Nifskope Help

[SnakeSlippers]

Not sure how to explain it so don't even know how to search for it.

 

I know nothing of Nifskope I'm learning as I go..

 

Question for anyone that knows

 

Some meshes loaded into Nifskope can have parts removed from it, others cannot.

 

(ex. A house with a AC unit and antenna on the roof can have the AC Unit and antenna removed cause I can click on them separately. Another mesh of say a cart with wheels I cant remove anything cause when I click on it, the whole thing gets selected.)

 

Anyone know why some meshes can be modified and others can't? How would I go about changing this?

[Deleted1205226User]

Look at a nif as a kind of container.

 

The container can have several distinct Nodes (your house example) because they rely on different texture or material,

Each of these Nodes can be manipulated (or removed) separately.

 

If the mesh is in one piece with one texture and one material (your car example), for optimization purpose, it will translate in one node inside the container.

 

Inside NifSkope it is possible to combine several Nodes in one, but it's not possible to divide a Node into several pieces, you'll need a program like Blender to do so.

 

Hope this helps.

[mindboggles]

If you still want to modify a mesh that's a whole piece then you will have to head into a 3D editor like Blender or 3DS Max instead.

[SnakeSlippers]

Thank you for the responses. Off to Blender now another program I have 0 knowledge in.

 

Is there a easy way to remove parts in Blender? Only way I found was hold shift and click a bunch of lines then remove. But that takes forever.

 

Ok I'm trying to find out what Vertices, Faces, and Edges are in Blender.

Edited March 27, 2017 by SnakeSlippers

[madmongo]

Blender Noob to Pro is a good resource. There's a fair amount to learn, but it's not bad once you get the basics of it. Just make sure when you are done editing that you export back to nif using the right export options for the type of thing you are editing. Also note that there are some things, like hair, that can't be edited properly in Blender (when you import hair, Blender apparently doesn't keep the sort order of the polygons intact which leads to weird hair rendering once you export it back to nif). Most things can be edited with Blender though. Look up tutorials for the type of thing you are editing to find out the proper export settings and also to get some tips and tricks.

 

As for selecting lots of stuff at once, depending on how the parts are oriented you may not be able to easily do this, but you can go into vertex mode and use B for a block select, then select a square on your screen and all points within that square will be selected. Sometimes by rotating the object around you can do block selects and get most, if not all, of the part you want to delete fairly quickly.

 

Getting back to your original question, some of it is up to the artist who created the original mesh. The artist can lump all of the bits together in one mesh or they can split it up into separate bits. I know that for some of my own creations, I have created the original mesh with different pieces, but then right at the end I combined them all into a single mesh so that I could just duplicate that entire mesh in one step to create the collision mesh (only recommended if your mesh is fairly simple, as complex collision meshes take a lot of time for the game engine to process them). I generally save the original blend before joining the pieces in case I want to edit them later. Blender and the nif tools will still sometimes separate some of the parts into separate mesh bits during the export to nif.

[SnakeSlippers]

Ok it all makes some sense now lol I understand the original question better now. Thank you for everyone helping. Dont think I'll be using Blender any time soon tho. I followed a guide on how to install all the things I need but I keep getting errors when I try to import Nif. I'm giving up for today.

[Hexrowe]

FWIW, all I ever did was install the latest version of Blender and the Nif plugin (I already had Python because a lot of other things use it, too) and it works fine. Never had any problems importing and editing Nifs - exporting OTOH is kinda finicky, although working with an imported NIF should make it quite a bit smoother.

 

The good thing about Blender is that it's a lot more consistent, intuitive and overall user friendly than GECK or Nifskope! Once you get the bare bone basics down, you can figure out most of it on your own through experimentation. I got started with this short series of basic tutorials.

[Deleted1205226User]

@ Hexrowe

 

You say that you have Blender 2.78C installed and working seamlessly with the 2.49 nif plugin? Can you confirm?

 

Also, you are lucky to find Blender "intuitive", I struggled (and still am) just to have the basics! :geek:

 

Geck , NifSkope and Blender are complementary as they all do different things needed depending how and what you're Modding.

 

@OP The Blender version generally used for FO3-FNV is 2.49b, it can be found with all the necessary plugin @: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/30/?

[Hexrowe]

Well, not quite seamlessly - like I said, exporting is finicky - but working, yes.

 

And yeah, I do seem to be having really good luck with certain software! Sure ain't having any in love nor money so I guess it's got to go somewhere... :D

 

But seriously, that series of tutorials got me through the basics in one afternoon. It's short and no-frills and shows pretty much all you need to start working. I think most of the perceived obtuseness of software like this is just in the basic vocabulary, really, they kind of have their own language that you have to learn before you can get a grasp of how stuff works - most of the words are lifted directly from common English, but they're used in unconventional ways and in a very specialized context, so it actually just makes things more confusing until you grok the jargon...

Edited March 29, 2017 by Hexrowe