Making a new static object?

[Ichikai]

Started working on my first ever mod, a house. I have an equilateral octagon room and I need a dome-like ceiling that fits on it.

 

After a full day and a half of watching/reading tutorials and trying stuff out, I don't have much to show for it yet.

I have a mesh with the general shape, I've applied a texture on it in blender before. But it doesn't show in nifskope, I've saved the texture to .dds format, but I can't wrap my head around the whole hierarchy in nifskope and basically it doesn't work.

Don't have much of an idea what I need to do after I get it to work in nifskope yet either, since I haven't gotten that far. I don't even know if the mesh is as big as a gold coin or solitude's blue palace.

I'm basically having trouble wrapping my head around it all and I'm lost. Maybe I bit off more than I can chew.

 

So my question is.. what do I do now? I export the mesh from blender to .obj file then open it in nifskope and then what? Most of the tutorials I find is on retexturing armors/weapons etc, and they don't really seem to apply.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

Or even better if someone's really proficient at this and can make me a ceiling with ease, I'd be all for that, save me the headache :yucky:

Edited November 19, 2012 by Ichikai

[ghosu]

Well, Blender can directly handle the .nif format if the correct plugin is installed, though i'm not using Blender myself (C4D and 3DsMax) so i can only explain the implicit process, takes a min more - to give you an idea:

 

1. Download a tool to extract the game's original .nif files, you'll need a reference object - i'm using FO3ArchiveUtility - just search for it on google, it's here on the Fallout Nexus Mod section.

2. Start the tool and open Skyrim\Skyrim-meshes.bsa, search for a similar object (you can search one in the Creation Kit as well, open its form and check out the entered path to its .nif file), select and extract it.

3. Open NifSkope (i'm using version rc4, newer versions tend to trash the UV map/texture), load the extracted .nif and replace its NiTriShapeData (=mesh) with your .obj, reallign the Shaderproperties and set up the texture paths (see video below).

4. Save this .nif to something like Skyrim\data\meshes\NAME\NAME.nif , same with the .dds textures in Skyrim\data\textures\NAME\NAME.dds (same path as entered in the .nif from the last step)

5. Creation Kit, open a similar object or the original .nif you used as reference, rename the form/ID and change the path to the .nif file to your file, when you press OK the programm will ask you if you want to create a new form - Yes - search your new form in object window and drag/drop it in the preview window.

 

Just the rough process, if you're using Blender's NifPlugin you can direclty save the whole thing as .nif and adjust it in NiFskope - but you have to wait for someone other's instructions.

 

Here is a requested video i recorded for someone else, he replaced a misc item (apple) with his mesh (sphere) - it's not thaaat different, just to give you an idea (especially when it comes to NifSkope, to set up texture paths and LightningShaderProperties since they get f*cked up when you import your .obj):

 

 

greetings

Edited November 18, 2012 by ghosu