Difference between revisions of "Blender/Creature Meshes 101"
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* Now copy the whole sheep folder to Oblivion\Data\meshes\creatures. You may need to create the meshes\creatures folders in your Data folder first. | * Now copy the whole sheep folder to Oblivion\Data\meshes\creatures. You may need to create the meshes\creatures folders in your Data folder first. | ||
* Since we do not wish to replace the sheep coming with Oblivion, we rename the sheep folder to "oursheep". | * Since we do not wish to replace the sheep coming with Oblivion, we rename the sheep folder to "oursheep". | ||
* Make a backup copy of the .nif files right now. That's not strictly | * Make a backup copy of the .nif files right now. That's not strictly necessary, 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. | ||
That's the folder we're going to work with. In there are the files we're going to mod! | That's the folder we're going to work with. In there are the files we're going to mod! | ||
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Your surface normals must point in the right direction, or weirdness will ensue. If you have darker surfaces in the shaded view in Blender, they're not "normal". If you have a closed model, that's pretty simple to fix: SPACE, Edit>Normals>Recalculate outside. I do that quite often on the slightest suspicion that something is wrong. Blender will get it wrong once in a while when you start to place vertices by hand and fill the polygons in by hand. But, that's easy to fix. | Your surface normals must point in the right direction, or weirdness will ensue. If you have darker surfaces in the shaded view in Blender, they're not "normal". If you have a closed model, that's pretty simple to fix: SPACE, Edit>Normals>Recalculate outside. I do that quite often on the slightest suspicion that something is wrong. Blender will get it wrong once in a while when you start to place vertices by hand and fill the polygons in by hand. But, that's easy to fix. | ||
Make sure you don't have double vertices (SPACE, Edit>Vertices>Remove Doubles). Also make sure you didn't | Make sure you don't have double vertices (SPACE, Edit>Vertices>Remove Doubles). Also make sure you didn't accidentally put lines through or vertices inside of your model. If normalization does not appear to do what it should, that's usually the problem: Your model is not continuous. You have doubled vertices or open-ended surfaces. | ||
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== Putting it all together == | == Putting it all together == | ||
Now we have a .nif containing a skeleton, and a mesh. ''We're now going to mod the | Now we have a .nif containing a skeleton, and a mesh. ''We're now going to mod the original sheep.nif to use our new mesh.'' Sounds like we're nearly there, doesn't it? And, want to know something? We don't need the skeleton, as we didn't need the sheep mesh in Blender before. But now, we don't simply delete it, we're just not going to copy it. | ||
{| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#ffccaa;" | {| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#ffccaa;" | ||
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* There, click "Add NIF file...", and use the skeleton.nif from the Oblivion\Data\meshes\creatures\oursheep folder, click OK | * There, click "Add NIF file...", and use the skeleton.nif from the Oblivion\Data\meshes\creatures\oursheep folder, click OK | ||
Clicking OK was | Clicking OK was necessary here to get the CS to load the models and animations. We directly reopen the dialog, and ''activate our modded model''. | ||
{| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#aaffaa;" | {| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#aaffaa;" | ||
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* there is a column named "Form ID" | * there is a column named "Form ID" | ||
The FormID there is '''01'''004C97 not '''10'''004C97 as I claimed above. That's because the first two digits are the mod number, in loading order, in hex. Since this is the most recently changed mod, it's always the last one. From here, you have two | The FormID there is '''01'''004C97 not '''10'''004C97 as I claimed above. That's because the first two digits are the mod number, in loading order, in hex. Since this is the most recently changed mod, it's always the last one. From here, you have two paths. | ||
{| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#aaffaa;" | {| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#aaffaa;" | ||
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As I'm not much of an artist, I can't really help you with actually drawing the texture. If you have nice pictures for the model, you can possibly use them to quickly cut&paste together a passable texture. I'd put the saved UV layout we created during the UV mapping phase into a separate layer and draw on a see-through-layer on top of that. I believe texture sizes must be powers of two, e.g. 128x512, 1024x1024, 256x2048 and so on, but I may be wrong. | As I'm not much of an artist, I can't really help you with actually drawing the texture. If you have nice pictures for the model, you can possibly use them to quickly cut&paste together a passable texture. I'd put the saved UV layout we created during the UV mapping phase into a separate layer and draw on a see-through-layer on top of that. I believe texture sizes must be powers of two, e.g. 128x512, 1024x1024, 256x2048 and so on, but I may be wrong. | ||
When you have | When you have finished the texture, ''it has to be in the right format and in the right place.'' There are may good guides on that on the CS wiki, but here's a quickie using The Gimp. The Photoshop way may be easier - if you have Photoshop. | ||
{| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#ffccaa;" | {| width="30%" align="right" style="background:#ffccaa;" | ||