so im new to the moding scene. is it possible to instead of modeling with blend do the modeling with 3ds max and just do a conversion?

I'm not sure, both are really hard, as what it comes down to is getting it right in Nifskope, which after 4 years of trying to do in Oblivion, and 1 of trying in FO3, I still can't manage to do lol.

It should be. I know you can (obviously) with blender, and I have done it many times. So I imagine it should be possible with 3ds max, as that is a rather prominant modeling program.

You'll just need to find a plugin to let you export as a nif.

sweet. thanks guys

Yep, or just save it as a regular .obj, then open it and save it with Blender as a .nif.

I'm a max user. so is saidenstorm. Surprised people don't know that max is nearly as supported blender.

the niftools plugin is fairly full featured. at the moment you can't export particles, morphs, and several animation types-texture transforms, material/alpha controllers etc. which blender doesn't support either. and often can be post processed in.

apparently even morphs and particles can be hex edited. all my attempts to do so failed though. only saiden knows how thats done. i'm just avoiding morphs, and its possible to hijack a vanilla particle system for any basic use, and mess with it via nifskope.

evertything else can be virtually exported straight to a in game working nif. collision and fallout dismemberment is also supported. but you might have to make 2 changes in nifskope if its not a skinned mesh.