SickleYield

I added this info to the first post as well.

Thanks! I've saved your post for future reference. That is indeed very different (albeit somewhat easier). I've found tutorials for making new heads (I'll probably be doing that, too), but the ones for clothes tended to focus on CS setup and 3ds Max. I haven't really done any animation for a loooong time (since I wrote about 3/4 of a tutorial on it and thus earned myself a jillion emails I couldn't answer because I'd never figured out what they were asking). But that is very exciting news.

Underground, you say? Linky?

Yep. The distant land feature is groundbreaking, too. Now if only I could get MGE not to cause my graphics driver to fail every ten minutes. That's on an ATI Radeon 4850, mind you. And savegames take FOREVER to load with MWSE on (initialization seems to be the lag phase). I've been playing again lately and am interested in making some BB clothing and/or armors. Nioliv's meshes are fabulous, but I'd like some new ones. Are there any Blender-related tutorials for MW rigging etc.? Is it just like Oblivion's with the necessity of using a clean skelly and so on? Are there special tweaks required after export with current NIF scripts? How do I properly set things up in the CS and make sure my .esp is clean? I just don't know! I have considerable experience meshing and texturing for Oblivion, so I'm not a stranger to Blender or TES games, I'm just needing a primer on Morrowind specifically.

Those who already know this, ignore it, of course. But I've been working with Blender for three years and never knew this until now. My friend the mysterious Lord Enigmatic just shared this incredibly useful little tip with me. Normally if I want to select an edge loop (that's a circle of vertices, something you need to do a lot when modeling clothes or armor) I would press ctrl+e and select from the menu that comes up. It's faster and easier to select one vert and press alt+right click. It takes a little bit to get the hang of it, since it chooses which vert loop to select based on which direction you click, but it's VERY worth it. And you know why? It works in the UV screen too. I cannot even DESCRIBE how useful this is. It has cut my UV mapping time in half. The reason is that whenever you model something long and twisty, like a strap or a belt or a vine, you can't auto UV map it without it looking screwy (even with a seam up one side created by selecting a vert loop with either method). Before I would have to individually select every individual vertex in that line of 100 or so before I could use w, 2 to haul them into a straight line. Now I can just alt+right click and there it is. I am SO geeked out about this, I had to share it with everyone. I'll be posting it on other forums I frequent as well. EDIT MUCH LATER: I just got this message from Vince here at the forum. He suggested consolidating the relevant info, and it seemed like a good idea to me. It will be added at the end as well.

Aww. Welcome to the forum, Katt.

Culling! Yes! -Has learned a new term- -Does a little dance-

Yep, that'll be why. I don't know the exact mechanics of the game engine (I'm just a modeler/texturer), but I do know it doesn't fully render things you're not looking at - just looking away from a mob of baddies that are destroying my framerate can cause it to pick up enough for me to run to where I can't see them all. Large, stationary hires objects that are not all visible at once are less apt to be a problem than small, animated hires objects that are in a visible array, is what I'm saying. You might need to put a rider in the readme with your own system specs and "don't play this with Oldblivion," but otherwise I wouldn't worry.

When you say they're in different sections of the interior, do you mean just in different areas, or are these actually different cells (i.e. are there loading doors between them)?

Only one way to find out - try it.

Glad you both got it thrashed out.

Instacrash on preview is nearly always a skeleton problem. Go back to your Blender scene and delete every skelly you can find. Switch to wireframe (z key) and check for floating bones that might be concealed inside another mesh as well. Save with no skeleton. Then redo the import skeleton/parent to selected and try the export again.

Howdy howdy! I like coffee too.

Hey, I'm all in favor of the lunacy. I'd better be...

That would be because I wrote the tutorial with 1. beginners and 2. cuirasses in mind. If you're making a very simple cuirass from an existing body piece, you can usually get by with using the upperbody's existing UV. This is what I did until I was far enough along to be ready for UV mapping with pinning and seams. The vanilla UV for heads would be awful for a helmet. Most torso UVs wouldn't be that bad for a main cuirass piece.

Oh, so it's less early now? I'd give you a cookie, but I'm not up to the required post count yet, so I ate it myself. And I know Vince from previous mod-related correspondence. Whereas I don't think we've met, unless you're actually Vagrant0 using a different screen name.

I was fixing the wrong problem. I'm glad chingari got it straightened out for you.

Thanks, guys! And... ZOMG VINCE!!!! I didn't realize it was you! Great to see you. I've been pretty much sticking to my two favorite forums lately, not much Official or Nexus action. Looks like I may have to be a frequent visitor here. Am working on the UV tutorial. Still have to take a bunch of screens. Will try and hack together a Blender-to-Xnormal workflow in the next couple of weeks, too.

Is this a clothing/armor item, or a non-rigged item? If it is unrigged, find a "clean" clutter object in NifSkope to use as a base. I suggest the paintbrush from the clutter folder because it has no collision (IIRC). Delete the nitristrips (and any collision you find). Copy all the nitristrips from the mashup into the empty file. If your mashup has collisions, copy the collisions over and use the spells-- entry to fix up the block order. Save. This should fix your scene root problem. If it is rigged, you will need to do the same with an armor/clothing piece that has a proven "clean" skelly and uses all the same bones - I suggest the Dark Brotherhood or Arena default armor (although it is a PITA deleting all the pieces). Otherwise it may be necessary for me to take a look at the Blender file and see what's causing the scene root problem - usually it's a hard-to-see bone piece hovering around.

UV it is. Thank you for the kind words. I will start putting it together today. As for that mesh, sorry, but no. A complicated hi-poly object like that needs to be planned with the UV in mind and mapped while it's being modeled, not modeled totally and mapped afterwards. Otherwise, what you get is an absolute mess. I have learned this from painful experience. Sculpt tools did not become my friends until I learned to bake normals (Blender does this all right, but Xnormal does it spectacularly).

Hm. Looks like basic UV mapping is already covered in one of the lessons. Is there something in particular we'd like to see? I just did a medium-level one targeted toward UV-mapping clothes that was useful to someone on the CI forum (it covers seams and pinning). I could take some pics and make a more formal version of that.

I'm never interested in any live human race for a fantasy game, and elves have to be pretty darn different for me not to actively dislike them. But then, I am perverse. I like the lore of Orcs and Malacath, and I liked the Argonian speech and gait from Morrowind (although one of those is gone from Oblivion). And of course I'm always for any cold-blooded creature, although Argonians in Oblivion appear to be some variety of mammal hybrid. Mainly I just prefer to create and play my own races. Then I can have them be very different from the norm, but also fit all my facial jewelry/tailslot mods.

There should be a note to the effect that gmax requires online registration on the computer it will be used on. Those who do not connect their modding computer to the internet for security reasons (as I do not; I have too much money in it to risk it getting a virus) will not be able to use it. Imagine my disappointment when I found that out. Here I was thinking there was a free way for me to learn Max's pesky interface...