Okay, I was piddling around making a tipi out of fence posts and scrap metal, and I found the coolest damn thing I've ever seen the GECK do! It completely bypassed NifScope's most common use, and made a custom mesh from vanilla resources, without any input whatsoever!

I'm kind of hoping this is news because it's really got me excited. Okay, you know how you make a Static Collection, right? If you don't, you simply select all your objects that you want to be a solid piece and hit CTRL+G, and voila - you've got a Static Collection. It looks, acts, and behaves the same as a regular mesh.

Now the cool part - bring up your Fallout directory and search the meshes for an SCOL folder, and a new mesh should be in that folder - the combined mesh you just made! And it's as manipulatable as any other mesh. It's freakin' wicked!


I did search the GECK wiki, but I didn't find anything about getting the mesh out and using it for whatever your needs. I hope this is something handy for y'all. And many, many apologies if this is old news.

I remember seeing something in the GECK wiki about that. Does it only work for statics or would it potentially work for armor or weapons?

Haven't tried it with them, but it's more likely that they will just become a lumped together mesh, without rigging or such. Maybe if you stuck a sword onto a gun or something, and then added the nodes you need, it might work like that. It's just really easy to create statics like that. It's just super simple and super handy. Since I'm a world builder, I can build a single house from scratch using random bits and bobs, and then combine them into a single unit so I can just copy and paste really easily. And then I can even use the new meshes elsewhere.

It's literally blown my world apart - what it does is something I've been wishing for since I picked up Morrowind's CS.

afaik, SCOLs aren't meant to be used in this way. the way i understand it (very limited, so forgive me in advance) is that SCOLs are used when multiple meshes are used that share the same texture. that way the mesh is loaded with a limited amount of calls to load texture files.

say, for example, there is a building with multiple sidewalk pieces around it and the sidewalks all use the same texture. a SCOL can be made of the sidewalks so that when the meshes are rendered, the texture file(s) need only be loaded once for the entire SCOL.

there was another thread regarding this awhile back, i think Miaximus explained it quite well. i haven't seen him around as much lately but he should be able to explain things much better.

It's basically a 'group' function for efficiency purposes. For example, I had a wine rack that I had created out of various shelving pieces plus wine bottles - probably about 60 individual pieces. Turning them into a SCOL means that the game only has to manipulate one nif rather than 60. However, they can be ungrouped, so I suspect that messing around with the SCOL nifs that are created by the GECK could result in problems.

I've been piddling about with the Tipi mesh I came about with, and it behaves just like a normal mesh for all intents and purposes. And I'm going to use this to my advantage, as it's given me the desire to start work on DIY again.

As far as I can tell it has a side effect of being a super awesome mesh combiner. It's a lot easier to work with than NIFScope and it's got great results.

There is no reason that I can see for not doing what you have described. The only caveat to making SCOLs is that all the pieces must be statics. You won't be able to combine them if they are not. Though there is no reason why you couldn't make a static version of an object and then use that in a SCOL. Just be sure to include your SCOLs with any mods you upload.

In fact it only works with statics, armour and weapons won't combine.

That's not the only way they can be used though. You just don't again any performance advantage when you combine statics with different textures, the game will still treat them as individual objects when rendering them. They're very handy when trying to place complex static formations. For instance, working on some interiors, I turned all the lighting effects and the curtains of some existing interiors into a SCOL and was able to just place the whole thing into one of my own windows. It would have been a major pain trying to place all of the FX statics individually.