Proper Way to Customize Armatures/Skeletons?

[NeverwinterPinata]

[sOLVED!]

 

I am currently working on an update to my Melusine - A Merfolk Race Mod, and I would love to be able to implement more realistically animated tails. I originally attempted to accomplish this by rigging a mermaid tail to the default tail bones, but that proved to be problematic around the waist when using vanilla animations, so I decided to try my hand at customizing coronerra's Maximum Compatibility Skeleton by doing the following:

 

- Imported body meshes, deleted the included armatures, and then imported coronerra's skeleton, all using Blender's default settings for Oblivion. (Importing the skeleton by itself only shows a tall rectangular box.)

- Deleted the body meshes, straightened the tail bones to point straight downward in Pose Mode, and then set the pose as the new rest position.

- Renamed the bones in Edit Mode (Bip01 MermaidTailRoot, Bip01 MermaidTail01 - 08), and then exported the skeleton using default settings for Oblivion.

- Opened two instances of NifSkope, one with coronerra's skeleton loaded, and the other with the edited skeleton. I copied the Bip01 MermaidTailRoot branch and pasted it into the Bip01 Pelvis NiNode of coronerra's skeleton.

- Copied the NiStringExtra data of each Bip01 Tail bone, one at a time, to their Bip01 MermaidTail equivalent.

 

After saving the skeleton and replacing the game's with it, I launched the game to see if the game crashes from this experiment. Surprisingly, it didn't, so then I quickly whipped up a test tail and replaced one of vanilla Oblivion's pants with it to see if it will show up in-game. Unfortunately, the mesh is completely invisible in-game. Can anyone assist me in properly customizing a skeleton for Oblivion? Any and all help will be greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you for reading, and good fortune to you in your current and future endeavors.

[NeverwinterPinata]

After some experimentation, I think I got the skeleton working. What I previously did was use Mod Organizer's overwrite folder to place both the skeleton and tail nif into the game. After loading the Construction Set and seeing that the tail nif is nowhere to be found, I decided to migrate the files from the overwrite folder to their own folders within the mod folder. After that, the tail mesh is showing up properly, and the skeleton seems to work. I say 'seems' because I have yet to test the new bones with an animation made for them, so I don't know if they will read animation data properly. But the tail mesh isn't stretching to infinity, which is an excellent sign! I'll update this post after I create an animation and test it in-game.

 

Edit: Whipped up a quick test animation, and I am happy to report the new bones read animation data correctly!