I tried simply copying NiTriStrips branches from a lawn mower blade nif over to a base ball bat nif and then positioned it to look like it had been attached to the bat to make a sort of bat axe (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/images/12307-1-1271906522.jpg) but for some reason now the baseball bat, when in game, hovers out in front of the player when in first person instead of appearing in the player's hands. I didn't move the bat or any nodes in Nifskope, the handle is still centered and has all those long wiry things coming out of the handle like in the original nif. A similar thing happened when I tried adding mower blades to brass knuckles and a knife at the end of a pool cue. Now the pool cue is held towards the center of the cue instead of at the bottom, making it look more like a staff weapon, and the blades aren't visible on the knuckles at all when the brass knuckles are equipped. I made sure to make 1st person objects in the GECK with the right meshes, and made sure to choose those 1st person objects as the 1st person model in the weapon's Art & Sound tab. Any ideas why it's not working?

maybe you could try to make it first as an object. / static and then rigging/copying branch. when i make two weapons together i first attach them to eachother in blender and join the meshes if needed. after that i go to nifskope coz then the mesh is already looking like it should be. then you could use the knuckles for the copybranch
for the pool cue try to move the mesh a bit forward. click the pool cue and then transform /edit. then use the translation section. when using the x-y-z you see it moving. now move it the way it need to be moved and press ok. then click again the mesh and transform/ apply. remember to do this otherwise the settings will not be done. press save. and save it with a new name so you have the original as backup. :wink_smile:

It would be my guess you need to 're-rig' the baseball bat. Or at least make the blade actually part of the bat NiTriStrips instead of its own seperate one.

The same would be true with any weapon or armor.

Damn, alright, is it much harder to combine them in Blender and export instead of just combining in Nifskope? I can never get all the settings right when I export from Blender and I can never set up the Nifs right to get them to act like I want them to, so when I thought I could do it in Nifskope I was like "YESS" but I guess not, I've tried doing it in Blender and exporting dozens of times but it never behaves right in game, the textures are always screwed up or its not rigged right or its scaled wrong, grrr...

load both meshes and delete the parts not needed.remember to leave the polyconvex there. now when you have set them together you export the new nif remember to leave the knuckles in it's place.press file /export/netimmerse, give it the name you want and click on export. in the middle section( collisionoptions) you click static metal,solid and none. on the right shader options you set this one to default.click underneath it the use bsfadenode root. press enter or ok to export. if i'm right and everything has done right this nif is now a new static nif.
check it in nifskope if it has the bsfade node. now do the copybranch and if i'm right that should do the trick.
if it is not at the right place then. load it again in blender and load theoriginal mesh of the knuckels. move your mesh to there and ..should do the trick too.
if i remember it right it should be ok when having it made in nifskope.

By copy branch do you mean copying all of the new static nif's branches into the original melee nif?

Hmm, I tried this, importing into blender was no problem, but I'm not really sure on what your instructions are saying deepside0, you seem to be telling me to export two times, and several of the export settings you mention aren't appearing in my export dialogue, so I'm not too sure how to proceed.

I have made melee weapons with maybe 10 separate objects. many of which were added post export in nifskope. I think basically the same as the op is trying to do. so hopefully that might be over kill.

I think nifskp is all you'd need. simple melee no animation weapn. should be do able with nifskope only.

maybe pivot centers aren't aligned correctly? which is why its floating, but only in first person it happens? after moving it around to the right spot, have you applied transforms on the mower blade? that will make all the translations 0 xyz. which is what you want, the bat is already aligned so it attaches to the weapon bone correctly, perhaps if you didn't reset the transforms on the mower blade it throws everything else off in the nif.
the long wirey things are just normal ninodes. they maybe flagged to do stuff. anyone know about them? I'm guessing if they actually do something it has to do with impact decals? they could well be junk nodes.

hi . sorry for the missunderstanding. it's only one time needed to export. the second time i mentioned are the settings before you export. these have to be in the last section before it actually exports. i don't know wich blender you are using and i don't know nifskope enough to know if it can be done there. i do believe it can but just don't know how. mine is the 2.49b serie.
so it needs only to be exported once with those settings.
i still need to learn some english again i see. :wink_smile:
i will see if i have time to place a picture of it when i added it in imageshack, might be tonight.
ps it is almost 12 pm here for me. living in holland.
need to go to work in about an hour.

Hey its no problem man, any help is much appreciated, and lol, thats funny I was just talking to my best friend who lives there.

I'll be back again tonight, going to school now.

Thanks a lot for all the help everyone!

Ghogiel, applying all the transforms fixed the problem with the bat hovering in front of the player, but the mower blade is still in the wrong place (its sticking out of the bat's handle instead of the actual bat, as it appears in Nifskope) and the 3 blades attached to the brass knuckles still won't show up at all when they're equipped. All the weapons look and behave perfectly when they're as statics (laying around on the ground), it's when they're equipped that they start malfunctioning. This is so frustrating, why don't programs ever work in an obvious manner.

well blender failed for me too. i tried about 15 ways to export it and as visual it works great but equiped. nope. tried some other things and can't even get the nif visual. looks awesome in blender and nifskope. but..well.. it going undercover in geck

Don't know whats up with that. It often seems like a voodoo ritual. You have to understand what the prog wants from you. and how to give it. then figure out what the game wants from you, and how to get the prog to do that as well. Baring when you have to do work arounds because of your tool set to get all the numbers right, it eventually makes sense why things work the way they do. For the most part :bonk: :dead:

send me the nifs and I will figure exactly what is going on. It'll probably be obvious stuff, in hindsight it usually is.

K will do, I'm not at home atm, thanks in advance for all the help, I love the Beth modding community!

There's one of the nifs if you want to take a look at it:

http://cid-a8f2a2b0ace8c1e2.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/pm%5E_triclawblade.nif

Well its immediately obvious why that particular nif isn't going to work. :hehe:

as soon as I even saw the file size I knew it's probably rigged< it's expensive stuff. and more so when anims start driving it.

basically that one is a rigged mesh. and the blades will have to be rigged as well. It'll only take me a a couple mins to fix that. for optimization- I'll consolidate the 3 blade meshes into 1 shape in the nif, so it becomes only one draw call instead of 3. and I'll do a transfer maps of the blade- basically the way it is now, you are loading 2mb of textures in 1st person just for that little blade. wasting around 95% of that texture. I can just scale up the UV of that and bake the maps across to that texture thus maximizing texture space< only because I have found a new way to do it recently and have only done s few times and I want to do it some more.

Optomaazing ftw.

anyway whats up with the bat? that is certainly not supposed to be rigged. it has just got to be an alignment/pivot issue?

just have to do a few exports on eyeballs, then I drop the freddy claw back off to ya.

sweet! the bat isn't rigged, but yeah like I said the blade still comes out of the wrong place for some reason, I'll keep playing with it myself and see what I can do, would it maybe help to combine the bat and mower blade meshes in the nif file?

edit: how exactly does one combine 2 NiTriStrips into 1 shape?

by attaching the objects together in a 3d modelling program. Don't think nifskope will do that.

nope.. you need a program like blender for that. this one will let you join the meshes. wich i already tried with the blades but eventually didn't worked. did ghogiel's way worked? if not maybe adding them to a glove? those are rigged too but not having the hand problem with it.