Need help setting up blender for Skyrim

[S121]

Okay. I have been working on and off on a really good race mod, but have always reached the limits of Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas. After playing Skyrim, I found it to be exactly what i need. Only problem is when I opened the latest Blender, I realised that I would need a way to import/export .NIFs. I had an old Blender program that had the .NIF plugin, but I cannot find the one for the most recent one. Second problem is my understanding that head meshes are treated differently than sword meshes. I previously used an old tutorial called Exporting the head mesh" by Slof, or at least I think so. Anyway, I would always had problems because I'm not looking to alter the existing verticies, I'm looking to add new ones, so it wasn't what I was slooking for.

 

Bottom line is, Ican not for the life of me, find the newest .NIF plugin and I need some comprehensive tutorial on the procedures of importing/exporting a completely changed head mesh. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edited August 9, 2012 by s47_Sethen

[Caithe]

There's no nif plugin for the recent Blender. You have to use 2.49 and export as Fallout because the script was never updated for Skyrim either.

 

As for Head meshes, you would probably need to learn about morphers/shape key to create Tri files.

[S121]

So 2.49 is still the latest Blender with a .NIF plugin? Anyway, thanks Caithe, I'll be sure to add that to my list of programs. Now, the next problems would be .TRI files and importing/exporting. I've never worked on .TRI files because modeling a head is unfamiliar territory for me and I've tried exporting heads before, as a practice run, but I have never gotten it to work. I've even tried changing the exporting options to that I thought would match what I needed for the head to work properly. Any other information is welcome!