Thanks to going to college for 3d Animation, I've recently started to learn the basics of 3d modeling. I don't know a lot yet, but I know enough to make slightly complicated things in Maya. I'm eager to test my new skills some more and thought I might try making a weapon for Fallout 3. Not from scratch, of course, because I'm still a novice. I was thinking more along the lines of extracting the model of a Laser Pistol from Fallout 3, editing it in a program, then importing the new model into the GECK and making a new weapon from it. Does anyone know of any good tutorials that would show me how to do all that? I've done some research myself and it seems I would have to use Niftools to edit the model. Is there no way to use Maya? I only ask because that's the only modeling program I'm used to at the moment.

Thanks for any help.

Well, I'm not a Maya user but from what I can tell Niftools has a plugin for Maya http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/Maya.

Regardless of what modeling program you use, you will definitely want a Niftools plugin to work with the .NIF file format.

Simple importing/exporting with the nif plugins from maya shouldnt be so hard, its just a matter of choosing the correct settings. Often times the defauls will do an ok job,
but may require some manual cleanup and tweaking. Im a maya and max user, havent had much experience with using the maya plugins, but assuming their similar to the
max ones, i can say beyond a shadow of a doubt learning how to effectively use nifskope in conjunction with the exporter will help you out a lot. A good idea in the beginning
is to study the hierarchy of pre-existing nifs then try to import your content into them, and play around a bit.

they aren't as functional, and afaik, it hasn't actually been updated to even export fallout3 version nifs. So it won't do you much good at all.

Ghogiel is correct. the maya scripts haven't been updated since oblivion, so using them for FO3/FONV wouldn't work.

you might be able to do your modeling in maya however, then export the model into a format to use in Max or Blender. if you have access to Max at school, i'd suggest trying that. i'm not sure if animations will survive the conversions though.


btw i think you can get a license for Max (and other Autodesk apps) for free if you are a student. see here:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=14185424

yup... 3 year licence FTW.