Importing armor from New Vegas to fallout 4[wip]

[Carnagechao]

hello, I am currently not trying to import anything any more, but make Joshua Grahams outfit from scratch so that there can be a free asset for everyone to use, because that's absurd. Okay, I'm brand new at modeling, so any advice on creating meshes is very much appreciated. I will be using blender, as it's free. I have never made a mod before aside from custom radio mods for myself. I am just an average person, no one special, so don't expect me to know anything about anything. Anyways thanks for the advice, and if you want to help, I'll take all the help I can get. Also If I'm doing something wrong please call me out on it.

Edited June 5, 2017 by Carnagechao

[DoctorKaizeld]

... you are aware you arent allowed to port assets from one Beth game to another right?

[Carnagechao]

... you are aware you arent allowed to port assets from one Beth game to another right?

I wasn't aware of that. Like I said before I am NEW to making mods. I haven't even made one. Why is that a thing? I paid for both games, the developers support modding, and practically give you all their tools, how could I have expected some kind of rule like this? Kind of goes back on their attitude. If this is the case, why can people on the nexus also teach me how to do this. Does this mean if I want to make Josh's armor for fallout 4 I need to completely make it from scratch or something? Is that how there are NCR Ranger armors on the nexus? I have absolutely no modeling experience so I cannot do that, and I doubt any one else would want to do this unless I paid them to. I thought the point of modding was to do whatever the hell you want to your game and not care what the world thinks. Obviously I wouldn't be able to share this mod, but whats to stop me from completing this for my own personal use?

 

Edit: Yeah I did more research on the topic, I can see why that could be a legality problem. Even though I was close to finishing porting this armor, I will cease and desist. This just gets harder and harder the more I think about it.

Edited June 5, 2017 by Carnagechao

[SMB92]

There are all sorts of legal reasons and technicalities invloved when it comes to porting content, 1 of them being Bethesda may not have made the content themselves (believe it or not). Amongst other things.

 

Yes you would have to make them from scratch. If you are new to modding, note that the NIF format has changed, and the bodies are different, so you can't straight port the armor without editing the meshes and textures anyway.

 

You can port the stuff for your own personal use, just never release it publicly.

[Carnagechao]

There are all sorts of legal reasons and technicalities invloved when it comes to porting content, 1 of them being Bethesda may not have made the content themselves (believe it or not). Amongst other things.

 

Yes you would have to make them from scratch. If you are new to modding, note that the NIF format has changed, and the bodies are different, so you can't straight port the armor without editing the meshes and textures anyway.

 

You can port the stuff for your own personal use, just never release it publicly.

Yeah I was in the process of editing the meshes to fit the body, but then I read that it was wrong so I x'd out of it. The only 3d modeling program I have is blender, and I doubt I could recreate anything fantastic in that. 3ds max is also out of the question for me, if it's possible to use blender, then I'll go for it, but I know absolutely nothing.

[madmongo]

You can port things for your own use. Technically that's a copyright violation, but no one will ever know or care.

 

What you can't do is then release something you ported from one game to another to anyone else. You can't give it to a friend. You can't upload it to the Nexus (that's a great way to get your account banned). You can't release it anywhere else on the internet.

 

It's the same with assets from other mods. Unless the mod author specifically gives open permission to use and modify the assets at will, you can't port them either.

 

If you see something like NCR armor for Fallout 4, the mod author has created new meshes and textures from scratch so that they look like the old ones, but don't actually contain anything made by Bethesda/Obsidian.

 

If you want to port Joshua Graham's outfit for your own use, that's fine. But you can't upload it or give it to anyone else.

[Carnagechao]

You can port things for your own use. Technically that's a copyright violation, but no one will ever know or care.

 

What you can't do is then release something you ported from one game to another to anyone else. You can't give it to a friend. You can't upload it to the Nexus (that's a great way to get your account banned). You can't release it anywhere else on the internet.

 

It's the same with assets from other mods. Unless the mod author specifically gives open permission to use and modify the assets at will, you can't port them either.

 

If you see something like NCR armor for Fallout 4, the mod author has created new meshes and textures from scratch so that they look like the old ones, but don't actually contain anything made by Bethesda/Obsidian.

 

If you want to port Joshua Graham's outfit for your own use, that's fine. But you can't upload it or give it to anyone else.

That's what I was originally trying to do, but that's rather selfish of me. If I put the outfit in the game, it would be cool to let others use it too, because it is a very cool outfit. I'm strongly considering recreating the outfit from scratch now just i think that it's outrageous . Problem is i don't know where to start, so I'm looking for modeling tutorials for fallout 4 but seem to be coming up dry. The worst thing that could happen is I learn something about 3d modeling. I've made a few 3d models before, but used tutorials, and I know with game meshes, they need to be pretty specific.

[madmongo]

Blender Noob to Pro is a good resource for modeling with Blender.

 

The basic idea of making armor is you create your mesh, then UV map it and texture it (this is all basic Blender stuff up to this point). Then you parent the mesh to a skeleton (armature). In my experience Blender always screws up the bone weighting so you have to adjust it a bit manually afterwards. Then you export the whole thing to a NIF and you're done.

 

Blender Noob to Pro will teach you the basics of modeling, UV mapping, texturing, and bone weighting. You should be able to find a tutorial somewhere for exporting to NIF using the fallout 4 tools (I've only done it for FO3 and FNV, but the basic idea is the same).

 

The texture will need to be a dds, which you can create with GIMP or with Paint.Net. Most folks prefer GIMP.

 

When making armor, I personally start with the body type that I want to target first. That way you import the skeleton and also you have a reference to build your own mesh around, so you can shape the arms, legs, body, etc. of the outfit to fit the way you want it to. If there are exposed fleshy bits, you can leave those visible parts from the body mesh in there as well. Joshua Graham's forearms are visible if I recall correctly, for example.

 

When you export from Blender, make sure you select everything you want to export first - all of the body bits, the skeleton, all of your armor mesh pieces. Blender only exports the parts you have selected.

 

The NIF tools for FO3/FNV don't export the shader flags properly, so you have to go in afterwards and fix them with NifSkope. I haven't played around with the NIF tools for FO4 yet so I don't know what they do correctly and incorrectly.

[Carnagechao]

-snip-

This is as far as I've come so far. I imported an image of the outfit I found on the wiki page.

 

 

 

I'm not very good at extruding as the model always some how ends up getting messed up when I get decently far with it because I press some key I'm not supposed to on accident and I can't undo the move with ctrl z for some reason. It happens to me all the time, so I gotta save frequently with this obviously.

 

You mentioned importing a skeleton, but I'm not quite where to find the default male skeleton for fallout 4, much less import it into blender. I've decided I'm going to try and start with the vest and see where it takes me. I've already downloaded the Nif tools I need for blender, etc, but i've also read I could save it as an OBJ and import it into the outfit studio. But yeah, right now my main concern is the mesh, because it's probably the most important part, and I've got a lot of ground I need to cover. I'll definately need to start smaller first to get my bearings with the program, so I've been watching tutorials on how to create other things, and from what I've seen its mainly just using the reference, and extruding/ shaping vertices. However, when I look at a lot of the meshes people make for fallout 4, they include a lot of triangles, rather than squares.

 

Edit/Update: so Yeah,This is as much as I've gotten done so far. it's definitely not the best, and I definitely don't know what I need to do next.

 

 

Edited June 5, 2017 by Carnagechao