I've just started to use gmax since Blender and I are never going to see eye-to-eye However when I try to export as a NIF file, I'm only getting the collision and not the rest of the mesh. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I've been trying to follow this http://www.squidoo.com/nifexport, but it's not working. I'm not creating new meshes in gmax - that's out of my league Basically I'm importing a mesh and defining the collision on it. I followed another http://www.squidoo.com/Nif_Collision for defining the collision.

Edit: I think I just figured out why only the collision is being exported, but I still have the two questions below:

Another issue I've run into is that the collision that is exported winds up with a lot more vertices than what it had in gmax. In gmax, the collision looks pretty good, with just a few vertices that seem to encompass the entire mesh but not completely obliterate it. When I export, the resulting collision looks like the vertices got multiplied like crazy. If I copy the collision on to the original mesh, the collision is so dense it completely obscures the objects underneath. I've actually seen quite a few vanilla meshes like this, but I would like to reduce the number of vertices if possible. This might be another aspect of the exports simply not working properly.

Another edit: Well I "solved" this by doing the collision in Blender! So unless I get 3DS Max, Blender and I are going to have to see eye-to-eye whether I like it or not Grrrrr...

Last question: if I was to shell out the money for 3DS Max, would the 2011 version work for Oblivion? I noticed that the exporter was updated fairly recently, so does anyone know if the new version of Max would work?

both those tutorials svck.
The one for exporting meshes, the guy has no idea what most of the export options are or do. Obviously hasn't even read the niftools documentation on how the exporter works. I would take anything said in there with a pinch of salt.

the collision tutorial is asking you to use the utilities nifprops which is an outdated workflow and afaik has been left nonfunctional for sometime, and just hasn't been removed from the plugin.

beyond that i cannot help you, i have no idea what is going on in your scene or in the nifs.

max 2011 has nif support

Yeah, I think I've pretty much figured it out. You're right about the tutorials. I've found a couple of others and they all seem to contradict one another, so I've been doing my own testing. I still find that both Gmax and Blender have a tendency to create collision meshes with way too many vertices. I'm basically creating clutter objects right now, so I don't need a collision mesh with so many vertices that it completely hides the model. I've been playing around with removing a bunch of detail from the original mesh, importing that into Gmax or Blender, duplicating it and converting the duplicate to a collision mesh. Sometimes that works fairly well, but is usually still too dense. I've also tried to just import the mesh, create some very simple basic objects to represent the outline and convert those to a collision mesh. However I still find that I get too dense a mesh - that surprises me actually. Unfortunately Gmax crashes if I try to select anything other than convex shape or strips shape, so that severely limits my options. I found two different tutorials that contradict each other on how to do this in Blender, so I'm still not sure how to do it.

I discovered that one of the fort ruins statues has a perfect collision mesh for my purposes. It's name and path is: \meshes\dungeons\fortruins\dungeon\decostatuesetc\rfstatuefig02.nif. Could you tell me how to create a collision mesh like that? It almost looks like Bethesda created that manually because there just doesn't seem to be a way to generate something like that. Maybe 3DS Max could do it, but Gmax doesn't seem to be able to.

So with Max 2011 having nif support, then there's no problem using it with Oblivion? I remember that there was one version of Max that didn't work with Oblivion anymore because it required a third party plugin to do the imports and exports and development had stopped. It looks like development has picked up again though because I saw some recent releases when I grabbed the plugin for Gmax.

My original problem was that I was converting the original mesh to a collision mesh without duplicating it first That actually turned out to be kind of handy because all I really wanted was the collision anyway - I just copied it to the original mesh with Nifskope This had the benefit of me not having to deal with the fact that Gmax didn't handle some of the textures properly, so the export didn't come out very good.

Your extra vertices on the collision mesh doesn't make sense to me. How many verts are on the mesh before export vs how many verts does nifskope say there are after its exported. I get an identical number. I always just create my collision objects from scratch, it's quicker than trying to reduce a mesh imo. few mins tops. it's hardly necessary to be totally anol with something like a clutter object, it's going to be a convex shape most like, and that in it self will not afford you great accuracy in all cases.

the recent releases you see for the max plugin is probably one before current test build. which is V3.4. which was compiled recently for max2011. v3.5 apparently works with 2011 as long as you extract it to the correct directory. though hardly really necessary if you only work with OB, as it won't really give you any extra functionality. Only useful for F3 really. So no problem with import/export from 2011 by all accounts.

The objects I'm trying to create collision for don't have any. I had to remove the original collision when I shrunk them down to size. The one I refer to (\meshes\dungeons\fortruins\dungeon\decostatuesetc\rfstatuefig02.nif) is how I would like the collision to appear. When I do it, it winds up more like meshes\architecture\statue\statueimperial02.nif. You can't even see the statue underneath if you have havok drawn in Nifskope! So even some of the original Beth meshes have the same issue The rf statue only has 44 verts whereas the imperial one has 137. I don't know what the performance impact is, but I would rather have as few verts as I can. This is for my Imperial Furniture Renovated mod and there are some serious clutter monkeys out there Just wondering what the magic spell is :wink_smile:

Thanks for the info about max. I think I'll at least grab the trial version and see if I like it.

Don't be scared by the look of that collision, as all convex shapes look like this :] The main advantage of such collision type is that it's very quick to make even for most complex objects. Though it's good to know its limits and properties, as it is not suitable for everything.
Anyway, you can convert convex type collision to StripsData collision in no time in Blender, and with poly reducer script you can have something like http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/8361/clipboard02pr.jpg (collision has only 35 vertices).
Or you can go even further and try one of primitive shapes collisions (capsule or box)*, especially when your object is really small, then you'll end with smth like http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/4872/clipboard03gd.jpg.

* for primitive shapes collisions you don't even need 3ds max or blender, as all this can be done in NifSkope alone.

Thank you! :hugs: I just thought all those vertices spelt trouble. I wasn't getting much better results with StripsData, but I didn't know about the poly reducer. I thought there had to be something like that I am having no luck at all finding stuff in the Blender docs - that's probably the biggest part of the learning curve - figuring out what to look for!

I've done primitive shapes collision in Nifskope, but editing the transforms is really tedious. They are using a really weird edit mask on the numbers which makes it really hard to input numbers in the transform dialog.

I tried using primitive shapes in Gmax and still wound up with a lot more vertices than I expected. Mind you, my "primitive" shape was a cylinder with a dome on top, so I guess it wound up being not quite so "primative"

Thanks again, I'll give your suggestions a try.

Your paintings are a hit in IFR, btw

there isn't a cylinder collision primitive shape. I dunno if the exporter converts the cylinder to capsules if you set it as such.. it might actually. :shrug:

tbh I have never exported a capsule from max, iirc there is some weird issue with them anyhow. I have only done box primitives and they worked.

max's version of poly reducer script is the optimize modifier. I never use it either. Decimation master in ZB is about the only poly reducing function I ever have a need for. But it's there if you need it none the less.

Box primitives would probably be better anyway - it isn't that much different, especially for clutter. I just thought I'd try a cylinder and was suprised at the result.

Yeah, Gmax is really showing its age I think. I found Optimize in Gmax, but it crashes as soon as I select it. I don't think it's happy running under Win 7 64 bit. What is ZB?

Actually I was going to ask: I notice that 3DS Max is available in a 64 bit version - would the Nif plugins work with that version?

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Actually I see they have something called niftools-max-plugins-3.4.2.4632-max_2011_x64.7z. I tried the 2009 32 bit version and that doesn't work. I've only got the 32bit version of Max as a trial right now. So I'm not sure what to try...

try using V3.5 test build. someone told me they have it working on 2011. :shrug: might be true. just extract it to the correct folders.

Ah, I was using 3.4. Where is 3.5? It's not in the http://sourceforge.net/projects/niftools/files/ of plugins I found.

Thanks!

oh yeah its on the niftools max forum somewhere, it'll be easy to find. iirc there are 2 DLs, one is an exe, get the other I suppose, Thats what I would try.

I've not tried it myself to comfirm that the plugin even works, remember I only heard this off someone when I queried them about them using 2011

Great, thanks Ghogiel. I found it - I'll give it a try.