is making armour the same a making a weapon?

[RaktoastTheSandwichTopper]

title says it all

[anb2004]

no, making weapons are much simpler if we're talking about melee weapons not ranged weapons like bow. armors/clothes need to be skinning to follow body/skeleton when moving.

[ghosu]

Weapons can be made with pretty and 3D Editor, for armor you need 3DsMax or Blender - not to create the armor itself but at least to import it. Those programs come with NIF import/export plugins...

 

In fact there are 2 common ways to import armor (i only know the 3DsMax way):

 

Open a similar armor piece NIF, a helmet for example. Load your new helmet as well, bring it in position, then you have to copy the settings (skin) from the original helmet, delete the original one and export the whole nif with your new helmet. In NifSkope you have to copy the bodypart value for the skindisplacement entry and the bslightningshaderproperties (for your textures) from the original nif, save & done.

 

2nd version:

 

Download the SoMuchMorpher plugin, that loads a skeleton into your 3DsMax, load your armor as well, bring it in position and let the plugin do the rest - it can morph your armor as well so you get the correct sizes for the _0 and _1 nif files (skinny/fat) and male/female, nice plugin and the creator made 2 good tutorials as well:

 

 

and

 

 

greetings

Edited March 15, 2012 by ghosu

[RaktoastTheSandwichTopper]

ok so is creating the 3d models is the same?

[ghosu]

The models - yes, just keep it close to the original body from the game (you have to extract for example the malebody_0 nif from the meshes.bsa archive as reference) so you can attach it to the bones later in a proper way. Edited March 15, 2012 by ghosu

[RaktoastTheSandwichTopper]

great! thanks!