exporting the Nif files and preparing for in-game tests;

 

- Texturing

 

- Intro: how the textures work;

- Different types of textures;

- UVs space, UV islands, correct aspect ratio, optimizing UV space for more capture details, texture sizes;

- Baking high polycount scuplt to low poly models;

- Exporting baked textures to 2D image editing programs;

- Final adjustments, mipmapping creation;

 

- Rigging and animations

 

- Linking a mesh to bones structure;

- Vertex weight;

- Creating animations;

- Exporting animations and testing in-game;

- ...;

 

- Questbuilding, dialogues

 

- Intro;

- Questbuilding basics;

- ...;

 

- Scripting

- Intro;

- Scripting basics;

- ...;

 

 

What you think guys?

 

Cheers

Edited November 9, 2011 by Mediolanum

[teq99]

There's already a wiki for the CS here: http://tinyurl.com/fo26l I personally learned a lot from here when modding Oblivion. Also one for the GECK here: http://tinyurl.com/69msvf No doubt one will be created for the CK as well, though Bethesda have said that anyone with experience in the earlier kits shouldn't have much trouble. :) Edited November 9, 2011 by teq99

[PaladinRider]

It's worth mentioning that the CS/GECK is very daunting at first. This is because almost everyone (myself included) expect to be able to jump in and make a huge city/land mass or another mega-mod.

 

The key is to start off slow. The search bar here and the WIKI are the biggest and best tools you can have. I can almost guarantee that any question you have about modding can be answered by one of the two.

 

The scripting language is about as simple of a scripting language as you can get (Although I recommend GECK Powerup and it's equivalent for the TES series - it'll tell you exactly where your scripts have an error) .

[samogen]

The one thing I would like to see is a tutorial for creating a new race with a custom mesh.

 

For example:

Let’s say I wanted to make a race with only 2 fingers and a thumb on each hand and some odd bent backward legs and the rest of the body looks more or less human ish. For the sake of this argument let’s say I have the animations, textures and meshes already made (or perhaps someone else made them for me) but I have no idea how to navigate or use the TES construction kit or perhaps script for the dang thing.

 

For Oblivion that meant you were up $hits creak and your paddle is on fire...

 

I guess all I’m saying is that the WIKI has gaps for those that really want to be creative.

[Bluechase]

I'm a total greenhorn at modding but that being my main interest I would LOVE to see a good tutorial. I wish I could offer my help but like I said, noob coming through :happy:

[Mediolanum]

Ok, the Wiki helped people a lot, but the idea of this thread was to build a really in-depth set of tutorials, from the foundamentals to the most hard and technical operations, with detailed images, videos too...

 

I think the Wiki is mostly a "reminder" for those who already have become familiar with the construction set.

I thought something similar to the TES Alliance school, but even more in-depth, hope.

 

Plus, i left blank the scripting, quests, AI fields etc.., in order to let the respective gurus to complete them, and having a good starting point to build the right schedule.

[Nakia]

Thank you. This is a good idea. The WIKI can be daunting too. :facepalm: I got a lot of help from places like this. Both sites are useful for both the novice modder and the experienced modder. Being able to ask questions on a forum is also very helpful.

[Illuna]

I never done any mods myself, tho for skyrim i will do some i think maby some stats chaning stuff at first like making some sword that would have x stats and you can use it all game or soming like that, and some new spells maby. Start small and later on see if you can make something bigger.

[Zherlthsh]

Tutorials are always great.

Even if you know the basics there might be some neat trick you missed.

And more modder = more mods. :D

 

I've modded OB, FO3 and FNV quite a bit so I know may way around TESCS/GECK and TES4/FO3/FNV-edit.

But I've never really scripted anything advanced so I'm hoping for some scripting tutorials.

And Dialogue/Quests tutorials if they haven't made them more comprehensive!

So, by the looks of it, I'm going to have to wait... or go all trial-and-error as I usually do, breaking things in the process ;P

 

Hopefully Bethesda will at least open their internal wiki with the release of the construction kit.

[Mediolanum]

Yes Zherlthsh,

 

the release of the official wiki would be a good starting point to find out how the Creation Kit is built and so on, the point is that would be great if modders could really get into a Nexus schedule tutorial and write down clear examples of modding.

 

Personally I could make tuts about modeling, sculpting and texturing (I wrote a quite exhaustive list of tuts about modeling, in the first post). My lack is all about scripting.