How I Did it - a Newbie Makes a Weapon that Works

This tale is designed to help you, if you have never really done any modeling, texturing, or Nif work.  It's a blog, see, so it's not truly a tutorial.  I'm going to try to hold your hand, through an entire process, if I can recall those things that I could not get to work, and tell you how I managed to find the solution/workaround, and I'll walk next to you as we go from finding the drawings of the thing we want to make, and work through Blending it, UV Unwrapping it, Gimping the texture, exporting it, and getting the thing into Fallout3.

This is by no means a definitive guide.  It's a journal of my adventures in the modeling arena.

One day I decided I wanted to make a thing in Blender.  I heard tell from WillieSea that there was no Pancor Jackhammer Automatic Shotgun in FO3, and he was sad about it.  So I went about learning Blender, while fumbling around and trying to model the shotgun for one of the most talented guys around.  

I watched about 15 hours of Blender tutorials, made about 400 saves, threw 250 of them away, started over once, but eventually, after 6 months or so, I had the mesh that worked well enough for WillieSea to take it and give it a great texture.  So I don't claim to be a pro with the things I talk about; this blog is by no means a serious tutorial.

This is not the way to do it, this isn't even really one way to do it, this is just a comprehensive blog about

HOW I DID IT




I. GET THESE THINGS

1.  Get detailed drawings/blueprints from 360 degrees.  I used a drawing of the gun as a template to trace out the shape in Blender.  Unless you're talented at sketching, I strongly suggest you find good pictures.

Google is your friend.  If the weapon isn't old, or obscure, you should be able to find plenty of pictures of it, from different angles.  I found one good pic of the Pancor.  So that's all I used.  But I was googling it all the time, trying to find more.  

If you have a talent for drawing then you might decide to skip this step.  I envy you.


2. Get ~
       • Blender
To make your model.
      
       • the PYFFI and NIF scripts
For exporting and importing between game and editing programs.
      
       • Nifskope
To translate your Blender model into something the game can use.
      
       • Gimp
Your free painting program.
      
       • FO3 Geck
The FO3 Sandbox
      
       • FallOutModManager
For easy opening of Fallout3 asset archives.


3. Find tutorials for all of the programs above!!  You'll want to learn how to use them, despite the fact that I'll use plain english to describe the things I did.  Here's a list that will grow with time.

Blender Tutorials: Blender Underground Video Tutorials  
These hour-long tutorials are the best I've found.  There are five of them, for Blender 2.4X.


II. BLENDER FUN, Part 1

• Set up your workspace
• Import to Blender a vanilla FO3 model to hijack
• Begin Building

I found a picture of a Pancor Jackhammer.  It was a side view line drawing.  



I saved the image somewhere, anywhere would be fine, but you could save it in the Blender folder, in the textures folder within.  That way it would be easy to find.  

To find your image and use it, click View-> Background Image-->and you get this box:



Click that button and you get this box:



then click the light-colored square "load".  Find the folder where you've put the image, by either typing its path in the space or navigating to it.

My image was a .jpg.  I suggest using .jpg.  After the image appears on your grid, use the box pictured above to lighten the image or change its size.  'Blend' is how you adjust its opacity.

The problem with using a background image is that if you turn your perspective on the model that background image will vanish...so you can put the image(s) on a plane(s) and intersect them.  This Article explains how.  

And then you'll have the problem that your growing model will cover the picture(s).  That article goes into some detail about how to handle that, BUT:  Here is THE tutorial to overcome that problem.  Making your model invisible.
This is a brilliant video!!!  

So now you have great blueprint pix on your Blender grid.  Ready to start building your weapon, right?  

Wrong.     There's another 'first' step you should take.  It's preparing and planning for the way you'll bring your model into the game.

I missed this step, and had a gun all ready for exporting, but then I had to go back and rip it into 3 pieces.  I discovered later that you can't just press a button and hey presto! your gun falls to the FO3 floor.  There's a way to bring your weapon into the game.  A kinda sly way.

I call it  HIJACKING A MESH

The way I learned to bring a weapon into Fallout 3 was to find a vanilla weapon and trade out its pieces for my model's pieces.  I believe that's the only way to do it.  We're not nearly there yet, but there's a little prep work you can do now, call it Mesh Recon.

Hijacking means you substitute or trade the thing you make for the thing Bethesda made. You'll do this in NifSkope. But you'll need to prepare for it in Blender.

Now, when you make a model in Blender you can divide any of that model's pieces, or objects, making them separate pieces or objects that are still connected, but are no longer the same. So if you skip this step now, that's more work you'll have to do later - that's what I had to do - but it won't be overly hard to do it later, it's just far easier to do this step now. I hate to plan things, but it's probably better that you make a plan.

INTERLUDE -- Blender models are objects first.  The program assembles data into an object, which you don't get to sculpt or extrude or flatten, or etc...  What we work with is the Mesh, that's the clay we sculpt.  You can have many objects making up your model.  This is what I mean by 'pieces'.  The weapon I chose to hijack was the submachine gun.  It's made of 3 pieces: the body, the trigger, and the magazine (drum). I didn't do this step when I started...so before I could export my shotgun, I had to cut it into 3 separate objects, because then I could have the pieces to trade into the submachine gun's .nif file.

So to save yourself some headaches later, go ahead and do some Mesh Recon:  look through FO3 to find a weapon similar to yours. You can easily do this in the GECK.  In game, I went to the cell TESTQAITEMS and it became the place I went to test the gun.  Every weapon in the game is in one of the mailboxes in that cell.  There's also a guy sleeping there, who doesn't mind a single bit if you blow his brains out...you know, for testing purposes!

Meanwhile, as you're checking out the weapons, think now about the end result.  After you have the model made, you're going to need to Hijack the .nif. Look at the reloading animation - is it similar to what your weapon requires?   How do you hold your weapon?  

Once you find one that fits the bill, jot down its name.  You'll be importing it into your Blender workspace now.

To find the .nif - use FOMM.  It's simple - merely open FOMM, tick open BSAUnpacker, navigate to your Fallout3 folder, and select the meshes.bsa (BethSoft Archive).  Find the name of the .nif you need, and click "extract" to your data folder, or even your blender folder if neatness is a priority.  

Once out, the vanilla .nif can be imported into Blender.  Here's how I did it...

1. Go to the main, upper left File in Blender.
2. Go down to Import.
3. Go down to NetImmerse/Gamebryo (.nif)
4. Clicky.


Depending on your Blender experience, either you'll have instant access to your Data folder, or you'll have to find it.  No matter - what you can do is a) go find out how to set up paths in Blender by following VINCE'S Tutorial.  

Or you can stumble around pig-headed, like me.

5. Then press 'Import'...

Now then, once you've found the .nif you extracted, you'll be faced with this daunting field:


Don't worry - just set the size up to 100% and look at the rest of that picture to see that your field looks the same.  IGNORE THE TEXTURE PATH FOR NOW!  Or you can navigate to your texture folder for Fallout 3.  

Then press 'OK'...

It might take a little time.  

Once Imported, you can go nuts.  Rip it up, turn it over, get a feel for how it's made -

JUST DON'T SAVE IT!  

Or you can simply resize your template to fit the size AND ORIENTATION of the vanilla weapon. I think the way the vanilla mesh sits on your Blender grid is important, and that you should create your weapon so that it sits the same way.  So if you need to adjust the template you've made, now you can easily do it.

Also, there will be strange pink lines and odd circles round that vanilla weapon.  Ignore 'em, as they're what we don't need to make, since we're going to be HIJACKING them.  Find the actual mesh by right-clicking and tabbing into edit mode, and when the body 'lights up' in Edit Mode, you've got the mesh.  Play around with it, JUST DON'T SAVE.

You might find that the picture is far too large.  Or that the planes you've put pix on ( if you went that route ) are off kilter.  Now's the time to adjust everything.  If the position of the picture is different from the position of the vanilla mesh you've just imported, simply delete that background pic ( in the small properties box ), select the vanilla model, hit the number key that will give you the view you'd like to use.  I liked the side view, but depending on the position of the vanilla mesh, 7 might not get you there, so get your favorite viewing angle, using 1,3 or 7 on your NUMPAD, then get the background pic reloaded, and it ought to be visible at that perspective.  Plane manipulation is a little trickier, but then this is practice for the real stuff, so re-dos are inevitable, and less problematic now.

REMEMBER THAT F2 IS YOUR SAVE.  Name your .blend file so it ends with a number, so that when you hit F2 next time, to advance the save you merely hit your NUMPAD '+' key, and it advances that number by one.

SAVE OFTEN!!! IT'S FREE!!!

Okay, after you've got the vanilla weapon into Blender, and you've adjusted things as needed, carefully select everything from that model ( everything you didn't make ) and Press 'x' to DELETE IT.  

Next we'll make that weapon of yours.

NEXT UP...BLENDER FUN PART 2!