To just export a mesh from blender, copy the mesh's basic "looks" (as I call them) blocks from it's Nif into a working armor or weapon's Nif.

I've been trying since basically the week Oblivion came out, to make a weapon or armor of any kind with a new or slightly modified mesh. Now I'm on to FO3, have been for a little over a year, and I have not once been able to get a new mesh I've made from blender and into Nifskope and have it work like it should in game. I honestly think I've followed about 5 different tutorials on the simplest way to do this with the simplest melee weapon, but I still can't get it to work. As someone who is generally able to grasp how a program works and get it to work for them quite easily, this has been tremendously frustrating, and meant that a lot of (I think) cool concepts of mine have never been able to be given to the community. If anyone is willing to help me with this, I will be ETERNALLY grateful. I know how to work Blender on a pretty basic functional level (I can make what I need, nothing fancy) and I can do pretty much anything in the GECK (my scripting skills are probably 30% if someone like Talkie gets 100%). Anyway, hope someone sees this and is able to help me.

well, first off, what exactly are you trying to get in-game?

making an armor is very different from weapons in that you have to rig it to a skeleton and assign weight paint. for weapons, you would probably want to stick with those you can adapt to the animations that are currently available, eg, if you wanted to make a bullpup-configured weapon, a proper-looking reload animation would have to be made (afaik there are none).

i haven't done any armor pieces but i have a handful of weapons implemented in game. i followed tutorials from miaximus and echonite, and that was pretty much all i needed (skykappa gave me lots of tips on collision meshes as well).

E:
just post specifics & lots of details on what you're trying to do, along with any errors/anomalies that occur. you should also update to the latest versions of the export scripts if you haven't already.

To update the scripts would I just re-download them?

What I'm trying to get in-game are basic 2H or 1H melee weapons, no fancy moving parts, nothing, it should be super simple.

yea that's what i've always done. just get the ones you need and install it to the same place as you did before. of course the scripts don't support blender 2.5x yet so you'll have to use 2.49.



what problems have you had before? was it a export problem, or a problem with getting it into the GECK/game? melee weapons shouldn't be that had to do, but i haven't made any so my experience there is limited at best.

Well basically, I'd get a couple of problems, the first one didn't really seem to have any affect, it was just that one of the options I was told to set in the walkthrough/tutorials on making weapons wasn't there when I wen't to export from blender. It really didn't seem to matter though, the real problem was once it was in Nifskope I'd have trouble setting up all the blocks right, and I COULD get them into the game, and they'd look fine when just laying around on the ground, but once you equipped them they would either not show up at all or would be in the wrong place, like hovering out of the player's hands.

I can help you with a basic melee weapon. I created a pickaxe for my mod by modifying the sledgehammer. Here's what I did:

Take the sledgehammer into blender and mess it about. Export as a new nif.

Bring up the new nif and the base sledgehammer in nifskope. Triangulate the meshes (right click -> mesh -> triangulate). Copy the NiTriShapeData data block from the new nif (right click -> block -> copy branch) and paste into the sledgehammer (right click -> paste at end). Click on the NiTriShape block in the sledgehammer and find the entry for NiTriShapeData in the Block Details - there is a number there identifying the (current) NiTriShapeData block. Double click it and change it to the number that nifskope assigned to the data block you pasted in. You should see your mesh now appear replacing the old sledgehammer mesh. The NiTriShape block for the old sledgehammer will now be at the end of the block list and you can delete it.

You then need to create two entries in the GECK, one a Static and one a weapon. The static is the 1st person view, create it first using your new model. Then create your weapon: in the Art & Sound tab, enter your model as the 'model' and the static you created as the '1st Person Model Object'. You should now be good to go.

You might also want to fiddle around with the collision box, but it's done in basically he same way - copy the bhkboxshape (or whatever) from the new nif and then modify the bhkRigidBodyT to point at your new block.

yea, i pretty much did what JW1 said (except i used block -> copy then block -> paste over on the NiTriStripsData). i'm not sure where you're going wrong, but if you want, you can post a blend/NIF file and i can take a look at it.

one thing i did notice though was that the vanilla NIF had almost 2x as many entries in the NIF than the one exported by blender. i'm not sure if it was the import settings i used, because i only made a simple change to the sword mesh, and nothing more. here's my http://picasaweb.google.com/Falcon8204/MiscModels#5503480869431179586.

:sadvaultboy:

I go to try what you guys have suggested and now it says PyFFI can't be found, I've tried twice to install it, and re-installed blender. I give up, this is too much frustration just to try and get a couple of weapons into a video game.