Artisanix

Thousands of free fonts with characters, symbols, shapes, etc. may be quite a useful resource during texturing... http://www.fontineed.com/free_fonts/page_1/

The only thing you should probably re-create in Blender is the collision for all these static models, as the format differs between Mr and Ob. As for the clothes and armors some rigging may be needed.

Very good tutorial of Ted Boardman about the basics of UVW mapping in 3ds Max - here.

here's a couple of links from me as I'm making some cleaning and delete various links from time to time, and such things may be useful for someone ;] FotoSketcher http://www.fotosketcher.com/ a little program whcih can easily make paintings-like pictures from vaious photos, can be useful for those who do not want to use any other more complex graphic editors like PS or GIMP... ColorPic http://www.iconico.com/colorpic/ small little app which can pick info about any color under cursor - very usefull if you spot some colours you like and want to "save" them for later for your future drawing projects... Tree[d] http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=treed.about very nice app which can generate 3D objects with various trees easily, and can export them to obj format, which can be imported to Blender then we can add collision there and usually increase the size by 10 factor and such trees can be placed in game I generated all trees for mysterious cave in my castle west weald this way...

to join two objects and make one mesh from them you may want to experiment with boolean operations, union in particular - manual

If the heart is all in one piece it's all easy then - Blender is able to save it and its animation to correct nif file - you need to select "Export Geopetry + Animation" button on export. And this should work well in NifSkope and game. Of course the most basic question still remains - what version of Blender you have and use...

I saw many complains on BSA commander, but the program never failed me - and I created all bsa files for my mods with it... I can only presume that those complains are because people relay on flags' descriptions in the program and try to set things in such a way - which is rather wrong because it doesn't work properly. What you should relay on are numbers of the bits. In other words you need to select proper bits no mater what descriptions they have. And for meshes you should select 1 2 3 8 9 10 11 bits for archive flags, and 1 7 bits for files flags, for textures these are 1 2 3 9 10 11 for archives and 2 for files, and so on... Which exactly bits you should select just check original files for reference. If your mod has meshes only just open original meshes archive and write down bits that had been selected for it (Info button) then you need to select those for your mod in exactly the same way. If you also have textures then open original textures bsa and check the bits - and add to the selected those with missing numbers. And I carried out an experiment once - I had selected all the bits for archives and files flags (FFFFFFFF) and bsa worked perfectly. So it is always better to select more bits than needed, than to select too few.

that imperial march had been played on more devices than floppy only...

Such "legendary" status could be reached now only because of quests... If there will be many choices and real consequences of those, and interesting non generic quest lines with some turns and twists - then who knows? Otherwise from things that have been shown, it only looks more like Oblivion 2.0 so far ;p

almost all is fine, but I'm really disappointed by the combat system :/ there's some minor progress since Oblivion, but animations, and behavior of NPCs leave much to be desired... at least from my point of view.

I always prefer a "bird view" to find interesting places for my mods with structures I want to place in game's world. Just type TFC in console and fly above the trees, if you find really interesting spot just make a save there for future reference - this always works for me.

What about the trap? Does it play its animation by itself? To test this in game turn the console, click on the trap and type playgroup forward 1 - if it won't move then maybe there's something wrong with the mesh itself? You may also put some test message in that part of the code to see whether it is triggered on contact, to narrow the problem down.

Hoods like any other clothes are skinned (attached properly to the bones via certain specific data). If you add anything to them you need to do some weight painting on new elements or copy weights of vertices form other stuff (e.g. from hood itself). These things can only be done in Blender or 3DS...

If you have SI then you may want to look at Syl for reference and maybe even try to copy verts from her dress - she's a duchess of dementia, and has one of the longest dresses from all stock cloth models - picture. Also from the game without expansion a shirt.nif mesh file located in meshes\clothes\upperclass\02\f has a dress that is long enough to cover all the legs and it ends on the ground like yours...

Let's explain something here ;] There's no one and only and ultimate method to do certain things in modeling and which is flexible enough to cover all the variants from simplest to the most complex. So it's usually good and useful to know more than one way to do things. Because one method may be far better suited for simple modeling while another for more advanced objects. And while that another method is supposed to be good for complex meshes and in the same time it is quite complex by itself then it may be not the best solution for simpler things ;] So do not deny existence of boolean method as a teacher ;] because for particular things it is far better than edge loops, etc. while for more advanced stuff your method may be the only reliable and decent solution...

Your tutorial is quite informative and detailed but... there's a third way to do such things :] And I mean boolean operations here... And here's how to do this (all actions in object mode): 1) create a cube, rescale it up (for instance) two times 2) create a cylinder with 24 vertices in the center of that cube and rescale it up along Z axis (for instance) three times 3) select the cube, and with SHIFT pressed down select that cylinder 4) menu: Object -> Boolean operation... -> Difference 5) select your cube and cylinder and hide or delete them and you will be left with cube that has a hole in it. two objects - cube and cylinder before boolean operation: cube with a hole after boolean operation (difference) - original cube and cylinder had been deleted: Well, your way of doing such things is interesting and give a chance to learn a few techniques that may be useful in some future for someone, but boolean operations in this case are much simpler, much faster, and more flexible (by using extrude for that other object you can easily create holes with various shapes). Besides the cube with hole produced by boolean has 56/56 vertices/faces after conversion to triangles, while the cube made with instructions in your tutorial has 112/112 faces/verticles (even before conversion?) from what I can see in your pictures - and that's because all sides of the cube have unnecessary faces me thinks ;]