For my mod I need some unique skeleton characters, and I want them to have unique armour and weapons. I know there is a skeleton NPC race I could use with custom armour and that's an option. The trouble with that is that the custom armour may occur elsewhere in game depending on which mods are used - so it may not be unique. Plus with most of the armour mods I've seen the armour is just too good for these characters or doesn't fit with who they are.


What I'd prefer to do is make changes to the stock skeleton creature, but I've never done any modelling so I have no idea how easy or difficult that would be. Would it be possible to make changes to the meshes without affecting the animation? I seem to recall seeing a sleleton with a helmet but that could well be from another game.

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Armor can be put on the vanilla skeleton pretty easily in nifskope if you have any experience with it. Even BB armor/clothes can be done.

I have some experience with nifskope, just tweaking textures generally, nothing like this. Would using Blender be easier or better? Are there any tutorials that cover this kind of thing?

No blender would not be easier for this. Try this.


The cuirass is going to be pretty easy, open up the cuirass you want, copy the node called Tri Chest or Tri Chest # (if there is more than one mesh there'll be a number, you probably want all of them). Paste the cuirass onto the Bip01 node of the skeleton. It'll go right on.

Pauldrons, bracers, boots, etc. are a little trickier sometimes because you'll have to position them once you paste them in. The trick is that you want to past them onto the correct node. If you want to use the clavicle part of a pauldron copy the mesh and paste it onto the Bip01 L Clavicle and the Bip01 R Clavicle. If you want to put on a helm, paste it onto Bip01 Head, etc..

Once you paste them on, just rotate and move them around until you are happy with them. There isn't really a "right" way to the position.

Hope this helps.

-MD

I'll start experimenting with some stock armour, though I'm going to need to create some new armour for at least some of them. Thanks very much for your help.

No problem, if you have issues feel free to post again. Someone will be around to help you

Why don't you simply use a skeleton race for those? They can use anything a normal PC/NPC can.

how do u... paste things on in nifskope please?

When I was first thinking about this, I thought I would have to change the underlying skeleton structure - for instance take the skeleton arm and change it to a piece of armour - the idea of which I find quite daunting. I just thought it would look better than the skeleton race wearing custom armour. Using Melchior's method (which I've tried and which proved easier than I could have hoped) on the face of it seems to have the same effect as using the skeleton NPC race, so it would come down to aesthetics. Although there are probably other differences which I'm unaware of at present.

One con to using the creatures which I only thought of last night, is that if you take the armour they're carrying they'll still appear to be wearing it. But I've thought of a couple of possible ways round that which suits my mod but which wouldn't work if you met these creatures in the wild somewhere.

In either case, I'm going to have to learn how to make some armour for them .

Erm eh? You don't change anything by doing that, the armor simply replaces the arm by itself when it is equipped..

Anyway, good luck with this

I meant changing the arm on the sleleton creature, not the NPC, if I've understood you correctly. I didn't know you could just add armour pieces in nifskope. I should have explained myself better. But I won't be doing anything like that now, thankfully.