Need help binding a mesh to a skeleton

[kvatchcount]

More specifically, a friend needs help. She's trying to get a cowboy Clippy in New Vegas and she can't figure out how to bind the mesh to its skeleton. I told her I'd find someone who could help, so if anyone would like to take the time then let me know.

[alpharomeo1]

In general, that's called - rig & skin. If she is using 3dmax she can load the skeleton first > reference skinned mesh (hide) > wip mesh > adjust vertices to match skeleton bones or a reference mesh > apply skin wrap to copy weights from ref mesh to wip mesh. There are video tutorials, but the golden rule is to always import skeleton bones firstly.

[Deleted1205226User]

Here could be a good start for info: https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Blender_rigging_/_skinning

[dubiousintent]

Other tutorials can be found in the "Blender (Mesh Editor)" section of wiki "Getting started creating mods using GECK" article.

 

-Dubious-

[madmongo]

This isn't Clippy as in Microsoft's Clippy, is it?

 

Anyway, you need a 3d modeling tool, like 3dsMax or Blender. I use Blender, so I can't help you at all with 3dsMax. Fallout New Vegas uses nif format for meshes, which Blender and 3dsMax both do not support natively. You need to install the nif import/export tools for them to work. And most importantly, these nif tools only work with very specific versions of Blender and 3dsMax.

 

For Blender, you need version 2.49b. If you search through the page that Dubious linked to above, you can find Blender 2.49b with all of the nif tools that you need all together in one package. I very strongly recommend that you install this package. If you try to piece it together from other sources you can end up spending countless hours fighting with incompatible versions of things.

 

Once you have Blender installed, you need to import your Clippy mesh and import one of the Fallout New Vegas skeletons. If Clippy has his own skeleton that comes with the mesh, then you can use that, but you'll have to make all of your own animations for FNV, and if you are having trouble figuring out how to attach the mesh to a skeleton then you probably also don't have the knowledge about how to make your own animations for FNV. So stick to one of the vanilla skeletons.

 

Once you have the mesh and skeleton both imported, select both of them (select the mesh first) and press CTRL-P to parent the mesh to the armature. Follow the on-screen prompts to automatically weight the mesh to the bones. You might want to save your blend at this point. Go into pose mode and move the bones around. Chances are you'll find that Blender didn't do all that great of a job of weighting things properly, so you'll probably need to edit the bone weights.

 

All that is left after that is to export it to a nif.

[kvatchcount]

Thanks guys. I'll DM her these tips and hopefully they help. Thanks.