Help with adding a custom hat model

[darklordgiggles]

I've been trying to follow this tutorial (http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Creating_an_armour_for_Skyrim._Part_1) to add a hat into the game. The tutorial makes it confusing, however, because it tells you how to make a full-body armor rather than just a hat, so I'm confused as to whether things like dismemberment data, weights, etc. are still necessary. I've managed to follow it pretty closely so far, but when I try to use the hat in-game it's invisible.

 

Some specific questions I have:

 

1) In part 2 when it's talking about exporting the model as a .nif it says "In Object mode select the skeleton you've just imported and press A twice to select all parts of the armour and the skeleton." When I do this Blender selects the hat, skeleton, and the head, not just the hat and skeleton... am I supposed to export the head too or just the hat and skeleton?

 

2) In the section "adjust the armor properties" when it says to expand the "children" property, the picture shows only one node under "chlidren". My file has several... does that mean something's wrong? Am I supposed to delete all the children nodes?

 

3) In the section "add materials and textures" it says "If the links to the files begin like C:\Program files\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Skyrim\Data\textures\..., or \textures\... the game may not be able to upload them..." The links do begin like "C:\Program files..." after I select the appropriate files, so do I simply change them to start with "textures\"? Does it matter where the texture files are stored?

 

If you're still reading this, thanks for bothering with such a long post. If you take the time to help me out you will be my favorite person ever. I'm willing to post screenshots, etc. if it would help.

[MShoap13]

Unless you're trying to replace the head/face of the character when the hat is worn, then no, you don't want to export the head. I'm assuming you either used the head as a template to make your hat or it was imported with the skeleton you imported. If you don't need it, it' safe to just delete.

I'm not very experienced with .nif's so I'm gonna skip number 2, hopefully a more experienced modeller can answer that one for you.

I'd find a known working mod that uses it's own resources and take a look at what they did. Ghosu is a semi-frequent poster on this board with tons of modelling experience so I'd recommend grabbing one of his mods as a reference. Also, I'm pretty sure the texture files do need to be somewhere in the \Skyrim\Data\ directory but beyond that wherever you specify should work (note: It's general common practice to place them at \Skyrim\Data\textures\*your mod here*\).

 

If all else fails, feel free to upload your model here and hopefully someone will take a look at it and let you know what needs to be done.

Edited April 9, 2013 by MShoap13

[darklordgiggles]

Thanks for the suggestions... I'll compare with an existing model to see if I can't figure out what's wrong. When you said to upload the model here, is there a particular place on the site to do that, or did you mean upload it to this topic?

[MShoap13]

If you click "More Reply Options" it will open a more detailed reply popup that includes the ability to attach a file to a post. It's probably best to edit the OP and attach it there, but it really doesn't matter.