looking for a flexible messenger bag model

[ThaHuntah]

I've looked all over and for the life of me I cannot find any messenger bag-ish looking bag model fit to be worn over anything more complex than the standard merc grunt/wasteland doctor t-shirt (which is where most people lift one of the only bags I've ever found from anyway). Would anyone happen to have the wasteland doctor bag with the sling expanded outwards?

Alternatively, could anyone point me in the right direction for just creating this myself? I've googled stuff like "nifskope blender tutorials" but all the links in whatever tutorial I find are either broken or lead to obsolete old versions of the relevant, essential plugins. It'd be way easier to just have someone share their bookmarked, up-to-date tutorial or something instead of scouring through hundreds of old tutorials from 2013. Only reason I haven't bothered to do it already is it seems like an excessive amount of learning just so I can have my mailman RP bag in-game.

[dubiousintent]

Have you seen the wiki "Getting started creating mods using GECK" article? The various sections have tutorials and "tips" on their respective subject matter, including "Custom Items", "Armor and Clothes", "Blender Mesh Editor", "Conversions", "Nifskope Mesh Editor", etc. It also has links to the recommended versions of tools under the "Program and Tools" section.

 

Most tutorials on "art assets" for FO3 are still valid.

 

-Dubious-

[ThaHuntah]

Alright, thanks for the link! This guide has been more help than most results on google I've gotten otherwise and I've made *some* progress on getting what I want done but I ended up running up against another wall: I can import, edit and export .nifs with blender but when I try to put the model in-game, it's invisible. Some small hasty googling around on this says the skin weights might be screwed somehow. Is this a common problem that happens when editing existing models from Fallout 3/New Vegas? inside nifskope, I can see the model, I can see the changes I made in blender and I can see that it's parent-linked or weighted or whatever to the same bones as it was before I imported it. Any help with this would be appreciated!

[dubiousintent]

I'm not a modeller, but these entries in that same article mention "invisible" objects: 'TIP Exporting a mesh from Blender for import into GECK' (especially the last sentence), 'TIP New to Blender', and 'TIP Biped and Equipped Objects'. I suspect your problem is related to one of them.

 

-Dubious-

[madmongo]

If I understand you correctly, all you are doing is importing the wasteland doctor outfit and then you are moving some of the vertices around to change how it fits over various outfits. As long as you don't add any new vertices, blender should retain the original bone weights, so in your case I think the bone weights are probably fine.

 

Note that if you do something more drastic, like flipping the bag around to the other side, you'll need to redo the bone weights or it is going to behave very very very strangely in-game. And if you do add parts to it, you'll need to weight any vertices that you add to the mesh or they won't work properly.

 

But, assuming that all you did was move some vertices around to change the fit, then your bone weights should be ok. In this case, either you exported the mesh wrong or you didn't fix up the shader flags in NifSkope.

 

For the export options, start with the default options for FO3, then in the top center where it says Collision Options, click on Creature and then Skin. To the right of that, make sure that Use BSFadeNodeRoot is unchecked. If you leave that checked, your clothing item will either not work properly in game or it will just flat out crash your game (and the GECK).

 

That's it for the export options. I have never figured out how to get Blender to properly export the shader flags for creature skins and outfits (outfits and skins are essentially the same thing as far as the game engine is concerned). So now you need to go into NifSkope and fix the shader flags.

 

You will need to fix up every mesh object inside your nif. In other words, I haven't looked at the doctor bag, but if it has one mesh for the bag and a second mesh for the strap, you will need to do this to both parts.

 

First, find the shader type. For a clothing item like a messenger bag, you'll want it set to SHADER_DEFAULT (which is should already be set to). You will change this to SHADER_SKIN if you are making human body parts like arms and legs that are visible in clothing outfits.

 

Next, click on the shader flags, and click the check boxes to set both SF_SHADOW_MAP and SF_REMAPPABLE_TEXTURES. Just an FYI, but if you are doing human body parts here, you check SF_SHADOW_MAP and SF_FACEGEN instead.

 

Remember to do this for each mesh object in your nif.

 

That's it. Save your nif and try it out in-game.

[ThaHuntah]

I didn't think to check back here while I was messing around and I didn't quite know what the problem really was but somehow I got my bag in-game. A lot of people both in google and I think some in the guide Dubious linked suggested only using the newer blender versions (which I was) for editing and the old 2.49 blender for exporting the models back into functioning .nifs, so that's what I ended up doing. Really, it was mostly my fault for attempting to use the newer, incomplete nif plugins for newer blender builds but either way, using 2.49 somehow sidestepped the whole invisible mesh problem completely. I guess I can just leave a few thanks here because every other guide I found was unclear but the one linked in this thread *mostly* helped, so thank you for that.