Braggi

Hi gang. Been quite a while since I was last active - life got busy. I'm currently working on getting a ton of new weapons into my Oblivion play install. Scimitars, war staves, broadswords, scythes and so on. Most of these are from pre-existing modder's resources. However, there is one I have a problem with: Sickles. A few years back I found a version of the vanilla OB sickle that someone had gotten working as a side-sheathing weapon in Oblivion. Worked great as a weapon when the player or an NPC used it. The problem came in when you dropped it from inventory. The item would just stay stuck in the air where it appeared, similar to a static. No dropping, bouncing or anything else. I monkeyed around with it in Nifskope and finally got the physics engine in the game to act on the object. However, I must have done something wrong - when dropped indoors, the weapon falls through floors and vanishes into the void. When dropped outdoors, the weapon falls though statics but stops when it hits the ground plane. (All my other weapons. vanilla or modded, work as expected, as a point of clarity.) So, what can I do to get this thing behaving like a proper weapon when dropped in-game? (No point in adding it to levelled lists on NPC's since they will just fall though the dungeon floors when dropped in combat... and I would love to go up against some necromancers armed with these things.) I know very little of how to finesse the physics in Nifskope. Hit some tutorials for it but they are way out of date. If anyone with more experience/expertise is interested, I've attached the weapon model (minus textures although the paths are intact). It's tiny - only about 48 kb in size. Hope that's enough to go on, and thanks to anyone who replies in advance. I've got in-game stats, textures and inventory icons corresponding to all the major in-game metals (including mithral and orcish) already set up. I just need sickle models that behave correctly. SickleEbony.nif

I just wanted to mention that my internet went down today - I'm coming in now via a borrowed laptop. It'll be about a week before they can send a cable repair person, so I'm offline until then. Thanks in advance for any comments on the thread. Until later folks...

Woo-hoo! I got one of the meshes converted properly. :rofl: It took some research and some trial and error, but it works. The basic method I hit on goes like this: 1. Open the TES3 Mesh in Nifskope and delete any bounding box entries. Save the Nif. 2. Import the mesh to Blender. 3. Select the entire mesh and duplicate it using CTRL-D. 4. Select and rename the duplicate mesh section(s) to something like "CollisionWalls" or "CollisionFloor", as needed. 5. Go into object mode and select the collision version(s) of the mesh duplicate. 6. Set Drawtype to Bounds, and in Draw Extra options, set Boundary Display to Polyhedron, and finally select Wire. 7. Switch to Logic. Make sure the drop down reads "Triangle Mesh". 8. Hit the Add Property Bar five time to create 5 new empty properties. 9. Set the properties as follows: a) String:HavokMaterial HAV_MAT_STONE b) String: Oblivion Layer Static c) String: Game Quality Type Fixed d) String: Game Motion Type Fixed e) Float: Mass 1000 10. Repeat the process for any other parts of the mesh that need collision. 11. Once all of these are done, hit "A" to select everything in the render window and then export the nif. 12. Finally go back into Nifskope and repair any texture paths (very necessary here since all the texture references had underscores that had to be removed from the updated dds names for the room textures). 13. Import into Oblivion through the CS and go to town modding. A couple of questions for any of the Blender/Nifskope wizards out there who know both TES3 and TES4: 1. What is the purpose of the bounding box I had to remove? Was it the TES3 version of collision? 2. The room and it's textures show up correctly in Nifskop and also show up in the game. However, the room appears textureless and black in the CS. Why is this?

Very useful. Thank you. I had run into the CS complaining about mipmaps on icons before this and wondered why modders included them. Your explanation about how it affects the menus50 and menus80 versions is a handy bit of modding knowledge.

I just got the PM off to you - had a power failure early this morning just when I was going to send it off. Thank you for offering to show me how it works as you go. Also, please let me know if I goofed up anything with the textures - every bit of constructive criticism helps. Thanks again.

@InsanitySorrow: ...and I'm finally done all the texture prep! Took a touch longer then I expected, but then I had to go back and convert all the base textures from 16 bit to 32 bit (forgot that step originally... doh! ) and then redo all the normals as well. It was also a bit more finicky then I expected in changing all the book textures over. Check your PM's for the link - the file is titled "Privateer's Hold Meshes and Textures.7z" and clocks in at about 38 MB. Notes - The directory structure in the archive is how I intend to set it up in the mod, so please use it for the texture paths. - The exterior mound entrance Nif references a Morrowind grass texture over much of its surface. The texture was not included in the original mod, so if you want to substitute a stock Oblivion grass texture with a rock or dirt base, that is fine by me. Thank you once more for your offer of assistance - I have wanted to update this interior set for a long time. I hope my prep work with the textures will save you time and headaches.

@InsanitySorrow: A quick update on the preparation progress... I have all 122 of the textures renamed and normal mapped. It turns out that there are also underscores and dashes used in the 122 Nif names so I am clearing those out as well. (Only 59 left to go... ) The static books in the two book cases do indeed use Morrowind textures, so I am going to swap them for some of those in Metallicow's Oblivion book resource. I'll tackle the rest of point #2 and all of point #3 tomorrow after some well-earned sleep. Getting closer, and thanks for your patience so far.

@Zu: Thank you very much for your offer. I do know that some of the objects are static lamps, but I can easily fake the light they give off using the native light sources already in in the CS. Regarding weapons and armor, I will definitely keep your offer in mind - who knows, I may run into something in my asset collecting. @InsanitySorrow: I definitely welcome your help here. I ask that you give me a little time to sort out the textures before I link anything for you. Jmanowar created the set for Morrowind and all of his textures had underscores in the texture names as a word separator. Unfortunately, Oblivion doesn't like that naming convention, since it uses underscores for glow maps ( _g ) and normal map ( _n ), so I'm fixing that up. Secondly, none of the original textures had normal maps, so I am manually generating them one at a time using Photoshop 6 and the NVIDIA plugin for it. Finally, I also need to check the textures for the static book sets on the bookcases in case there are any original Bethesda Morrowind textures adapted for the book covers. If there are, then they need to be replaced with OB book cover textures or Modder created ones, which is easy enough to do. The first issue is sorted out, although I have caught a couple items that were missed as I've been going along and generating normal maps. As for the normal maps themselves I'm about 3/5 done. I hope to have then last of the normals sorted out by tomorrow evening, then it just a matter of clearing up the books. After all of that is finished, I will combine the nifs and textures into a 7z for you and get it online for you to download and work on. Thank you both, very much! I'm hoping to set Privateer's Hold up as the first dungeon on my personal High Rock mod, to teach myself the art of dungeon design.

Thank you very much for the reply IS. All of the items to be converted are rooms, corridors or static (non-havoc) set pieces - hanging lamps/lights and dungeon dressing of various types. Weapons and armor aren't part of it, so that simplifies things quite a bit. I did dig up one possibility on squidoo that I will be testing tomorrow located here: http://www.squidoo.com/nifexport Being still very new to Blender, I imagine this will be quite a learning curve - hence my hope for a tutorial. Feel free to add anything you think might be useful - I am open to all suggestions.

Hi folks. I recently was granted permission to use the non-Bethesda meshes and textures from the TES3 mod Privateer's Hold by the modeler who made them, Jmanowar. I know that you can indeed update and move a mesh and its texture(s) from Morrowind format to Oblivion format and that there is no ethical reason not to, so long as the resources are not created by Bethesda. There have been several previous successful projects to port fan-made content from Morrowind, including the Barabus Crypt set, a sextant model (both ported by Razorwing from Silgrad Tower and freely available at TESNexus), along with some clothing mods I have heard about. So, in a nutshell, what I need is a tutorial source for updating the mod's Nif files from the old TES3 format to the newer Oblivion version, preferably using either Blender or another free program. Anything along this line would help. and let me stress again - these are all fan-made assets, so no copyright issues exist, since they were not part of the retail versions of Morrowind or it's expansions. Looking forward to any ideas you may have and thanks in advance.

Thanks Darkrider. I'll be tackling the grime a bit later this evening.