SSE Cutting up Thirsk Mead Hall Interior/Exterior?

[Unedjis]

Hello Nexus!

 

I'm currently in the process of building my very first player home as a training ground for a much more ambitious project, Unique Hearthfire Homes (which is supposed to give *real* customization options for each of the homes so you don't get confused anymore which home you're in right now and where you've left your kids). As a base layout, I chose the Thirsk Mead Hall from Dragonborn because I instantly felt at home there after doing the quest and I think it's a very beautiful thing. Problem is, it consists of ONE .nif for everything (floor, walls, roof beams, ceiling). This causes a number of issues for me:

 

1) The interior and exterior don't match, especially when it comes to windows (the exterior has a lot more windows). I could cover up the missing windows using pelts or whatever, but the more elegant solution would be to have a wall with no windows in it and get the windows as an extra mesh to place at my convenience.

 

2) Lighting. This is a huge PITA already. With the walls and stuff all being the same model, I can only place five (four if I want to allow the player to carry a torch or magelight) light sources in total because they all hit the walls or floor or roof beams. So far I've only done the kitchen, and the kitchen ground floor has 3 lights already, and the windows are still unaccounted for. Plus, I've inserted a first and second floor in the main hall and a first floor in the kitchen (additional storage plus bed for a cook/maid I want to enable the player to hire), and that needs at least three more light sources as well if I want to keep it realistic but not pitch dark. Which means I'm already getting flickering lights even before I touched the main hall at all. I would very much hate to have to resort to the vanilla strategy of placing a million candles and torches but just one general light source for all of them.

 

Sooooo basically I would need a cut-up version of the interior so that it consists of three parts on the y-axis (vertical), five parts along the length (z-axis, horizontal) and three parts along the width (x-axis, horizontal). Alternatively, and probably the better solution in the long run, cutting out the individual building blocks (wall segments, window frames, window panes, individual beams, floor tiles, ...) would work as well (and help me when I want to make it buildable in-game). I've downloaded Blender to do just that, but so far I haven't even managed to load the exported .obj in that program (the object doesn't show up even though in the sidebar it says it's loaded), and I understand now why there are graphic design courses at university to learn that stuff. (Translation: It's not something I'll learn in an afternoon.)

 

My question therefore is, is there anyone here who is knowledgable in 3D modelling and willing to do that for me? Or show me how to do it? (The YouTube tutorials I've found so far don't cover exactly what I want, which is to cut up an object and save its parts as individual meshes to serve as building blocks in the CK.)

 

As a first impression, here are some screenshots of what I've done so far. I guess anyone contemplating to get on board with a noob modder would need some sort of preview of the mod's quality.

 

I know chances are slim because it's probably more work than I imagine even for someone who knows their way around 3D modelling, but here's hoping that someone might actually be willing to help me out. If so, shoot me a PM for details and whatever else you or I need to know.

 

Cheers and thanks for reading!

Unedjis

 

Edit: I know Just in Time-Lighting exists, but since this is all one room where every light can be seen (at least indirectly) from any point, it doesn't really help, unfortunately.

 

Edit2: It just occurred to me that the devs must have built the hall from existing tiles, so I'm currently looking through the data folder and I believe all of the building blocks are already there, I'll just have to find them and give them the right textures. Maybe I won't need help after all.

Edited February 18, 2017 by Unedjis

[Unedjis]

Okay, so I think I can build *most* of the house from the Jorrvaskr tileset, but for some reason there is no WRIntCHStrSlopeLWall, only a WRIntCHStrSlopeRWall. Since the CK has no way of flipping a mesh, I tried to do it in Nifskope, which didn't work, so I'd have to use Blender to do that - problem is, I can't seem to import .obj files into Blender. They appear in the sidebar on the right, but in the render window there is no actual object. I'm using the latest version of Blender (2.78b). Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?