Hello, I'm requesting that someone help me to properly weight a new creature I've made to the mudcrab skeleton. Also, I've had a great deal of hassle trying to get the normals of one of the creature's legs to work properly - either the texture is on the inside of the mesh, or parts of it keep disappearing when viewed from certain angles. I've spent several fruitless hours trying to weight paint it, and the results are awful, and hardly working. :banghead:

Here are some pictures of the creature, as it is currently:
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u187/K4tana/Screen2.jpg?t=1281793441
http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u187/K4tana/Screen.jpg?t=1281793839

It needs some texture work done on it still, but I'll do that eventually.

If someone could do the weight painting for me, I'd be very grateful, and that person would receive full credit in my mod. I have a feeling that a new, slightly modified version of the mudcrab skeleton may be needed, as the mesh doesn't fit it perfectly, and perhaps some of the mudcrab animations which use the extra nifs "Mud crbeyer/l00"and "mud crbjawr/l" may need to be modified to not use them.

Here is a link to the mesh on filefront. It contains 2 .blend files (one of which isn't weighted to anything (v10) and one which has my poor weighting attempt (v15)), a .nif file which is not weighted to anything, and the two screenshots. Please don't just use the files as a resource without asking me.

http://www.filefront.com/17200731/Marrow Crawler.rar
http://www.filefront.com/17206169/marrow crawler 2.rar <-- this contains 2 versions of the skin which are correctly scaled and aligned to the skeleton. One also has the skeleton in it, one doesn't.


Thanks very much in advance. :hugs:

When I tried to Import that Mesh into Max on top of the MudCrab skeleton -> the mesh is nowhere near aligned to the skeleton it was suppost to be based on its roughly 2 times larger and mis-aligned -> generally when your going to make a creature based on already present assets (both the Mudcrab and the Meshes themselves) you will scale and alter the mesh to fit the Skeleton it almost seems like you did the opposite you altered the skeleton to fit how you arranged the meshes and that will never work because the Animations will always reset the bones to their unaltered animated positions.

Also there are a ton of meshes in that file that are all using the same texture and should be all one mesh along with tons of unseen polies you did not cull when you imported the assets.

I would suggest Importing the Base MudCrab skeleton into your Blender Scene and Deleting the one you altered (if you did it is possible you did not and that .Nif you gave out is a version before you aligned it to the skeleton) then going over that entire set of meshes and aligning them to the original Mudcrab skeleton -> after that the skinning process will be much easier.

Thanks for taking a look Saiden.

Well, the mesh is mostly made from a mesh that came from SI - bonetree.nif, which is why there are probably a lot of unseen vertices, although I removed quite a few from the bottom half of the "shell". As for the scale issue - the .nif file just contains the "body" of the creature, before I moved it to be aligned with the mudcrab skeleton, so it will be, as you said, about 2 times larger than it, and not in the right place. I didn't change the skeleton at all, at least, not intentionally. My "aligned" version of the nif has all my crappy weight painting in it, and I thought it'd be easier to give a .nif which didn't have to have a whole load of mistakes erased first. >.< One of the .blend files is aligned, but it is the one which has my attempt at weight painting too.

Also, I'm not particularly good with blender - I can copy and move separate objects about, and make slight modifications to meshes (which is how I made the creature mesh). I don't know how to combine separate objects into one with blender either, hence the several meshes using the same texture. So whilst I tried to follow http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Blender/Creature_Meshes_101 as best I could, the results were just really, really bad when I got the creature into CS (everything was really wonky, and parts of the mesh had disappeared). I think I do know (sort of) what to do, but I lack the skill to do it, and because I have lots of other scripting and landscaping to do (which I am quite good at), I was hoping if someone with the skills would finish the creature for me. :shrug:

If you would like me to send you/upload a .nif with the body of the creature aligned as best as I can with the skeleton I will. It's just that I was *so bad* at skinning that I thought it would be better to ask someone else to do it.

Thanks for taking the time to look though

If you put those files up someone will take a peek at them and most likely help out, I personally do not have alot of time this week but if you make those files available when I do get some time I can look at them if no one else beats me to it.

http://www.filefront.com/17206169/marrow crawler 2.rar is the link to the second mesh pack, which contains two .nifs, both aligned as well as I could to the mudcrab skeleton (although the arms don't match too well :/). One .nif contains the mesh and the "clean" skeleton (without collision) and the other just contains the mesh.

Thank you very much for your help Saiden, I'd appreciate any assistance when you get the time. But if someone else contacts me about it, I'll post here so that you don't waste any time doing it again!