How can you combine pieces of vanilla meshes( +Textures)?

[DwemerHunter]

:biggrin: Hi everyone,

 

I want to try and make a new armour set that is a combination of several pieces of vanilla armour and static objects. I'm aware the first step to doing this is importing the things you want into blender, which I believe is done by editing some of the properties of the object in nifscope, but I'm not sure what to do exactly.

 

Then the next step would be physically combining the pieces into one mesh. Does anyone know how difficult this is?

 

When combining meshes into one new armour mesh, do the textures get messed up, or is there a way to make the original meshes keep their original textures?

 

And the final question, do you have to start the armour from scratch again for the 2 different sizes (_0 and _1), or is there a way to modify the armour once you have made it to fit the second body size?

 

Sorry for flooding the forum with questions, but I've never used blender before and I really want to learn how to do it, so starting by just combining items is a good start I think.

 

Thanks in advance people! :biggrin:

[Stemin]

I'm not sure how the nif tools work with Blender, but you don't have to use nifskope to edit the meshes in 3ds max. You do however have to mess with nifskope afterwards to get the textures to work properly because of problems exporting, although theru just came up with an update so maybe that part is fixed.

 

Some items can be mashed up using just nifskope, but that depends entirely on how many pieces Bethesda made the mesh. For example, mage hoods can be basically cut and pasted on any armor. There are some tricks to doing it though that you'd have to learn. I played with it once, but I don't really remember how it works since I do most of my mesh editing in 3ds max.

 

Editing in meshes is fairly easy for armors because they can be made up of several different pieces, where as weapons seem to be made of one single mesh, so you have to either build it from scratch, or figure out how you can weld all your meshes together, which I find to be very tricky personally.

 

Overall, editing clothing and armor seems to be the most forgiving process when working with meshes. Making new creatures involve a lot more work with the bones and painting weights, and there's very little info out yet on it, although several people have done it. There seems to be even less information on creating simple static pieces from a custom mesh, where you have to deal with collision properties, and I have no idea how this is done. As I said, weapons tend to be one piece, which is a bit more tricky than armors. Armors you can create from multiple pieces and import them together or separately. You can use the attach feature in 3ds max instead of welding the individual vertices like you would have to if doing a weapon.

 

I recommend Nightasay's tutorials to get you going. He just started his own website so I don't know where it's going to go in the future as he already has a pay section that doesn't seem to list the membership price until you sign up (which I have not done), but right now his free section is still the best thing going right now.

 

As far as your other questions... You can keep the existing textures as long as you keep the meshes separated. I don't know for sure what happens if you try to make them one piece. I imagine there's still a way to use them, but you'd have to know a lot more about working with the uvw than I do.

 

Regarding the 0 and 1 weight sliders, you do not have to recreate it from scratch. You definitely don't want to do this because you want both set of meshes to have the same number of vertices. What you do is you simply resize your mesh to fit the _0 or _1 body type you're working with. I personally think it might be easier to start with the _0 first, because when you load the 0 armor on a 1 body, then all you have to do is resize where there is collision, whereas if you start with the 1 weight slider and put it on the 0 body, you will probably have zero collisions, but you have to then fuss with the mesh to try and get it as tight as possible. Just a personal preference.

Edited October 22, 2012 by Stemin