Hey all,

I am teaching myself how to make a weapon mod from the ground up. While I am a beginner modeler, I have made a model of a the backpack of a 2-hand gun that I want to see in game. I have had several problems though, and I was hoping that I could find someone on these forums with a lot of experience building models for Fallout 3. Here's the top of my list of questions:

1. My current build has 1752 vertices and 2609 faces. Is this too much for just a backpack? I am concerned that my mesh is sloppy and not optimized but I'm working with limited knowledge.
2. My mesh is not symmetrical and I'm having some problems teaching myself to UV map this object. The UV tutorials I've found discuss only cubes, or symmetrical organic shapes (human/animal) and I am really confused about seam placement. My UV map attempts are really rough compared to other mod's UV maps and especially Bethesda's. I feel that since I'm teaching myself I've missed out on some fundamental here.
3. Getting a bit ahead of myself, does it make a difference at all to have multiple objects rather than one single attached mesh when exporting to .nif?


I have the mesh in 3ds max and blender formats and I am willing to send it to anyone willing to take a look and help me out. The backpack is my best shot at a faithful adaptation of the Ghostbuster's Proton Pack.


Thank you,

stewelement

Your uv seams should be placed along smoothing groups so normal maps function correctly. Hide seams in places you wont usually see (back of cylinders etc) to hide inconsistencies. Try to maneuver your uv map to reduce texture stretching.

how did you edit the model files of FO?