Creating Skyrim Armor in Blender Tutorial Series

[Hanaisse]

No, never copy. You re-weighted everything?

[Zchu]

@Hanaisse

Thank you very much!

Could this tutorial be used to convert a female armor to a male armor? This is my primary goal and i want to be sure I am using the right tutorial before I begin.

Thank you!

[Hanaisse]

It sure could, if you have the Blender skills to edit in the differences and reshape it to the male body (this isn't a Blender tutorial but there are plenty out there).

[Zchu]

That is great news!

Yes I have a lot of practice to do, but I wanted to be sure I could eventually.

There are so many good armor mods for females, and many would look very good on males too with the right tweaks!

 

Thank you again =3

[Melonize]

Hello there,

 

great work with the tutorials! However, I came across a problem. This is how I did it: I imported a NIF (compatible with Blender) of some clothing from Skyrim. It imported the UV fine, so I opened the image for the original model. Enabled sync UV vertices with mesh vertices (not sure what it is exactly called but you get the point I hope) and started removing some vertices, not random of course, until I got the edited mesh I wanted. I left the UV map at that and did the rest of the steps (Bone weight copy, skin partitions, imported skeleton etc.). And then exported with the settings you mentioned.

 

Open the exported NIF with NifSkope, changed the User Versions back. Changed the BS Num UV Sets to 4097 and turned normals off. Changed the skin partitions to Skyrim skin partitions. In BSLightingShaderProperty, I added SLSF1_Skinned to first flags and removed SLSF2_Vertex_Color as my TriShapeData has none. In my texture set I set the number of textures to 9 and updated, then added a texture. My mesh in the viewport didn't update so I saved my NIF to a new one and the mesh turned black. Edited UV map and all my UV vertices where in the top-left corner. I checked my TriShapeData and the 'Has UV' setting was set to no and greyed out. I noticed that my Normals and Bitangents were all zero but I fixed that.

 

I feel like I missed out a vital step or several in the UV map. I have basic knowledge in getting UVs setup for scenes in Blender but not got a slightest in exporting these meshes. I may not of mentioned everything I have done but feel free to ask.

 

Many thanks.

 

[Hanaisse]

Hello Melonize, and welcome to TESA. Glad you found the tutorial helpful.

 

The main reason a UV will not export properly is because of not assigning materials and textures to each piece in Blender. Double check that.

 

What version of Blender are you using?

[Melonize]

I'm using Blender 2.49b for this but my experience was with the later versions of Blender and mainly using Cycles Rendering for my scenes. However my experience is eight months or more old, so what do I know? (Well, what ever I know is a bit rusty.) Anyways, thanks for the response I'll check it out soon.

[Pjfeets]

Hello

Thanks for writing this tutorial without it there's no way I would have made it this far. I'm a true beginner, I followed the steps in order but for some reason when I try to open my mesh in CK I get Marker_error:0. I've repeated steps 4-5 multiple times with the same results. Here's the file http://www.mediafire.com/download/ueedn54fbtipwss/sky_IMPERIALOFFICER_attemp11_0.nif

Thanks for all the help.

[Hanaisse]

Hello Pjfeets, welcome to TESA.

 

That's a very nice looking armor for a first try. Here's the issue. There are two objects for the armor - the suit itself, and what looks like a badge on the chest. That's fine but the problem comes because they are connected together by a NiNode, hence the error. All objects need to stand by themselves (NiTriShapes) and all objects need to be aligned with the skeleton NiNode.

 

You'd probably be better off joining the armor and the badge into one object (it's easier but you don't have to). Also, the badge is not properly UV mapped, so there's that to fix.

[Laxgrie]

So I've followed and applied this tutorial (as well as others) to the best of my ability to create a custom armor for Skyrim, but there's one key issue that I continue to beat my head into a wall over. When I get to the point at which I should change the property names under BSDismemberBodyPartType (switching BP_TORSO to SBP_32_BODY), I am unable to make Nifskope change BP_TORSO to SBP_32_BODY. When 32 is typed in and I hit enter, it just stays as a simple "32", and if I type out SBP_32_BODY, it just changes it back to BP_TORSO. Please help me with this, it's so aggravating .

[Hanaisse]

Hello Laxgrie, welcome to TESA

 

1) What version of nifskope are you using?

2) Are you sure you changed the User Version and User Version 2 values first?

 

There should also be a drop down list you can choose the biped name from, just double click on BP_TORSO (the drop down arrow is to the right). But I've never experienced this problem.

[Laxgrie]

Thanks for the welcome

 

It would seem that using Nifskope 1.1.3 over Nifskope 1.1.0 seems to have fixed my issues with this problem, as I had changed the user versions when I had done it before in 1.1.0.

Thank you so much for the help, I'll be back if anything else goes wrong

[Bearnaise]

Hi, I followed this tutorial trying to adapt an armor mod to a different body, and it's worked out quite well except for one issue. When my weight slider is at 0 the armor looks fine, and when the weight slider is at 1 it also looks fine. But if I change to any weights in between the armor flips out (I'm sure you've seen something like it... the mesh just goes everywhere, filling up the whole screen). I thought it might be an issue with weight paints, but the 1 and 0 sizes are fine when the armor is in motion. I am also 100% sure I did not add or take away any vertices between sizes. Do you have any idea what could be causing it? Thanks!

[Hanaisse]

Hi Bearnaise, welcome to TESA.

 

All I can do is re-iterate from Part 6 of my tutorial;

Tips for creating the _1.nif;
- Both versions need to be exactly the same. Same position, same vertices count and order. The game merges both the _0 and the _1 mesh so if they don't match strange things happen.
- Should only require minor scaling in parts. Scaling and proprotional editing work best here. Try not to pull parts out of shape.
- Ensure the wrists and ankles edge loop aligns perfectly with the malebody_1.nif. Use the Snap tool.
- You can move vertices around but do not delete any or add more.
- Do not merge vertices or use "remove doubles" on one but not the other.
- Never use CTRL+A scale and rotate.
- Don't disturb the skin partitions.
- Use a lattice (blender lattice tool)

 

Something here is the cause of your issue. You'll have to double check everything.

[Bearnaise]

Something here is the cause of your issue. You'll have to double check everything.

Hmm, I guess I'll have to do it over again more carefully... Thanks for the help and for the welcome.

[Allnarta]

Hi to everyone!
Thanks for wonderful guide.
 
I have few questions about armor export:
 
I am Fallout modder and imported/exported hundreds of armors for FNV succesfully. Usually when I edit existing armor (mainly for adaptation to other body), I merge some objects of it to better shape editing. Blender is separating objects as they was according to their different material property. I tried to do the same here, but after export armor looses it's parent/child tree: 
 

 

 

Is it possible to export armor properly? Because I cannot edit it while some objects are separate, result is very bad because my skills is not enough to synchronously edit different objects that are joined with each other. Here's what I mean:

 

 

 

 

Or maybe there is some other tricks that helps to avoid this problem (gaps and imperfections while editing two different objects)? Thanks in advance for help.

[grond]

Try joining those parts, editing the single result, then in edit mode select the arm and P to separate it again.

[Allnarta]

Try joining those parts, editing the single result, then in edit mode select the arm and P to separate it again.

 

Thanks for advice! I was thinking about it. Will try it (actually I already edited this armor with separate parts and succesfully imported to game).

Edited September 25, 2015 by Allnarta

[Sangheili15]

I have an issue with importing an argonian tail into Blender. I do the exact same to it as all of the others while in NifScope, but it just doesn't work. Any advice????

I'm trying to make a model act with a Tail, and I can't import the tail!

[Hanaisse]

Make sure to also delete the line 1 BSBehaviorGraphExtraData, it's probably stopping it.

What's the error message in the output window?

[Jase]

This seems like a great tutorial. The only problem is that I have Blender 2.7...so it doesn't really help me.

[Hanaisse]

Thanks. You're correct, this tutorial is very specific to 2.49, what we had to work with way back when. The only useful portion of this tutorial for you would be the explanations of partitioning and possibly the nifskope cleanup sections. I could never get the 2.7x version nifscripts to work properly for me, so to this day I still use 2.49.

What kind of help are you looking for?