Making Weapon Modification Mods

[lichm]

Ok, slightly misleading title. I want to do a one punch man/brawler build; I don't want to see clunky weapons equipped. My Theoretical Solution: Create a Hand to Hand weapon modification that can be applied to turn the weapons invisible. The Problem: I am so totally lost. I can easily figure out how to add OP brass knuckles into the world, but that is not what I want. This seems like it would be pretty easy to do, but I am a total noob to mod creation so I cannot figure it out. Finding tutorials for weapon mod mods is hard enough without trying to pull some visual shenanigans on top of it. Any tips for how to move forward?

[jkruse05]

Okay, you're gonna need the Bethesda Archive Extractor, the Material Editor, GIMP or Photoshop with .dds plugins, Nifskope, and the CK.

 

1. Find the Brass Knuckles model (.nif), material (.bgsm) and textures (.dds) in the Fallout ba2 archives with the Bethesda Archive Extractor. Extract them all.

2. Open the texture file that ends with "_d.dds" in your image editor of choice, make sure it has an alpha channel, and erase everything. Export under a new name, like "OnePunch_d.dds" and use DXT5 compression. Make sure it's set to generate mipmaps. Rename the other textures you extracted to something similar, like "OnePunch_n" and "OnePunch_s". Put all those textures in your own new folder in Fallout4/Data/Textures.

3. Follow this tutorial. Make sure you put the material in it's own folder within Fallout4/Data/Materials before you link the .nif to it.

4. Put the .nif you just modified/made in a similar folder within Fallout4/Data/Materials

5. In the CK copy and change the base ID for an existing Brass Knuckles attachment. Let it make a new form when it asks. In this copy you're gonna add a variable that jacks the damage way up, and another one that points to a texture swap file, which will also need to be made. I'd go through the exact steps, but I don't recall them without opening up one of my mods in the CK and looking again. This should get you started at least.

6. Make a recipe for the attachment so it can be made at a weapon bench.

7. Make a "loose mod" entry so you can keep the mod if you take it off for some reason.

8. Save and play.

 

Best thing I've found when learning is to dig through the .esps of mods that do the things you want to do and see how they did it. In the window where you choose which data to load there is a button that says 'details'. If you highlight an .esp and hit that it will list all the changes made within the .esp, so you have an idea of what to look at.