Nifskope Basics

[madmongo]

Collision is easy.

 

If you have a very simple mesh, like what we have here, then you can just duplicate that mesh. If you have a much more complex mesh, the game engine won't handle trying to figure out collision with too many vertices very well, so you need to make a simpler approximation of your mesh. Keep the collision as simple as possible.

 

One way or another (either by duplicating or creating a new mesh), you should now have a second mesh that you can use for collision. The next step is to turn it into a collision mesh. To do that, make sure your new collision mesh is the selected object. Down on the bottom left side of Blender, select the icon with the 3 arrows. Down at the bottom of the screen you should have a section called Draw. By default, Shaded will probably be selected. For Drawtype, select Bounds instead of Shaded, and for Draw Extra select Wire.

 

Now on the left, where you selected the 3 arrows before, select the Pac-Man (yeah I know it's not a Pac-Man, but it sure looks like a Pac-Man to me so that's what I'm calling it). At the bottom left, there should be a box labeled Bounds. Click on that, and it will display Box and Compound. Using the arrows just to the right of Box, change the collision bounds to Triangle Mesh. Just below that, click on Add Property. Where it says Float, change it to String. Then, to the right of Name:prop, fill in the collision material you want. This will be something like HAV_MAT_METAL, HAV_MAT_WOOD, HAV_MAT_STONE, etc. depending on what you want your object to act like it's made out of with respect to collisions.

 

Now just make sure you select all objects, and export your nif. If you forget to select all, then only your collision will be exported and Blender will only export the collision and not the rest of your nif, which will give you some really weird errors when you try to import that nif into the GECK.