Difference between revisions of "Blender/Creature Meshes 101"

* Make a backup copy of the .nif files right now. That's not strictly neccessary, but convenient. Just select them, hit Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Should you want to start anew with a

fresh skeleton.nif or so, it will be right there.

We actually just deleted all havok data. Oops! But as we're not going to use any of it directly in the game later, it will be OK. The problem is, Blender will not be happy with just the naked bones - there must be a skin they're attached to (and, we'll just delete that skin later in Blender, too).  

* in front of the node is a number, remember that

* scroll down, you should see an entry "Children"

* double-click the value of the children

* replace the 1 with the number you remembered above

Explanation: In the Block List window, there are numbers printed next to the node types. The "0" in "0 NiNode Scene Root" stands for the number of the node. The meshes we just copied in have numbers standing next to them, too. Watch how the Block Lists changes when we do the next step.

Finally:

* save the file as cleanskel.nif

Phew! That was quite some work, to make a cleaned skeleton like this. But the good news

is, you only need to do that once for each creature. You can reuse the cleaned skeleton

for other creatures which are based on the same skeleton.  

The model needs to roughly fit the existing ones. Look at the dog model, the original has a raised head and the tail in a straight line. You can just about forget to start with a dog sitting, its tail wound around the paws. If you have a model with a wrong tail, well a tail is quickly deleted and redone, but much more problems than that and I would rather start anew. You can play around with the overall size in the construction set later, or leave parts of the rigging out. If you want to have a small dog, just set size to 0.5 later. If you want to have a dog with a capped tail, just don't rig the last tail bones.

* load the sheep model

You now see the same structures you earlier saw in NIFskope, in Blender. In the front is the sheep mesh, inside - look closely - you can see the skeleton. ''We want to rig that skeleton to our mesh.'' As a start, in Object Mode right click the sheep mesh and delete it (XKEY). That hurt, right? What you have left is the basic skeleton.

* scale and rotate the sheep model into a good position. Rotate by exact amounts (hold ctrl). ''Do not change the skeleton in any way!'' That will not do what you think it does.

* switch to a sideways view (NUM3)

* right click the dog mesh, shift-rightclick the skeleton, hit ctrl-P, select armature, select don't create groups

We just parented the mesh to the skeleton. That means if you move the skeleton, the mesh moves along with it - a good start! But what we actually need is not only a movement of the mesh along with the skeleton, but a deformation of the mesh itself. To that end, we must ''tell which vertices belong to which bone(s)''. That process is called weight painting. The deformation does not use absolute yes-or-no values, but a value between 0 and 1 (or 0% and 100%), it's weighted. The value determines how much a vertex is influenced, not only if it's influenced at all. Of course a value of 0 means it's not influenced at all.

* from the menu, choose File>Export>NetImmerse/Gamebryo, export as ourdog.nif

* open dogbones.nif in NIFskope and check for errors