openmw.org

Want to try your hand at making objects for the Example Suite, but finding it difficult to navigate the mess of old installation guides, broken links and missing xml files? Here's something I combined from them that works easily.

Link to our issue tracker!

https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/example-suite/issues

Installing OpenMW-Template:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3003

Blender 2.49 tools installation

Quick package (untested) http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/42755/?

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1. Download and install Python 2.6 http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.6/python-2.6.6.msi
2. Download and install Pyffi http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyffi/f ... e/download
3. Download Blender 2.49B http://download.blender.org/release/Ble ... indows.exe



4. Download this Nifscripts zip https://github.com/niftools/blender_nif ... 7b0815.zip

Install.bat doesn't work for me, so this is what you need to do for a manual install. You need to find blender/.blender/scripts and dump the scripts from your zip in there. However sometimes the scripts folder is not even located in the program files Blender directory.

If it isn't in there, look for users/myusername/appdata/roaming/blender foundation/blender/.blender/scripts.

5. (Optional) Now if you want to view your nifs in Nifskope, then download and install it https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/re ... indows.exe

Nifskope is kind of like a limited tool that lets you view your files easily, as well as play around with /texture locations, make rectangular collision boxes, change how your mesh interacts with lights and edit the little numerical values you wouldn't normally be able to see in Blender.

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Alternatively, you can use this link. http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/40980/ I have not used it myself, but Linux/Debian users John_D and Psi29a down below vouch for it.

Blender 2.7x -> Blender 2.49B

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Make your model, UV unwrap it and texture. After that, press A to select all and ctrl+T to triangulate, so all faces carry over correctly. Then save as, with the legacy option selected:

http://i.imgur.com/pJKXoTy.png

Open it up in Blender 2.49. You will notice that it has no textures, but the materials and UV unwrap are intact. All you needd to do is reapply textures.

Keep in mind that all animation is lost, so any animating needs to be done in 2.49 at the moment. I don´t use .obj because it resulted in some weird stuff that was sometimes not noticeable, sometimes ruined the model.

Blender NIF exporting

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So first things first. You want to test it out, see if the nif exporter works. You select File->export->NetImmerse/Gamebryo (nif, kf, egm), select Morrowind as the nif version you want to export to and... get an error about map import UV something something. First, find your texture slots.

http://i.imgur.com/QzH3koq.png

Set all textures on every material to map input UV.

http://i.imgur.com/GJ64j1Y.png

When exporting, make sure that you have your mesh selected. Blender nif exporter only exports what is selected.

Blender NIF collision

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If you were just introduced to Blender, don't bother with this yet. But somewhere down the line you will want to think about object collision. If a mesh has no collision, then the OpenMW engine simply generates it based on mesh polygons. However some meshes have a looooooooooooot of polygons. Colliding against 10 000 surfaces can confuse the engine and make it go slow for a bit, or even let you pass through the object. For this reason you might want to add a simplified version of the mesh from which the collision will be generated.

NPCs and Creatures currently only have 1 rectangular collision box. Rectangular collision boxes can be added in Nifskope. Here's how:

http://i.imgur.com/kUlu95C.png

As you can see, it is extremely tedious to move the rectangle around. You have to insert coordinates by hand. But what if your mesh is more complex than a rectangular collision box can represent? Then the collision model has to be done in Blender and as a separate object from the actual mesh:

Step 1: http://i.imgur.com/00SXlQI.png
Step 2: http://i.imgur.com/n8VRQku.png

When you want to export it, make sure you select BOTH the collision mesh and original mesh. Blender will only export what is selected.

Partial collision. Lets say you have a palm tree. You want the bark of the tree to have collision, but the leaves should not have any. What you could do is make a bounding box in Nifskope in the shape of a rectangle and cover the bark part. But a rectangular collision box won´t cover a bent palm tree, so no go. If you use the triangle mesh via blender, the tree leaves still retain their collision. So how do we get rid of the leaf collision while keeping the bark?

For that we need to go into Nifskope. We have 2 NiTriShapes here. The leaves and bark. Insert a new node.

http://i.imgur.com/nXlrARs.png

Choose NiNode.

http://i.imgur.com/Q5HrOgb.png

Now we will bring the Leaves NiTriShape under our second NiNode.

http://i.imgur.com/wT53dDz.png

As you will now see, we have Leaves under both NiNodes.

http://i.imgur.com/0MgFY5o.png

We don´t need both. So simply change the block node on the first to not include leaves.

http://i.imgur.com/QkSMgrd.png

Once again insert a new node. This time it´s NiStringExtraData.

http://i.imgur.com/uZEJqT6.png

It will probably pop up somewhere random. What you need to to is select the NiNode you want to apply no collision to and edit the ExtraData block to have the corresponding number to your NiStringExtraData node.

http://i.imgur.com/coUds2A.png

Final Step. Click on NiStringExtraData, change the bytes remaining to 7 and value to NCO.

http://i.imgur.com/4wztJKK.png

You now have a palm tree with no collision on the leaves and mesh generated collision on the bark.

Blender NIF/KF animation

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I'm not going to teach you how to animate, you can learn on your own on Youtube. However I am going to let you know how the OpenMW engine interprets these animations. You see, there are things such as animation groups. Refer to the link here: http://www.preik.net/morrowind/animationgroups.html

In order for OpenMW to know from which keyframe your character starts walking, and at which he stops, you need to go into text editor, make a txt file named anim (important) and write the keyframes together with animation groups. See example here:

http://i.imgur.com/2iTMHtS.png

When exporting your animated mesh, be sure to export nif+xnif+kf.

http://i.imgur.com/WfkXEeD.png

Nif contains the mesh, together with animation and everything.

xnif contains the mesh, but without any animation.

kf contains the animation, but without the mesh.

Store them all in your data files/meshes.

OSG Tools installation

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Download and install one of the newer versions of Blender http://mirror.cs.umn.edu/blender.org/re ... dows64.msi

Download https://github.com/OpenMW/osgexport/archive/master.zip and put the osg folder into blender foundation/blender/2.76/scripts/addons. Launch Blender and do the following:

http://i.imgur.com/4JQhBur.png

You can now export osgt files by going to file->export->osgt in Blender.

OSG Export

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Just like nif, OSG export has its own quirks. First of all, it exports everything in the scene. This includes the light source. So if you have a light source that you do not want to include along with the model, delete that. I don't know if the camera is included as well, but delete it just in case it adds anything to the file size.

When exporting to osgt, you need to make sure that your blender file and image file are in the same folder, like in this screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/XoE0x5E.png

When done, a textures folder with your .tga texture will appear. Put it in your game/data files/textures folder and the osg file to game/data files/meshes.

OSG exporter works with the following image formats: BMP, IRIS, PNG, JPEG, TARGA, TARGA_RAW, AVI_JPEG, AVI_RAW, FRAMESERVER

Yes, you read that right. There is no support for .dds format yet. So how to switch to it? Start with converting the image file to .tga and replacing whatever format is used in the mesh. To do so, find the textures tab in Blender:

http://i.imgur.com/i0pPJVS.png

Then switch off specular, normalmaps. For whatever reason specular makes the mesh black and normal makes it pure white, so I got rid of them. Switch the image to the .tga version of it:

http://i.imgur.com/i0ld7ec.png

Now use the OSG export. You will get a meshname.osgt file. Go edit it in notepad or whatever pleases you. Lines like these must be changed to use .dds:

http://i.imgur.com/iX7Lr6U.png

Now save it, put it in /meshes, put your .dds image in /textures, load it up in OpenMW-CS and see if the preview looks correct:

http://i.imgur.com/QUzd5Eo.png

OSG collision

No idea how to do these. If anyone knows, write instructions and I'll include them here.

OSG animations

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Osgt files currently do not support animations in OpenMW.

Normal and Specular maps

https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=TextureModding

When uploading to Redmine

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Make sure you're including the original files (.blend, image files, etc).

http://i.imgur.com/mPNRkpp.png

It should also be apparent where the model came from if it isn't your making. If your source is stated in the issue comments, I think that's enough. The source must be CC BY 3.0 or CC0.

Phew. Now that that´s off the way, let´s get to modeling those assets.

Naming conventions

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For weapons. Type of weapon comes first, then material, then any additional information. DaggerIron, DaggerSteel, BladeSteel2hand, AxeAxeGrinder (Axe Grinder unique axe),

Buildings. The set it´s part of comes first. First of all, it´s part of the Linnus set. But which part of the set? The wall part of it. The rest is descriptive of which part of the wall it is. LinnusWallShort, LinnusWallEntrance, LinnusWallTower8Plain

Textures. Usually tied to their respective mesh name. LinnusWallBrick, LinnusWallStone, LinnusWallWindow...

Additional guidelines

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All meshes with no collision, such as ingredients, armor, weapons, potions, books, etc are to be ported to the OSG format.

Because we have yet to figure out how to do collision boxes in OSG format, complex objects with collision shapes need to be ported to NIF format.

Due to OSG not yet supporting animations, all animated things also need to be in NIF format.

Placeholder assets are made low-poly.

The polycount for non-placeholder meshes is medium. If you think this is vague, look at Oblivion assets. That´s the quality we want to achieve for this project.

Non-placeholder meshes should utilize normal maps, parallax maps and/or specular maps.

We will not do PBR materials until PBR is implemented into the engine.

We have no specific art syle. Meshes are made for the purpose of showcasing the engine.

Thanks for this!

I found a bundle on nexusmods awhile back that did this as well and worked with wine too.

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/40980/? <-- while it says oblivion, it should also work on morrowind objects.

psi29a wrote: I found a bundle on nexusmods awhile back that did this as well and worked with wine too.

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/40980/? <-- while it says oblivion, it should also work on morrowind objects.

That's the one I'm currently using, running on Wine. It's a lot more convenient than hunting down and installing all of the different components. Just make sure to select Morrowind from the list upon exporting.

I think I'm done for now. If anyone spots any gaps, feel free to write instructions and I will include them in the OP.

Great work, thank you for this.

This would be great for in the wiki I think, would you mind if someone (me?) ports this over to our wiki?

Question for you, you labeled this for windows. Almost all the scripts are in python, so the question is... how windows specific is this?

Any pathing I gave is specific to what I see on my windows. I have no idea what the pathing is on your OS.

Edit: Just dropping a link for later experimenting. http://trac.openscenegraph.org/projects ... es/osgconv

I should do some experiments with this osg exporter, thanks for the guidelines. I have some questions about creature animation and the new engine though.
Is OpenMW engine going to allow us to use more Idle/Attack animations in creature files?
The original engine wasn't using sounds (in creature text files) that contained spaces in their names (there were even some vanilla creatures with such sound files, that were never played), is this going to be fixed?
Can we get turn right/turn left animtion working for creatures? (It's necessary especially for large creatures)
Is it possible to have animated collision boxes or different collision shapes for creatures?

Figured out how to get .dds files working with .osgt and added it to the instructions.

Also added minor guides to uploading to Redmine.

Now that is super. Thank you!

By the way, I use a combination here:

windows blender 2.49b with osgexport: this allows me to port from nif to osg
linux blender 2.74 with osgexport: allows for latest blender to osg support

The interesting thing here is that osgexport is directly from the author's github and not from scrawl's.

What exactly is the difference between scrawl's version and the original? With Scrawl's updates go back upstream?

psi29a wrote:
The interesting thing here is that osgexport is directly from the author's github and not from scrawl's.

What exactly is the difference between scrawl's version and the original? With Scrawl's updates go back upstream?

I can't say I know the difference, but can you please give me the link to Scrawl's?