Requestig help for a Sword of Omens Mod

[FrederickEmpalador]

Hello everyone!
I've been trying to make a Sword Of Omens mod (from the Thundercats classic show), but I'm a beginner and I could really use some help to make this dream come true.
So far, I've made the model for the sword in 3ds Max, uv mapped it and made the textures, but I cannot get the sword to show in the game, I'd need some help getting through Nifskope and into the Construction set, sine there is something I'm obviously doing wrong and couldn't figure it out despite reading different guides and walkthroughts for oblivion modding.
Having that come to life would be enough, but of course, I do have a thought thru idea of what features I'd dream about having in a Sword of Omens mod, but I have no idea of how to implement them or even if they're possible.
I've also made the model for the dagger version of the sword: in the show, the sword would shrink until i'd become a dagger when Lion-O would sheathe it in it's "scabbard" (this would be like a lion glove/gauntlet strapped to his belt) and it would grow up again to its full size once drawn for a fight/duel. Perhaps this feature can be achieved through a scripted spell that once casted it could trigger an animation and switch dagger for sword? See, I don't know how this part works; should I make the animation in Max? And then, how do I implement it? So many questions. The sword should then shrink back to dagger automatically when sheathed.
Besides that, the sword had 2 other key features in the show:
- The Lord of the Thundercats would swing it 3 times while shouting: "Thunder...Thunder...Thundercats...!" (in the meanwhile, the dagger would be growing to sword in 3 steps, 1 step for each swing) and then it would raise the sword with both hands and shout "Hoooooo!!!!!" and a great beam of red light would fire from the sword's hilt and into the skies, and this would summon the rest of the Thundercats to come in his aid. This would involve animations and a new spell that would increment with each click, then it would trigger the summoning of some custom khajiits, hahaha. They could fight by your side for like a minute or something and then vanish, and maybe make this a once per day power.
- The other famous feature of the sword from the show was the ability to be held in front of one's eyes and it would show you a short vision of the future, or something from far away, while one would pronounce the command: "Sword of Omens, show me what's beyond sight". This would need a custom animation and it could trigger a spell of Night Eye and Detect Life, and show you the path to the active quest; maybe making valuable items to glow also.
Other than that, the Sword could have some other enchantment, like fire or/and shock damage.

To obtain the sword, I'd be great if it was through a full quest. I've come up with a possible narrative:
During the first sleep after installing the mod you receive a quest telling you that you had a dream about a sword, a khajiit and a mummy, and more than a vivid dream, it felt like a vision, and there was something about the sword: it was calling you.
In your dream, they were inside some sort of cave/ruins you had never been to, but for some reason, you knew exactly were it was (location is added in your map).
Once you get there, you find a redheaded khajiit in blue thights fighting a mummy. With a powerful spell, the mummy blows the sword form the khajiit hands, and then strucks him with a shock spell. The Khajiit falls unconscious. You fight the mummy and you defeat it. It vanishes while it swears to return. The Khajiit comes to you, he's badly wounded. He explains to you who he is, and who is Mum-ra, he tells you the story of the Sword of Omens and it's incredible powers. He gives you the lion glove/scabbard and asks you to prevent the sword from ever falling into the hands of Mum-ra or any other evil, and names you the new Lord of the Tundercats. Then, he dies from his wounds.
Maybe later on, you can have another encounter with Mum-ra in his final form and fight him one last time, destroying his spirit, soul trapping his ass in the sword and wasting that energy with a lightbeam to the skies.
And that, would be the whole package; a mod I've been dreaming about for some time now, but between work and family, haven't got the time to learn all there is needed to know to make this come true. I need help. I hope that someone finds this idea and project to be worth a shot, and to find someone interested in giving a hand in a project like this.
Thank you all in advance!
F.F.

[mixxa77]

I'm no good at 3d modelling so I can't help you directly, but if you haven't already taken a look at this: https://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php?title=Blender/Custom_Sword, maybe it can help you. A fair bit down, there are some notes on how to work it into the game and nifskope.

[Pellape]

I know nada about 3D Max as I use Blender, Nifscope and Niftools importer/exporter. Blender is free and it works great, even if the collisions do not export right, well they get exported with BSX flag 0 so we need to add the right flag for the collision to work but otherwise its great but thats not Blenders fault as it is Niftools. Praise Mara for Nifscope. :D

 

I bet you do not want to start using Blender when you are used to 3D max?? :wink: As I would never try to learn 3D max... If there where more jobs available for 3D artists, then just 15 all over this country, I would have taking a year in school again really, and then I had to learn 3D max, but 15 available jobs in the whole country??? No way... Well... I am too old as well....

 

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To the point:

But start doing vice verse... Import and export a Iron sword and if that works great, then I do not know... I bet you installed the Niftools plugins for MAX already as otherwise how to you export the nif and do you export it in the right version - 20.0.0.5 or 20.0.0.4??? I keep forgetting to set the version myself and when I forget it, I only get errors anyway during the exporting.

 

Something the tools do in Blender as default is to set the Alpha channel to 0 when it needs to be 1 for a solid object but it might be the default Blender setting but I do check it to 1 in Blender these days. There's also a flag that sets an object to hidden at the NitriShape which I use for my custom hidden collisions I made from a carpet, which is so damn handy... ;P When I place them, I make the carpet visible with a 64p texture and when they are right, I hide them...

 

If nothing works, send the mesh to me + the texture and I peek at it. I give you my email in a private mess if needed.

Edited December 13, 2020 by Pellape

[FrederickEmpalador]

I'm no good at 3d modelling so I can't help you directly, but if you haven't already taken a look at this: https://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php?title=Blender/Custom_Sword, maybe it can help you. A fair bit down, there are some notes on how to work it into the game and nifskope.

I'm giving that a read right now, thank you mixxa! Tho is in Blender, if all else fails I will give it a try.

Edited December 13, 2020 by FrederickEmpalador

[FrederickEmpalador]

I know nada about 3D Max as I use Blender, Nifscope and Niftools importer/exporter. Blender is free and it works great, even if the collisions do not export right, well they get exported with BSX flag 0 so we need to add the right flag for the collision to work but otherwise its great but thats not Blenders fault as it is Niftools. Praise Mara for Nifscope. :D

 

I bet you do not want to start using Blender when you are used to 3D max?? :wink: As I would never try to learn 3D max... If there where more jobs available for 3D artists, then just 15 all over this country, I would have taking a year in school again really, and then I had to learn 3D max, but 15 available jobs in the whole country??? No way... Well... I am too old as well....

 

-----------------------------

To the point:

But start doing vice verse... Import and export a Iron sword and if that works great, then I do not know... I bet you installed the Niftools plugins for MAX already as otherwise how to you export the nif and do you export it in the right version - 20.0.0.5 or 20.0.0.4??? I keep forgetting to set the version myself and when I forget it, I only get errors anyway during the exporting.

 

Something the tools do in Blender as default is to set the Alpha channel to 0 when it needs to be 1 for a solid object but it might be the default Blender setting but I do check it to 1 in Blender these days. There's also a flag that sets an object to hidden at the NitriShape which I use for my custom hidden collisions I made from a carpet, which is so damn handy... ;P When I place them, I make the carpet visible with a 64p texture and when they are right, I hide them...

 

If nothing works, send the mesh to me + the texture and I peek at it. I give you my email in a private mess if needed.

Hey Pellape, thanks for replying. I do have Blender installed, but never used it, always used Max for light modeling, mainly 3d printing and scenery. There is not much info about how to work properly from Max to Oblivion, so maybe Im forced to try going through Blender, but I'd love to avoid that due to time constrains.

Im currently on Max 2020, and I couldn't get the nifskope plugin for that version. What I end up doing was exporting as .obj and imported it with Nifskope, replacing the steel sword and routing my new texture (wich I made in photoshop from a picture of the sword I took in Max, with materials applied, along with a basic normal map).

My model would show up in Nifskope, I saved as a new .nif file and then I would boot up the construction set end edit the steel sword, adding my nif and my icon, saving with new ID and name (new form) and then I would try to drag and drop it into some location but I'd be invisible (not gray).

I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with my mesh, although I had no inverted normals, no flipped UV's, a fairly clean mesh, something must have gone wrong on export/import. And there's definitely something wrong with my .nif (I'm a Niftard).

So if it weren't too much trouble, I'd love to send you my mesh so you can instruct me on where I'm f----- up, I'm a self-taught 3d modeler for hobby purposes, there wasn't proper 3D education available back in the 90's lol, so I've leraned the hard way,and there is still a steep curve ahead of me, whatever help is really welcomed and appreciated.

[Pellape]

We had proper 3D education during the end of the 90's at least but I went Computer Technician instead and ended up with networking, which I might regret today for sure... I visted their classroom and peeked and they did very nice stuff.

I did work 20 years as technician but we all got kicked a year ago, all technicians...

 

Invisible, then it must be the alpha channel or that flag for sure. Exporting *.obj from Blender did work 10 years ago but it is messy now, at least when I tried it but we cannot export to a NIF if the object miss some properties, so I guess I did miss something, like a proper material or similar. I am happy that the Niftools from 2017 works very well with the latest Blender at all and it is a shame for sure that they stopped develop it, at least taking a break. When TES 6 comes, we will have a pure hell if we wanna try to mod it... ;)

 

I guess the new look of Blender is to get it closer to 3D max, but idk as it sure look much better now but it took some time for me to find anything when I am so used to the older UI. It is not even possible to easy follow older tutorials either as it is a complete remake and nothing is where it used to be. At least the buttons are the same as they used to be, like e for Extrude and so on... ;)

[Pellape]

Peek at your private messages as I added my email there.

[Pellape]

I made several reports in 4-5 emails to Frederick but I will make a much shorter report here.

 

Messing with 3D is not a straight road as the exporters are not working perfect. The obj file I got couldn't be imported to an Iron sword mesh in Nifscope so I had to do it in Blender, where I imported an Iron Sword and then Fredricks mesh over it and moved all objects into the Longsword Ninode. Well I stop there I think as the report I made in emails includes every detail that I could add.

 

But Blender is the perfect tool for this as it has been developed for 30 years now I guess and has everything that 3D Max has as far as I know and it is also free. I could compare this debate with the Gimp vs PS users... There's no big differens between them really. :wink: Obviously 3D Max 2020 is not the right tool for this, not yet and not if Niftools doesn't make a working exporter for it. All exporters are broken for Blender as well and I made a bug report at GitHub today about it so I use 2 versions to be able to make stuff.

 

• v2.6.0 which is for Blender 2.8 but it works for the latest Blender, but it doesnt make a full NiTextureProperty when we export a new object but it does when we export an imported NIF mesh
• v0.03 is new one, 2 days old. It cant import Oblivion meshes but it exports them better, but also 10 times bigger, so I had a giant scythe yesterday that took up a whole room. I need to learn how to set the export scale of course

 

I used v2.6.0 for this one and the final result??

 

 

POOR DOG - Who would be so cruel to attack a poor stray dog?? First I thought the sword was broken until I did a getav health at that dog and it had 940 HP and it has Daedric properties here.

 

It is 2 swords at the screenie:

• One handed, which I prefer
• Two handed

One thing we must think about when making 3D objects for games and it is to make them as simple as possible, to make them look advanced anyway and never use to many vertices than what is really needed as the game engine must calculate them all. :wink: Well not as simple as Bethesdas, but a balance is needed. This sword is extremely complex and it took 5 seconds to drop it with F in CS. The game halted and frooze for 3-5 seconds when I equipped it. :smile: I do use loads of vertices myself in my meshes but then they are needed, like this one I made yesterday:

 

 

It has much more vertices then any Bethesda equalent hand scythe but not to many as it does not halt the game... :wink:

 

 

It is used for harvesting anyway, MOO area harvesting... The original hand scythe do the same job but I dislike it for sure as it is so extremely ugly.

The handle and shaft is a 16 sided cylinder but 12 or even 8 could have worked good as well when I think about it... 32?? To many...

 

 

The blade at my first sword I made 16 years ago, had 6 lines in the middle and 6 at the top, made from a Blender tutorial.

 

I cannot find any screenies of it but it is simialr to this really, as I had that Blender monkey in the side of the hilt, one at each side and one in the end...

It is cool and in some way also ugly anyway... :wink: I do like the hilt but not this blade :D

 

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Collision?

I tried to grab it with Z in game but it did not move so something is missing. It might be so that you need to exchange the collision as this one was exported from Blender and BSX flag was then set from 0 to 3 and it is 3 at the Iron weapons.

 

Well open an Iron sword, the claymore in Nifscope, Remove the NiTriSrips by Object -> Remove Branch which is one onöly at the Claymore as it doesn't has a scabbard.

Open your sword in another Nifscope and copy every NiTriShape, one by one to the top Ninode in the Iron Sword.

 

Save

Edited December 15, 2020 by Pellape