Help with rigging objects to an outfit

[Delim33]

Everything is rigged properly except for 4 things, those things being the skull, jaw, Mr. Handy eye, and the belt that's holding the skull. I've tried looking at some tutorials but I haven't found anything that hasn't confused the hell out of me. 

Edited July 19 by Delim33

[madmongo]

I'm not sure how much you know about rigging things, so forgive me if some of this is too basic.

I, like most modders, use Blender for things like this, mostly because it's free, and the other methods that folks use aren't free.

That said, another option is Outfit Studio. Most modders for FNV don't use Outfit Studio since it came along later  during the Skyrim years. It might be easier to use for this, but you aren't going to find too much support for it on FNV because most FNV modders are used to Blender instead. I've never used Outfit Studio for FNV, so I don't know how well it works and I can't help you with it.

For Blender, if you want it to actually work, you need Blender 2.49b. There are nif tools for later versions of Blender but I've never seen anyone successfully use them to create anything other than simple statics. Rigging tends to fail miserably from what I've seen. 2.49b has a few quirks, but at least most things work. Mostly.

There's a complete package for Blender 2.49b and all of the necessary tools under the Oblivion section of the Nexus. You can drive yourself nuts trying to put together the correct versions of the tools if you do it yourself, so having it all in one package with the correct versions and everything working together is a huge time saver. Make sure you follow the installation instructions.

Open up Blender, select all and press delete to get rid of all of the junk it adds by default when it starts up. Now that you have any empty workspace, import your clothing nif. Then import your other objects, like the skull, Mr. Handy eye, etc. When you import the other objects, if they have collision meshes, remove those collision meshes. You don't want them for outfits. If those objects (like the Mr. Handy eye) are already rigged to a different skeleton (armature), it's best to un-rig them before you start all this. Open up Blender, load in the mesh, un-parent it, delete the skeleton, and export the mesh. Then import that stripped out mesh into your clothing mesh.

Now that you have the clothing mesh and all of the other meshes all in one place, you just need to rig the new meshes to the clothing skeleton. Select the skeleton and the mesh and parent the mesh to the skeleton. I always let Blender assign the bone weights then go back and edit the weights to fix up what it does wrong. Once the mesh is parented to the skeleton, select the skull mesh and edit bone weights. Bone weighting is fairly simple. If you assign the bone weighting 100 percent to the left thigh bone, then the skull will move exactly with the left thigh when the clothing is animated. For something like an outfit, you'll want parts near the elbow to be weighted to both the upper arm and lower arm so that the mesh will deform as the character bends their arm, but you'll want other parts like a belt to be weighted almost exclusively to the pelvis, for example. Since skulls aren't made of cloth and shouldn't deform, you'll want the entire skull mesh weighted identically so that it all moves as one thing. Based on where you have it positioned, it might be best to weight it to either the pelvis or to one of the lower spine bones.

Any tutorial on rigging in Blender should give you all of the details. A complete tutorial on rigging is well beyond what I can type in a single post here.

Remember, you can move the bones around and see how the skull moves, then CTRL-Z when you're done to put the bones back where they started.

Once that is done for each individual mesh piece, save your blend, then export it as a nif. Make sure to select all before exporting. To export it properly, start with the defaults for Fallout 3, press Creature and Skin under the collision options (top center), then make sure Use BSFadeNodeRoot (top right) is NOT selected.

Blender never seems to export the shader flags correctly, so you'll have to fix those in NifSkope. For each mesh piece, find the BSSharerPPLightingProperty, and set the Shader Type and Shader Flags to fix it. For clothing bits, your skull, etc. you'll want the shader type to be SHADER_DEFAULT and you'll want to set SF_Skinned and SF_ShadowMap. Your mesh doesn't have any human body parts, but if it did have any (like for example if it had short sleeves and human arms visible), those parts would use a shader type of SHADER_SKIN and you would set SF_Skinned and SF_Facegen instead. Blender usually sets the rest of the flags correctly.

[Delim33]

Thanks for the thorough reply! Was surprised I got a response so fast. I winded up figuring it out in outfit studio and got it working after some trial and error