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[SKY] Grafting NitTriShapes


ResolveThatChord
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When attempting to add custom meshes to objects in the CK, I've found that .nif files which have had their mesh data (NitriShapes) copied and pasted from other .nifs cause the CK to crash. Following Insanity Sorrow's excellent importing tutorial to the letter yeilds success; but seperately creating and importing .obj files for every piece of every mesh is time consuming compared to doing them all in one go and copy-pasting. Also, (afaik) .obj files don't contain vertex weight data, and can't be used for armour, clothing, creatures, etc.

So my questions are:

What is the difference between importing an .obj file over a nitrishape in nifskope, and simply copying and pasting a NiTriShape branch?

What steps after copying and pasting a branch into the root node are required to make it work?

Cheers in advance. (That doesn't sound as humble as I would like... if you don't know the answer, then just have an awesome day regardless. :P )

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..... seperately creating and importing .obj files for every piece of every mesh is time consuming compared to doing them all in one go and copy-pasting.

Ehm, do them in one go :D. I am a complete noob with blender but for meshes that consist of many different NiTriStrips I imported the (Oblivion) nif into blender 2.49 and then exported the whole thing as *.obj

When you import that "whole" *.obj into a Skyrim nif it will fall apart into the pieces again. Will need some treatment (esp. scaling them up) but it saves time to skip the step of exporting every single NiTriStrip first from the original nif.

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A copy/paste adds a NiTriStrip/Shape into the new mesh. An import obj replaces a NiTriStrip/Shape.

Copy/paste also runs into the potential issue of "different versions of Nifskope" warning. Not sure if it ever IS a problem but it's annoying.

It also depends what you are working on. IS's method is valid and safe for static objects. Things such as armor, clothing, etc that you mentioned that need rigging do not work well that way and will need treatment from Blender to properly rig the new pieces (following F03 processes).

If you want to copy/paste, you'll need to add BSLightingShaderProperty and BSShaderTextureSet nodes and probably a lot of fiddling with axis's to line it up properly. Personally I prefer the .obj method.

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I never use the obj method, I just export to an FO3 format from Blender, use NifSkope to change the version to 12.83, delete the incompatible bits (saving and reloading detaches these from Scene Root making them easy to spot) and then copy across BSLightingShaderProperty from a similar enough NIF (these vary depending on factors such as whether it's e.g. a piece of armour, a ground object or whatever). Haven't really had any significant problems with that method, except that it's a bit tedious. Haven't tried things like weapons though. There's a few other bits of the process including giving the various components the correct name (especially important for the root) and changing the BSDismemberSkinInstance partition ID where necessary, but y'know.

If I'm adding bits to another NIF I still use this method before copy-and-pasting, which seems to work without any problems except for forgetting the NiTriShape name which I need to reenter manually.

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Yes, that's right. I think it's also a good idea to save afterwards too in order to make sure that any relevant changes are applied to the NIF's constituent bits... Occasionally I forget to change the version and it all goes a bit wrong!

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