Hello, I've been searching through the forums to see if my problem had been adressed but didn't found anything related.

My problem is that, after some time using gmax to model, I decided to see how different meshes for OB and MW were made and worked. I have imported some modder resource meshes from Oblivion and exported them as Morrowind meshes to see how well they worked. Everything went fine until I imported a morrowind head to see how the animation was made, after that everytime I try to import any OB nif the import settings are the same, no matter if its a static or an animated object, and the model appears weirdly altered. So I was wondering if anyone could tell me which are the best settings to import an oblivion nif that has no animation (like a statue, a barrel...) because the auto detect feature of the importer no longer works.

I made a quick import of a model from the game so that you can see my settings and that it doesn't look like it should: (I chose a Dibella statue here because I guess people is familiar with it and can tell the changes, the same thing happens to the resources i've been using)

the import settings that i get when loading an OB mesh:
http://s189.photobucket.com/albums/z237/vi-c-iv/?action=view¤t=importOB-1.jpg


How the models looks, almost like if it had been roughly scratched or something:
http://s189.photobucket.com/albums/z237/vi-c-iv/?action=view¤t=importOB_messed-1.jpg

I hope I explained my problem clearly, excuse my bad english, my possible noobishness and thank you very very much for this community and for your time.

it's just the face normals are a bit messed up. could be split edges, import splits edges at UV seams as well. just select all the verts, set weld threshold to 0.01, weld. And set up some face smoothing. called smoothing groups in max.

No need to worry about much, as Ob doesn't often have many baked normal maps, and MW doesn't use them, which is about the only thing you need to worry about in getting face normals right, as baked normal maps will rely on having the meshes face normals be set up exactly how they were when you baked the map. Or else you will have shading errors. all you need to worry about is setting the face normals up so it looks good to you.

anyway, i don't understand what you mean by auto detect no working, you have to manually set game to oblivion for it to import?

I am pretty sure morphs will not import. So you will not be able to see how MW does facial anims from importing one. But it's just a morpher iirc.

Thanks for your reply. By autodetect I meant that the importer used (and should) to detect if the nif was a MW or a OB nif, now it doesn't, I have to set the game myself. Also, it has the skeleton and animation import options clicked even if the model i'm importing has no skeleton at all. I will try your suggestion later when I have time, I hope is works ok!

thanks again for taking time to read it and answer, I really aprecciate it

all those options besides the game setting, ie animation, are toggles, and are parameters that are for you set up. it would be odd if it resets to being ticked every time, if you had previously unticked it. but yeah something isn't right if it is not detecting the game version

IIRC the game detection is not done from the content of the nif file, but its location being a subfolder of the game's resources. If you extract to a neutral location, it doesn't have enough data to choose. I.e. it's not OB or MW if it's found in c:\meshes or something like that. I'm using an old 3ds MAX, rather than gmax, but the scripts are essentially the same ones.

Oh, thank you very much. I have the meshes i'm working with in a seperate folder in order not to loose them in the game folders, so that's what's causing it. Thank you very much, really helpful indication!

Also if you look at your import settings under geometry there is a check box for weld vertices that you have unchecked which might be the problem as Ghogiel mentioned - check it and set the weld threshold to 0.01 in that box and then try reimporting !

auto detect has always detected what nif version it is at import regardless of where it is located.