[SKY] Any way to avoid re-doing all weights, dismemberment, partitions when editing meshes?

[fadingsignal]

Hey everyone!  tl;dr Do I always have to go through the entire multi-step, laborious process of copying bones / editing weights / partitions / etc. every time I so much as touch an armor or clothing mesh?

 

 

Details: I'm moved from the texture mod realm into the mesh realm, and from my old 3D days have picked up Blender pretty quickly.  To keep it easy on myself, I started with weapons, and have that pretty much nailed down.  Obviously, armor is different.

 

From what I've read, and my experiments, it seems there is no way to edit an existing mesh without completely re-doing the skeletons/rigging, skin partitions, dismember data each and every time, even if you are just deleting a single face.

 

I tried to do a simple mesh "switcharoo" in NifSkope the way I do with weapons (export a 3DS file via Blender, import in NifSkope on top of the NiTriShape node you want to replace, which keeps all other node data intact).  This looks fine in NifSkope, but in the game the armor mesh explodes into infinite shards everywhere.  The mesh swap out was a simply change to a belt.

 

I went node-by-node, property-by-property and all of the skeleton data is 100% same as the original NIF -- is there some sort of "binding" of the mesh to bones that happens within a 3D program that is not visible within NifSkope? 

 

It's no wonder a lot of armors are just mash-ups done in NifSkope alone!

 

Thanks!

Edited July 19, 2014 by fadingsignal

[fadingsignal]

Turns out my Skin Partition Blocks are all scrambled because the new mesh data is different, which makes complete sense.  I feel like there is some RTFM action I need to do here, I would delete this post if I could figure out how

Edited July 19, 2014 by fadingsignal