The Dummy's Guide Altering Figure Meshes

[LaylahniJade]

Hi everyone!

 

I'm new to Modding and have a desire to make my own nude figure mesh for my game. I have read every walk-through I can find on how to edit a mesh, but I can't get the figures I make to work in game.

 

The specifics:

 

I want to take the normal female_1.nif (yes I know what the difference between 0 and 1 is) and edit the mesh to make her hips and such more to my liking.

 

I have followed people's instructions step by step, but it always seems like someone leaves something out because nothing ever looks the way it should (especially in Nifskope). The one time where I managed to get everything to look right I tried to edit my character in game (using the console command showracemenu) and move up the slider under the body options to the larger frame because I did not edit the small (0) mesh just the large mesh (1). When it got to the "largest" setting (which would be my altered mesh) the game crashed. So obviously something wasn't right with my mesh or the alterations I made in Nifskope.

 

So my questions are:

 

1. How, STEP BY STEP without leaving aaaaaaaany step out, do I export an altered mesh from Blender 2.49? I am pretty sure I am doing this right though.

 

2. Do I need to alter the texture and/or RE-assign it a texture if I haven't added any vertices?

 

3. If so, do I do that in blender? Every tutorial I have read has said what texture I give it doesn't matter at all, why is that?

 

4. In NifSkope what needs to be changed/deleted/added to get it to function properly in Skyrim?

 

5. Should it have the NiSkinData and NiSkinPartitions blocks in it or not? Nobody ever talks about those blocks or how they work in any tutorials I have read.

 

6. What does each block do and why do we or why do we not need each one?

 

The only difference I have found when comparing my .nif in NifSkope with one that works is that mine has the Scene Root node in it whereas the working one does not. I have made everything else look exactly the same.... So I don't understand what is going wrong.

 

Please help. I'm getting really frustrated.

 

LaylahniJade

[LaylahniJade]

Any answers would be nice. I've been trying for a couple weeks to figure all this out and have failed every time <.<