Importing a blender model into geck

[UndeadMartyr]

Most of what I've found has related ro modifying or adding weapons, but a teammate and I want to add a custom blender mesh they made for a new building into the geck.  I assume that NIFscope is needed for this process but it's largely outside of my wheelhouse.

[madmongo]

I use Blender 2.49b because it's the version that works for most things. You can use later versions of Blender to make simple statics like this, but since many other things don't work properly I don't use the later versions. If you are using a later version then some of the details of this might be different. Somewhere on the Nexus (under Oblivion I think?) there is a complete package of Blender 2.49b with all of the proper versions of the tools required. Make sure to follow the installation instructions.

Create your mesh in Blender, and create a texture for it in .dds format, along with a normal map dds. Make sure the texture is set to UV mapped in Blender. Map the mesh onto the texture. Create a collision mesh for your building (Draw Type = Bounds, Draw Extra = Wire). If the building mesh is simple enough, you can just copy the building mesh and turn it into a collision mesh. If the building mesh is too complicated though you'll want to make a simplified mesh for the collision just for performance reasons (don't want to unnecessarily overwork the game engine figuring out all of the collisions with an over-complex mesh). Once you have your collision mesh, click on Add Property on the PacMan panel (I have no idea what that panel's actual name is, but the icon looks like a PacMan). Once you have the new property, change the type to String and use one of the collision materials from the game (HAV_MAT_STONE, HAV_MAT_METAL, HAV_MAT_WOOD, etc). I always set the collision type to Triangle Mesh. I think Box also works but I never use it so I can't be sure.

Once that is done, just export the mesh as a nif. Make sure you select all before exporting since Blender only exports what you have selected.

Open the GECK, add a new static, and point it to your new mesh.

That's it. No NifSkope required.

[UndeadMartyr]

So I'm not the actual modeler and my blender abilities are barely beyond training wheels, and the person I am working with is not fluent in English, so there are multiple levels of comprehension difficulty here.  That said, any pointers on where to poke around in the belly of the Blender beast would be greatly appreciated.

I have a model from a teammate that I have imported into Blender, but the export is throwing up an error and refusing to generate a .nif file.  I think that my team member has not properly done either or both of the collision or the texture, and the error I get on attempting an export seems to support this ("Export Version expected shader.  No shader applied to mesh <bpy_struct, Material("New_Material.001") at 0x0.

Edited June 9 by UndeadMartyr

[UndeadMartyr]

Regarding the texture- will any old Blender texture work?

[madmongo]

Textures in FNV need to be in dds format. They also need to be sized in powers of 2 (e.g. 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, etc). Try to use the smallest texture size possible. Most meshes will look bad if the texture is too small, but large textures take up a lot of memory. FNV is a 32 bit game, so no matter how much memory your system has, the game will never use more than 2 GB of it. There is a mod/patch you can install to increase that to 4 GB, but that's as far as it goes. If your system has 32 GB of RAM, the game uses 4 GB of it and ignores the rest. It can't use it. 32 bits of address space is 4 GB. That's a hard limit. 4096x4096 textures look pretty, but using a lot of them is an excellent way to run your game out of memory and cause it to crash. Save the high-res textures for 64 bit games.

Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.Net (not the MS paint that comes with Windows) can all handle the dds file format. Photoshop costs money. GIMP and Paint.Net are both free. I've never used Photoshop due to the cost. Personally I think GIMP is more powerful but Paint.Net is much more intuitive and easy to use. GIMP is probably the most popular texture editor for FNV modders. GIMP handles alpha maps better than Paint.Net and is better for creating normal maps, otherwise both GIMP and Paint.Net are perfectly usable, so it's down to personal preference there.

GIMP and Paint.Net used to both require plugins for dds files. It's been a long time since I have installed GIMP (the version I have is old) but I know newer versions of Paint.Net come with dds support built-in and don't require an additional plugin. No idea about Photoshop. Like I said, I don't use it. I usually save textures as DXT5 as that format works with everything (transparencies, etc). If you are using GIMP make sure to check the box so that it generates mipmaps.

The dds texture for your mesh has to reside somewhere in your data\textures folder, just as your mesh's nif needs to go in data\meshes.

I found this video which goes over the basics of texture UV mapping. The tutorial is for Oblivion but it's pretty much the same for FNV.

 

At 0.50 he sets the colors to white, black, and white. I have never ever done this so you can skip this step.

You also don't need to go into NifSkope afterwards and fix anything unless you are making armor/clothing/skins. Blender never sets the shader flags properly for those so you need to fix them. Clutter objects and statics will export just fine as-is as long as you set the export options correctly.

When you are creating a real object, it's never as easy as just loading up the texture file and taking the default UV unwrapping. What you will end up doing is selecting different parts of the mesh and moving it around on the UV map until you get it to line up the way that you want it to.

 

[UndeadMartyr]

What do I need to do to add a collision mesh or generate a normal mesh?

[madmongo]

I only briefly skimmed through this video, but it seems to cover everything reasonably well for how to make normal maps using GIMP. Like I said earlier, I've never used Photoshop due to the cost so I can't help you if you use that, but there are numerous tutorials out there. Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas use basically the same game engine with just some minor tweaks between them, so any tutorial for Fallout 3 will tell you what you need for New Vegas as well.

As for creating a collision mesh, if your mesh is reasonably simple, you can just duplicate it and turn that into a collision mesh. If your mesh is more complicated though you don't want to do that because you'll make the game engine work a lot harder to calculate collision with all of the mesh triangles, which will have a negative impact on your game's performance. On the plus side, a modern PC can handle much more complicated collision meshes than a PC from back when FNV was originally released, so you don't need to be quite so concerned with simpiliciy and performance these days.

You create a collision mesh the same way you create any other mesh. Start with something simple like a cube and create your mesh from there by extruding faces, moving things around, etc.

Now that you've made your collision mesh, you need to turn it from a regular mesh into a collision mesh. See the instructions I posted earlier on May 22 about that. Again, any tutorial for Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas will apply here.

 

 

[UndeadMartyr]

The model I'm question is a cooling tower so I'll just duplicate the mesh as its fairly simple, I'm just not sure about this from your earlier post-

(Draw Type = Bounds, Draw Extra = Wire)

is that a tool, a modifier, a property assigned to the mesh?  Blender has its own collision system which I'm not sure will translate.

 

 

[madmongo]

Those are the options in Blender. If you have the object menu selected, they are down on the bottom in the middle. Under Draw Type click on Bounds, and under Draw Extra click on Wire.

[UndeadMartyr]

I;m using blender 3.3.1 so the menus are completely different.  Closest I can find is under Viewport Display for Object Properties setting to wire with a checkbox for bounds permitting a cylinder (or other basic shape) type.

 

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