making armour and houses meshes

prometheus · Post by **prometheus** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 12:12 pm

ok guys to anyone that is a good modeller please help me...

i searched the tes cd for meshes of buildingsbut i couldn't find any ....where can i get them?

then i have 3dsmax5 the nif importer and exporter , but i couldn't import races to see how to work on the armours and clothing , i tried severall tuts but they where almoust useless and short , i can't import any body and only few timwes a armour , but how do i link it then to the player?

how do i fibnd any building to modify and have new meshes???

Rodan · Post by **Rodan** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 12:57 pm

Take a look in the old forum. I'm sure those other buildings were posted there with their locations.

Veet · Post by **Veet** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 1:19 am

are you looking for NIF files or 3DS files to alter?

Kothloth · Post by **Kothloth** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 9:08 pm

Instead of using the races to know how armour and clothes would look, use existing armours and clothes as reference instead. I once tried to model a glove after an imported hand, but that didn't work at all

prometheus · Post by **prometheus** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 12:17 pm

thanx

o k i had been able to open some buildings but still i didnt find a good tutorial on how to modify , texturize and similar...

then can 1 of you explain me how i can make a fully new meshes set for an armour , make it work in game and texturize..

the tuts i have just say to reutilize old armour meshes , but i want to create a fully new one...

as for buildings , but in that case is simplier becouse they are statics

the what about the collisions for the buildings , i have to use some peculiar 3dmax option and how it works???

Kothloth · Post by **Kothloth** » Mon Oct 06, 2003 1:31 pm

Prometheus, I would recommend you making your armours from existing ones since it's much harder to create armours from the beginning. Also, you'll get the right measures and placement for the armour, which otherwise can be really tricky. And since it's so easy to modify an existing armour into something totally unique, you should only make armours from the beginning in very special cases.

I don't think I got your last question there, care to reformulate it?

prometheus · Post by **prometheus** » Fri Oct 10, 2003 12:52 pm

ok here is my second question....

i noticed in some buildings , but not for all that there is a secondary building inside untextured and with fewer poligons....i guessed it was for the collisions for buildings that have more particular shapes and poligons is that true and if it is how i should regulate myself on doing a new building about the collision wireframe in game?

about armours,i opened for example a bonemold shoulder, but how i can modify to create a new mesh without moving the place of it and making it collide well with the pg?

then how do i open some armours that are ...may be linked to animated files?

like daedric or dagoth ur's?

then and lastly what tut did u use to learn?

i got the ones on the thanos tower but in some places aren't very usefull

...thanks for your help

RaJevir · Post by **RaJevir** » Sat Oct 11, 2003 9:02 am

As for the simpeler model being a collision mesh, it is. Every static that you can collide with should have one. As for how to designate that it's a collision mesh, your guess is as good as mine.

Kothloth · Post by **Kothloth** » Sat Oct 11, 2003 11:34 am

i noticed in some buildings , but not for all that there is a secondary building inside untextured and with fewer poligons....i guessed it was for the collisions for buildings that have more particular shapes and poligons is that true and if it is how i should regulate myself on doing a new building about the collision wireframe in game?

'Collision' (from TES forums)

This object can be used to create a combination of colliding objects and non-colliding objects in the same mesh. An object with the word 'Collision' as the first part of its name is designated to be an area the player cannot move through. All other objects in the mesh however, automatically gain the property of NoCollision, so that they may be moved through. The object or plane that you designate with a 'Collision' name will be rendered invisible, so it is not necessary to hide it before export. If an invisible collision surface is not what you want, simply make a copy of the object, put it in the same location, but give it some other name and then texture it. That copy will be collisionless, but since it's occupying the same space as the invisible collision object, it works fine. I actually do it the other way around: design the object first, name it as you like, then make a copy named 'Collision' at the same location. It can be whatever shape you want of course. 'Collision' cannot be used in conjunction with 'NoCollision', as 'NoCollision' will override it.

about armours,i opened for example a bonemold shoulder, but how i can modify to create a new mesh without moving the place of it and making it collide well with the pg?

Well, if I got your question right, I think it works like this; If you just move around your mesh, it wont change it's position when you export it to a .nif. Tough if you edit it's mesh and moves all polygons with the edit tool, it's position will change. And this means that you can't use an other model to make it look good on NPC's. You'll just have to move it around yourself until it looks good. (It isn't that hard though)

then how do i open some armours that are ...may be linked to animated files?

The importing tool is quite limited. It crashes when you import some models, and don't when you import others. If it crashes when you try to open a armour like this, there isn't much to do about it I guess.

then and lastly what tut did u use to learn?

Knew how to work with 3dsmax before I came to this project

And I mostly learnt from trail and error, the inbuilt 3dsmax tutorials and some of the free tutorials over at 3dcafe.com.

prometheus · Post by **prometheus** » Mon Oct 13, 2003 2:57 pm

thanks a lot for your very detailed and explecative answers...

but as u understood i'm a 3dsmax noob so i have some new questions

o succeded in loading in game an armour i edited cutting some poligons away from the original mesh ...the dreugh armour for precisio...i cutted the upper and lower parts leaving only torso

then i saw that it was linked to 3 textures i hadn't been able to eliminate and so retexture it ...i succeded only ...and i even diont remember how to substitute one tex with a new one i made but it could not show in gane ...even if i put everithing in the right positiondirectories..

then i dressed the pc with ne non textured arnour but....it was transparent and i could see only what my pc dressed under it but not the armopur itself

oooh this makes be a little bit frustated especially about the texturing phase of a mesh ...

i think that if i created a new mesh would have been simplier but reediting an existing one as u said is better and time saving ...,.

but i 'm nit still able to retexture it and make it work in game

thanks again for any help and ur disposition...

Kothloth · Post by **Kothloth** » Mon Oct 13, 2003 9:18 pm

No problem

Let's see then:

First, texturing should be really simple. I'd say remove all original textures and retexture the whole thing again. One texture probably doesn't have the same fit as an other. The easiest (and most limited though) way to do it, is just to open the material editor, add the texture to the new mesh and then use UVW mapping (a modifier). Don't forget to press the "texture show" button in the material editor on the texture, so that you can see how it looks like when you change the settings in the UVW mappar. I know for sure that this works, since this is how I usually apply a texture to my meshes. If one wants to be more precise, one will have to use a UVW Unwrapper, which is much harder to work with.

And for the second point:

Armours are tricky to get right. Are you sure you've put the mesh to use in the right way in TESCS? That took me a while to get used to atleast

You must first create a bodypart from your mesh. It should be Armour, and the right type of it. Then create the armour itself. Choose the armour from the list on the right, (you must make the armour the right type first though in order for this to work). This is about how much you need to do for the armour to work at all. In addition to this (that is, if you want to use the armour in a public mod and also want it to be wearable) you should have a "world" model aswell as an icon. You can make a good icon by rendering in 3dsmax, but for the worldmodel, I'm afraid you'll just have to model something that looks good when placed on a table etc.

I think this is it though.

prometheus · Post by **prometheus** » Tue Oct 14, 2003 12:48 pm

well thanks again ...but i 'm still unable to remove the previous textures, and when in game it always says text.. error etc...

but i'll try to use unwrap

i tryed instead to take the bitmap...then add it to a material and then i dragged it on the mesh but i could see it only in render window....the main problem with this is that i'm unable to correctly fit the bitmap on the model like the lÃƒÂ²wer part is ok but the upper is stretched and deformed as it progresses toward the neck...

i'll try then a unwrap ....

what if i upload to u the mesh and bitmap so that u can understand better on what i was working on??

of courese this is for me only a step in the msh modelling for morrowind and only a training armour

i hope to learn soon to create full sets of stuff

from buildings ....armours....animations etc..

but is hard to learn by tutorials

as i read and make severall after the other i forget what i learn befoure ...this program is very deep and complicate to master

thankyou again for all your help

prometheus · Post by **prometheus** » Tue Oct 14, 2003 12:48 pm

oh one more thing what is a hexitor?

Kothloth · Post by **Kothloth** » Tue Oct 14, 2003 5:38 pm

Well, yea, upload your mesh so that I could have a look at it since I don't quite understand

Hexitor? Hex editor perhaps?

(With an Hex editor you can read modelled information for an example, and change textures on an object only by changing numbers and letters I think. Useful for those without fancy texturing programs like 3dsmax

)

Lord_Gallant · Post by **Lord_Gallant** » Tue Oct 14, 2003 7:49 pm

I strongly recommend NIFText for retexturing things, if you don't have 3dsmax. It is very easy to use and is a free download. The only problem is that you can't retexture creatures, since the program can't make animation groups. It works fine for objects, statics and body parts. You can find it here:

[url]http://12.145.63.45/~uesp/morrow/files/morfiles.shtml[/url]

Nazz · Post by **Nazz** » Tue Oct 14, 2003 9:00 pm

If you want to use a retextured creature what you have to do is copy the animation groups from the CS CD and put them in the folder with the nif, rename them, and hex edit them to have them use your new creatures textures.

Lord_Gallant · Post by **Lord_Gallant** » Tue Oct 14, 2003 9:25 pm

Yeah, that would work, wouldn't it. Why didn't I think about that when I was trying to make a vermai out of a hunger? Thanks for the tip, Nazz.

Kothloth · Post by **Kothloth** » Wed Oct 15, 2003 11:13 am

Hmm. Wait a minute. I remember I retextured a cliffracer some time ago. And I didn't use 3dsmax. In fact, I used one of these Morrowind reskinning programs. But it probably wasn't NIFText then. I could check what the program was called if you want to.

prometheus · Post by **prometheus** » Thu Oct 16, 2003 9:20 am

ok guys here is what i poorly tried to work on ...may be u can make it liook better than what i did and u can teach me how u did...