Fallout Modelling - Mini Tutorial

[Moraelin]

@speedy

 

i dunno if its possible to create new ammo at all (i believe it is)...

but you can surely change the vanilla ammo models i guess tho

 

didnt try that yet but if you have trouble just post here

 

yeah it is possible. you would add a new model the same way you would add a firearm, just paste it over to one of the existing rounds nif. and give it a different name. adding a new ammo type to the game is a little harder though and involves alot of LVLI editing.

 

Jaysus: i dont know how you got your method to work, i could not duplicate it successfully. when i tried it just crashed the game =(. the official Nifskope 1.0.16 has been released and i dont think you need to go through the process of re-adding the shaders anymore ;)

 

Or you could give it to some vendor to sell too, like, say, the recoloured glass arrows in Oblivion. Personally that's what I'd do. Well, for powerful ammo, anyway. Give the player an extra reason to haul all those miniguns and power armours to a vendor.

[vashts1985]

extra what? :huh:

 

seriously yeah you could do that. and if you wanted to more power to ya, but i just think adding it to the loots so it feels more natural works better. that's just me though ;)

[jaysus]

what exactly doesnt work vash?

 

ya loot tables are better than merchants for most things imo aswell (just waiting for mod conflicts now lol... bah we need a cs or at least a lvl list merger)

[vashts1985]

somewhere in the process of recreating the the BBs shaders the nifs were getting screwed up. however im willing to bet it may have been an error of my doing.

 

i can say with certainty thought that its not needed anymore. ive been able to get shaders working properly without that process most likely due to the fact that they have updated the way nifskope handles the binormals and tangents for the new version

[Moraelin]

Well, feeling natural is a noble goal. My only problem with modifying the loot tables is that it doesn't scale. If two people with two different mods change the same one, they'll conflict. And that's talking about only a measly two mods at the same time. With the vendors we have a little more of them to choose from, and everyone can just list theirs in their mod's readme. And if we do get a conflict, it's trivial to merge CNTO entries in one single CONT record.

[vashts1985]

i can see where you are going with that.

[jaysus]

aha (after 20 minutes of mind frenzy)... well if you do exactly as i tell you it works ;) hehe

 

you need to have the "1stpersonweaponname.dds" and the "1stpersonweaponname_n.dds" in the same folder as the weaponname.dds (and normal) or you get that ominous array size mismatch error

 

but youre right about the deleting/recreating stuff... its not needed anymore :)

even tho i think somin is wrong here anyway as you also do NOT get an error anymore if you forget to include the 1stpersonblabla.dds files

 

will update the tut now tho thx for pointing that out

[vashts1985]

ive never had to include a "1stperson" copy for my textues, then again i never had to re create the shaders either.

[jaysus]

mmh not creating a 1stperson thing had terrible consequences when i tried it lol... the gun had my hand as a texture in 1stperson view for example which was really awkward

 

if you still get errors tho try to post em here so we can look into it and hopefully in a few weeks we can do whatever we want without errors lurking behind every corner lol

[meise]

Just thought I would chime in here. This is my first post here and I am new to oblivion/fallout modding. I have a couple of mods up on the fallout nexus site and during the creation of those mods I stumbled across some info some ppl might find useful.

 

GETTING A GLOW MAP TO WORK ON A WEAPON MODEL:

 

So I wanted tritium sights on my handgun and no one seemed to know how to add a glow map in fallout 3. All I found from searching 3 sites forums were vague "in oblivion you just add a _g file to the directory". This does not work for fallout 3. So without further ado, I give you the glow map technique.

 

First, this is only valid for now, once NifSkope matures a bit more I hope the issues with arrays of textures are sorted properly. So the first step is to open your .nif in nifskope.

I will be opening the 10mmpistol as my example.

 

Next go to the NiNode for the slide and expand it. Then expand the NiTriStrips. Then expand the BSShaderPPLightingProperty node. Select the BSShaderTextureSet and then right click, choose Block and then Remove. Then do the same for BSShaderPPLightingProperty.

 

Now do the same thing for each of the nodes for each part of the gun, including the last one which is just a NiTriStrips node, not a NiNode. After you have finished deleting these, save the nif (do be brilliant and save with a new name, just in case this whole process goes tits up). Now open the nif you just saved.

 

Now you need to add back all the things you just deleted, only this time when you add the BSShaderTextureSet nodes, you will need to look down to the bottom window in nifskope and expand the Textures item and manually add back in the paths that were there before. Don't worry it's painless. In the case of the 10mmpistol the first one should be "textures\weapons\1handpistol\10mmpistol.dds". The second slot should be "textures\weapons\1handpistol\10mmpistol_n.dds" and the new one goes in the third slot and should read something like "textures\weapons\1handpistol\10mmpistol_g.dds"

 

This guide is for people who already know there way around nifskope pretty well so the next step may lose people who are more newbie than me. Now you need to makes sure your new BSShaderPPLightingProperty nodes and BSShaderTextureSet are pointing to each other. I believe if you click on the BSShaderPPLightingProperty node and look down to the bottom section you will see an entry for Texture Set. Type in the node number for the BSShaderTextureSet you just made and they are now linked. Next you need to link your new 2 part node to one of those places you deleted a similiar set from before.

 

So go to the Slide node (node 12 in this case) and click on the NiTriStrips. Look down to the bottom section and find Properties. Expand that and notice that the second one is blank. Type in the number of the BSShaderPPLightingProperty node pair you created and viola, the slide is fixed. Now repeated this for each node you removed those two nodes from in the first part.

 

Now go to the node for the slide (or the body, they actually point to the same thing we are interested in now) and select the NiMaterialProperty. Look down below and find the Emissive Color entry and change the 3 value (Red, Green, Blue) to whatever color you want to glow.

 

After you are done with that, save the nif and close NifSkope, you are done with it. Open FOMM and choose Plugin Editor. From the file menu choose open and open the fallout3.esm. Now go back to file and choose new. Expand the fallout3.esm node and look for a node called "GRUP (TXST)". Expand that node and look for "1stPerson10mmPistolTexture". Click once on that node to highlight it. Go up to edit and click copy. Now go down to "New plugin" and select it. Go to edit and click paste. Click once on the TXST node you just pasted and notice that it has 7 subrecords, EDID, OBND, TX00, TX01, TX02, TX05, and DNAM. Now because we know (from painful trial and error) that glow maps always go in texture slot 3 in a nif, lets extrapolate a bit and assume the same is true for this TXST record. So with the TXST node still highlighted, go to the edit menu and click new subrecord. Go to options and uncheck Hex mode. Double click on the "NEW_" it created and change the NEW_ to TX03 and type "Weapons\1HandPistol\1stPerson10mmPistol_g.dds" for a value. Click save the commit those changes. Now you may or may not have to add a "MAST" sub record (with a value of "fallout3.esm") to the TES4 node or not. Either way, select the "New plugin" and then go to file and click save. Name your new plugin whatever you want.

 

The next step is to create a glow map in photoshop/gimp/whatever. This file is made just like you make new regulare textures except you just want it to be shades of grey. White areas will glow 100% and black will not glow at all. All shades in between glow accordingly. The key is that this map will use the same uv layout as the regular texture does, so it can help to create this map as a layer over the weapon texture to use as a guide. Just make sure you turn off all the layers except the black and white glow map before you export. When you export this to .dds you can choose dtx1 if you want, we aren't worried about alpha channels at all. For our example we want to save as "1stPerson10mmPistol_g.dds". After you save make a copy and name it "10mmPistol_g.dds". Both of the files now go in you Fallout 3\Data\Textures\weapons\1handpistol\" folder. You may have to add entries to ArchiveInvalidate.txt as well, not certain.

 

And thats all there is too it. I prolly left something out, or did things I didn't need to do, but this process worked for me. Don't message me asking "how to make bewbs show plz", I've moved on and so should you =)

 

-Meisekiyume