Weapon model structure

[verified261]

So I am in the planning stages of a mod and and part of my plan involves creating weapons. I have gane modding experience mostly in modelling and texturing but have never made a mod for fallout 4 much less created assets for it. If anyone has tutorials they can point me to or can give me an overview of how a weapon asset is structured, how weapon mods work etc. That would be great. Ive seen some mods basically combine parts of existing weapons to form new objects. This would be a functional stopgap solution and if anyone can explain how this is done I would appreciate that as well. I use blender for modling and substance painter for texturing usually. Any help is welcome.

[AlexDyre]

I was recently in the exact same position that you were, sadly there aren't any tutorials out there that will guide you through on a step by step basis, but I can recommend a few starting tips.

 

When modeling use seperate meshes for each weapon part. Example for a rifle: Stock, Barrel, Receiver.

 

If you want your weapon parts to have textures that can change you'll need to unwrap each mesh to a separate UV and assign each mesh a material in Blender.

When importing the model into Substance Painter you can then paint and export each mesh separately.

 

I've done a lot of experimenting with export settings for Substance Painter, and I've found that when using the "Metal-Rough PBR" shader, these settings work the best.

http://i.imgur.com/bejJJcV.png

 

When it actually comes to taking the model and getting it in-game you'll need to convert to a .nif

From blender the easiest way to do this is to open the model in bodyslide, this tutorial here covers it perfectly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppTXCJ0SZ88

 

For putting all the pieces together I found there is no easy answer, it's best to extract the meshes of a similar weapon already in the game and look at what each piece does.

 

In the Creation Kit it's easy to open the weapon and look at the weapon templates to see what parts it takes to make particular weapons.

As a starting point it might be easy to duplicate a weapon and basic parts for it then replace the mesh components with your own and move on from there.

 

 

Hope this is somewhat helpful, feel free to message me if you get stuck on anything as I've been there myself :)