Blender drives me crazy . I've been working on this custom armor for some time and I finally finished it but seem to be unable to export it from blender.,,I'm a max user so I had to import my files to blender to skin my new armor. Anyways I sucessfully managed to export a custom head model and got it all working ingame but somehow I'm stuck with my custom armor. I've been using the "malos" tutorial as my guide but I keep on getting the same error over and over.

It seems like some of the vertex don't get assigned to the bones. However when I move the skeleton around in pose mode it looks alright? So the error I basically get is this:
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/blendererror.jpg

Since I'm not used to work in blender at all I have no idea how to fix this. So I was realy hoping that one of our fine board members could help me out solving this problem?
Your help is very mucho appreciated! !

Normaly it helps for me if I get this error (and the weightpainting is done correctly) to simply delete the skeleton which I used for testposing. Select all, import a new one (with 'Import Skeleton only + Parent Selected' checked only in the left section ) and then export.

thanks! I just tested it but somehow I still seem to end up with the same problem. I have a seperate mesh for the boots, jacket and pants and it does seem to export the boots correctly but not the pants and jacket mesh. I can't merge it all together in one mesh because then I would have to redo the mapping and textures? So I'm realy lost right now. I'm wondering if there's anything I'm doing wrong. Because I exported a head mesh the same way and that one worked out fine? So I have no idea what's causing this problem?

One thing I forgot to mention earlier from my weightpoint routine. I delete normally all bone assignments on the faces that have no influence (dark blue) and are not needed. If they are in it also can lead to this annoying error.
I also remove the assignments which are written in capital letters but I am not sure if this is correct.

Btw. I am no specialist and only learning armor making in the moment.

yea, this can be a very annoying issue to debug. i've only dabbled around with armor before, mainly modifying the vanilla ones.

as sesom said, it has to do with the weight paint. i'm guessing it's probably a vertex (or a couple of vertices) that have not been weight painted to any bone. i think the easiest way for you to resolve this would be to isolate the pants and jacket, and just re-weight-paint the weight paints on both. make sure you hit every single vertex (of course make sure you are painting the vertices to the correct bones), because even if one vertex doesn't have weight paint, blender will throw this error at you.

i had this error when i tried to modify a raider armor. turns out it was one (yes one) vertex that hadn't been assigned weight.
i'm not sure if blender selects the vertices in this case or not... when you get the error, you could try doing an inverse selecton (CTRL+I), then press 'H' to hide. that should leave only the un-painted vertices visible. press CRTL+H (i think) to un-hide the vertices.


as far as merging in into one mesh... it depends on how you have set up your UV map/textures. if the pants & jacket share the same texture file & are UV mapped correctly, you should be able to merge them together.

hope this helps.



ps
if you're a max user, why for the love of max aren't you using it?? i'm guessing that you have a version that is unsupported by the current export scripts.....

When that happens it is because those vertices are not part a bone group. Assign them to one with zero or negligible weight (or delete them if they are not needed).

*Edit: (just saw this)
If they are assigned to a bone group ~check for doubles. Maybe check to remove them from all groups and reassign them.
Worst case, just delete the vertices and rebuild them (at last resort).

When using Blender I would highly recommend saving about ten incremental backups. Its possible to get a mesh that will not export at all even when this error is fixed. You should make sure that you have the ability to revert back to a few minutes or hours, or days past. I had this happen more than once, usually it was fixable, but once I did have to revert to the previous days Blend.

Why did you have to import it to blender to skin it. why not just do it in max? which will be a zillion times easier because you know what you are doing. and that it just isn't blender. loco if you ask me.



which version would that be? max 5 or something... hell even that might be supported. as far as i am aware, the niftools exporter is supported for all of them from that to current. apparently even the 2010 plugin works in 2011 if you just install it to the right folders.

thanks guys! I tried fixing it with your help but somehow blender keeps on selecting the same faces over and over again, even if I remove them and re-assign them to a bone. Blender is so confusing I'm wondering if it even realy assigns the vertex to a group or w/e. So I'm going to see if I can get it right in 3d max, which should also do the trick. Other than that would one of you guys be willing to have a look at my mesh in blender? I can just send the blend file by yousendit or upload it on my webspace so you can download it? Because this thing is driving me crazy lol ! I would also like to know if one of you guys is able to fix it how you did it? Just in case I run into the same problem next time :/!

lol yeah i'm going to see if I can fix it in max now I know it's supposed to be a lot easier but since I have no idea about the technical side of modding for Fallout [im just a modeller and texture artist] I'm kinda afraid to do it without a tutorial. Cos ofcourse ill end up doing one small thing wrong and it get's all effed up again ingame lol Btw Im a 9 user and the plugins work fine for me so I guess ill just give it a try!

there is nothing to it in max... if you have used skin before, so just do that. once it's skinned, export it. you won't even need to do anything to in nifskope, it'll work as armor right out of the box.

once you are happy with the rigging etc, you just come back to the scene to do all the dismemberment/pipboy/meatcaps as a separate round final round, bfeore its completed

Yeah I'm trying to get it right in 3d max now but somehow I think I have to redo all the weight painting. I tried copying a modifier from another nif but it doesn't work like that. I have to re-assign all the vertex so it seems. Which is going to take some time getting the weights right. Blender was just a few clicks...or I might be doing something wrong again i guess lol? Since the mesh isn't responding to the bones at all only if I change the enveloppe radius but it looks realy ugly...

you cannot just copy the skin modifier from the stack from one mesh to another- this is just bad news. actually that is the only thing i have ever liked about blender, skin copy weights.

if you want to copy skin weights do it the proper way.... skin utilities or you can try the skin wrap modifier. warning these can be fiddly.

edit: oh yeah..

you could merge the objects into one.. the exporter should split the mesh according to material ID. so you can just attach it all together and apply different materials to the sub objects. and the exporter will split into separate mesh objects in the nif. not that i think you should do that. but you can

I just messed around with some of the settings and most of it looks okay now. There are only some vertex I need to reassign or remove but I guess I'll figure that out lol. I just hope i wont run into errors again once I try to export this one. Btw I noticed how all the imported nifs have a "BSdismemberskin modifier" attached to it. What is this and what does it do? And do I also need to add this to my nif when I export it?

that is for setting up the dismemberment. don't worry about using it until you are past rigging. you can export without it and test everything in game. you just cant shoot off arms until you set it up.

I finally managed to sucessfully export it with blender! I don't know how but I did, and it seems to work in nifskope as well. The armor seems to be perfectly rigged [a lot better than the version i did in max] but I run into the next problem, it seems to be that by exporting the file it also loses it's uv map I guess. It seems that it's all set up in blender but apparently when I open it up in nifskope I get a "could not load uv data" error when I try to check the uv map and somehow there are no textures asigned as well. When I copy a block from another nif file and reassign the textures they also won't seem to show up.

....any thoughts on this one?

I <3 modding lol

I dunno... but I can say that Blender has a lot of non-intuitive aspects that have to be right to get the results you want.

My guess about this, is that your material may be setup wrong. In Blender the material draqed on the model is not necessarily the same as the one that exports. There are two separate image settings. One is the preview texture (used in 'Textured' view). The other is the actual material that you assign to the model, and will actually render.
The one for the preview & editing, is (or can be) different from the one that the nifscripts export. Check that your material is correct.

You should have [at minimum] a diffuse texture, and a normal map [texture] assigned to the material that you are using for your mesh. The nifscripts use that material to assign the right files in the NIF.

**Edit: http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/materials.jpg

Yeah your right I checked it and my material set up wasn't right. So I just messed around in blender, changed the color of the texture to some vibrant color to see if the mesh was also changing with it and it wasn't. So I did some tests and I FINALLY lord lol managed to get it working. I just tested in the editor and it seeems to be working. All the textures show up and the armor seems to be rigged. However I have no idea if I will get any errors later on ingame.

So far I only exported the jacket and the boots, the pants seem to have the same problem as the jacket did so I had to copy the weights of another nif file. So hopefully I can just cut and paste this thing together in nifskope without any trouble! But well see I'll keep you guys posted! Thanks so much for your help btw ! I iz back working on this thing again !

edit;

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/Geonox_2/abe.jpg <- lol he's such a fierce diva!