[LE] Trouble making a resource

[Eleusiv]

I'm trying to combine the hawk sculpture on the skyforge with the Markarth mine entrance. I thought I could just export as an obj and load into blender to make my changes, but it's so far away from the camera and grid. I can't work on it like that so I'm guessing I need to change a node in nifskope, but I'm a total novice with both programs. I can't find any tutorials on how to do this. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[TomTesoro]

You can open two instances of nifskope, one with each mesh you want to use. Go to the hawk sculpture and right click on the mesh and select copy branch. Then select the destination mesh, in this case the mine entrance, and right click on the parent node, be it bsfadenode or what have you, and select paste branch. This will place the hawk in the same mesh file as the mine entrance, but the positioning may be off. If it is you'll need to right click on the hawk mesh and bring up the transform window, where you'll be able to position it the way you want to. Finally, you'll want to click sanitize > reorder blocks.

[Eleusiv]

I'm going to try that in just a minute, but I do need to make changes to the forge in blender before I can add it to the mine entrance. I can just copy over the forge into a new instance of nifskope without loading the entrance right?

[TomTesoro]

You shouldn't need to do anything in blender at all. This is a static mesh that they player isn't really going to physically interact with so everything should be fine doing it this way. You'll still need to open up the entrance nif, you need somewhere to paste the hawk into. Now if you're just looking to replace the mesh, the steps I described above should be everything you need to do. If you want to make one with a different file name and not overwrite the original, then you're going to need to open up the Creation Kit or xEdit and change out the file path which is a whole different can of worms. Though overwriting the original shouldn't matter since it still exists in Skyrim - meshes.bsa regardless. If you were to delete your overwritten file, the original would be unharmed in the bsa.

[Eleusiv]

Actually I am creating a new mesh, not just a replacer. It's going to be the entrance to the Belly of Kyne, an underground farm that I'm putting in Whiterun. My plan is to rebuild Whiterun from the ground up, but I just started so we're almost certainly talking years before it will be done. I'll release any resources that I make as I go

[TomTesoro]

Same principals still apply. I'd work with the entrance as a base mesh, and paste the hawk into it and then save it with a new file name.