Hi everyone!

I used to do some modelling for Oblivion and I wanted to do the same for Skyrim, but for the lack of time I did not get into it. Now it seems I might have some time on my hands and I would like to go back to model making and I'm looking for advice. I was quite used to using Blender and NifSkope, but as I recall, in the early days Blender did not have very good support (no offense intended, I'm sure the people at NifTools were doing their best).

So I would like to know what is the current state of Blender nif scripts, is it a bit more user friendly now and if not, what are, by the opinion of the community, the most useful 3D modelling tools available (I would very much prefer free-to-use software, I cannot afford to buy professional programmes).

Thanks for any advice given and good luck to you all!

Blender has a community of users; they would provide help and support: http://www.blender.org/forum/

Progress is being made, however you still need blender 2.49 for export/import with minimal support in other areas at the moment. It's mostly because the team is much smaller now, and the inner workings of Skyrim is different from Oblivion, combined with API changes with Blender 2.5x and above.

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My opinion is work with what we have now, there's tons of tutorials out there that make importing models into skyrim easier.

Last edit: You DONT need to use Blender 2.49 for modeling exclusively because of the nif plugin limitation. Blender 2.5x and above are backwards compatible(with the exception of animation).