New Vegas meshes and Blender?

[vurt]

So it's been a while since i modded this game, but I thought i'd look over my New Vegas mod which still seems to be fairly popular. Many of the meshes are in need of improvements.

How do you other modders do it..? Importing a NV mesh into 2.79b was no problem, i was sad to notice there was only Fallout 3 in the exporter though. I'm quite familiar with 2.49b, guess i could go back to it or is there a better suggestion perhaps? :)

Thanks

 

 

 

 

[madmongo]

The nif tools for Blender 2.79 have a lot of issues. You'll save yourself a ton of headaches if you do everything in 2.49b.

 

The nif format did not change much between Fallout 3 and Fallout NV. Export everything as a Fallout 3 nif. You'll have to fix hairs and hats in NifSkope because they'll end up rotated 90 degrees. You'll need to fix shader flags in NifSkope for armor/clothing/skins. Most things will export correctly though as long as you use the correct export options.

 

There is a link to a complete package here (under tools) that has Blender 2.49b plus all of the nif tools and NifSkope that are all correct versions that work together properly.

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Getting_started_creating_mods_using_GECK

Edited April 13, 2019 by madmongo

[vurt]

Ah, i seem to remember wrong, i thought 2.49b with the niftools had NV as an export option, i see now that it actually doesn't. So i guess i must have exported as FO3 when i did my NV mod (ages ago now).

 

I'm only gonna export static meshes (trees) so i will probably be fine with 2.79b then, changing stuff like flags and shaders in nifskope i'm very used to by now.

 

 

Thanks!

[RoyBatterian]

You can't really use Blender for much serious work in NV, the niftools plugin still destroys vertex normals on export, and Neo won't fix it as much as people have begged him to.

 

Jon stopped developing nifskope, but I have the 2.07beta's with the shaders in them on my gdrive, 32 bit version is only to update MOPP. Shoot me a pm if you need them vurt. I'll shoot you a message if/when the FBX converter is ever released.

[vurt]

What's vertex normals, when is it used, how etc.? i'm still very much a n00b when it comes to modelling.

 

i have version 2.07 revision 2dad25d... if its newer im interested :)

[madmongo]

I don't know how much you know about 3d modeling, so you will probably know some of this already.

 

A mesh is composed of vertices and faces. If you consider the example of a simple cube mesh, it has eight vertices, the four on the top of the cube and the four corners on the bottom of the cube. It has six faces, top, bottom, front, back, left and right. Some game engines can't handle faces with more than 3 vertices (basically, everything has to be triangles), and FNV seems to be one of those types of game engines, so while you can make each face of the cube in Blender as one polygon, the nif tools will split each face into two triangles when it exports the mesh.

 

A "normal" is a vector which is perpendicular to the surface. So for the cube, imagine a line coming straight out of the middle of the front face .That's the front normal. For a simple cube it's a bit more difficult to imagine a vertex normal, but imagine a more complex mesh like a piece of clothing where the faces aren't all hitting each other at right angles. For each vertex, imagine that there is an imaginary surface above the vertex that smooths out all of the bumps caused by the pointy vertices. The vertex normal is the vector normal of that smooth surface over the triangular pointy vertex.

 

So, why would anyone care about something like this? Simple. It's used to determine lighting and reflections. If you know which way the normal faces for each vertex, you can interpolate between vertices and figure out how the light reflects off of the entire face.

 

What RoyBatterian is saying is that if you use Blender, the vertex normals don't get exported correctly and the lighting may reflect a bit funny off of your model.

 

In practice, I have seen a little bit of lighting weirdness because of this, but it's not terribly noticeable. FNV has a fairly old and clunky rendering engine (by modern standards) so it's not like it has wonderful lighting effects to start with.

 

My personal take on it is this. FNV is an old game with an old and crappy graphics engine, and mediocre 3d model designs. There are a lot of what I call 3d modelling snobs out there who will tell you that you can't use Blender because it's just a freeware piece of junk. The reality is that, even though it is free and open source, Blender is actually a fairly decent program, and if you are an amateur at 3d modeling (like I am), Blender has one HUGE advantage over all of the "professional" 3d modelling programs that the snobs want you to use. Blender is free. There are free versions of programs like 3ds Max, but like Blender, only certain versions work with the nif tools, and the last I heard, the version of 3ds Max that works with FNV is not free. If you want to shell out a fair chunk of change for 3ds Max (or maybe Maya, I think it has working nif tools these days) and Photoshop, I'm certainly not going to stop you. But if you are just an amateur who doesn't want to shell out that kind of cash for something that is just a hobby, go ahead and use Blender and GIMP (or Paint.Net).

 

If you make super-duper 3d models with fancy shmancy 4k textures, the only thing you are going to do is help run FNV's texture caching system out of memory and crash the game. You don't have to worry so much about vertex count. A modern PC can usually handle high vertex counts without issue. But textures are limited by the game engine being 32 bits. The game's texture caching system seems to leak memory, making the game run slower and slower until it finally crashes. Even with smaller textures the game is still buggy and you can't stop it from crashing, but the larger textures you use, the faster this happens. Simple models and simple (smaller) textures are good things. Save the fancy models and hi-res textures for a 64 bit game.

 

I am just an amateur hack 3d modeller. I am never going to be a "serious" modeller according to RoyBatterian's definition of the word. I don't have that much time to devote to it. Even if I had better tools, I just can't sink enough time into it to really become good at 3d modeling. My 3d models may be crappy compared to theirs, but look at the basketball in the vanilla game. That's a pretty crappy 3d model, and that came from Bethesda. They set the bar pretty low for this game.

 

The long and short of it is this. Have fun. Don't let the snobs or anyone else put you down. Blender is fine, even if it does have some issues.

 

As for Blender versions, 2.79 is better at a lot of things, but the nif tools for it are crap. I've seen people have a lot of success with static objects, but I have seen post after post of this problem or that problem with anything other than a static. I have even seen some statics get totally hosed. 2.49 has its limits, and the nif tools have their issues, but overall it works and you can make reasonable 3d models with it. They may not be "serious" or professional quality, but so what.

 

From what I have seen, there are more modders around here using Blender than 3ds Max, at least based on forum posts. Cost alone probably drives most of that. Similarly, GIMP seems to be the most popular dds texture editor, again, I'm assuming because of cost. There are some modders using 3ds Max (Millenia, for example, based on what I've seen of his weapon tutorials), and there are some modders using photoshop, but not many that I have seen.

 

Anyway, like I said, have fun. As long as you are enjoying what you are doing, nothing else matters. It's a game. The whole point is to have fun with it.

[M48A5]

What he said^^^^^^ 100%.

 

I have been using your Forested version in FO3 for years and I can think of no reason to change.

 

For the limited amount of changes in the game that I do, Blender and GIMP work just fine for me.

[vurt]

@madmongo

 

ah ok, i thought vertex normals was something else than just normals, obviously i know what normals are.

 

What i've noticed is that meshes can get very bright in FO:NV, especially when using ENB.. It seems that turning up "gloss" in nifskope for the mesh (up it to like 80) makes it less bright. i did some screen comparisons and noticed it.

Overall i really hate the engine and how ugly it is. Everything is drawn / loaded into the game very slow, tons of pop ups. It's the same in Skyrim LE, it might not be noticeable when you walk, but if you fly fast (player.setav speedmult 900, TCL) over the landscape, wow, the game can't keep up, you can fly and stop and you have to wait for 5-10 seconds before grasses and other things shows up.. In Skyrim SE it's much better and it loads fairly quickly.

Blender has worked great for me over the years. But it's too bad if it breaks normals. Can't they be recalculated and fixed in nifskope though?