.nif export question

[Vyrukas]

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around Blender 2.49 and I've been looking for workarounds. Someone told me that I could export my mesh as a .obj file and then import it into nifscope, but that some data wouldn't be transfered.

Since I'm only interested at this point in making weapons and other static objects, is there a downside to this?

[silentthief]

no. I have done this when I tried making a sword and a shield in Wings3D and truespace. Export to obj, then import that obj into nifskope.

You may have to play around with orientation in nifscope or when exporting to get this set up properly, but it can be done.

ST
ps. no animation gets exported when exporting to obj, but the geometry does just fine

[DestinedToDie]

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.

[Berandas]

I recommend using triangulation modifier (and then checking the apply modifiers in the export dialogue), which will keep you all the n-gons of the original model in the edit mode.

[Vyrukas]

I get it know, but I sort of fucked up the first time around by splitting my mesh into 3 different objects so I could cut some corners while UV mapping. And to be completely frank, my first attempt wasn't all that good. I'm thinking about going for a polynesian vibe for the knife anyway, maybe something snake-like.

[DestinedToDie]

Sometimes it´s actually smart and efficient to use multiple objects rather than have the entire mesh 1 object. Also when exporting to nif, the mesh is divided into separate objects based on textures anyway.

[Vyrukas]

I made a kris model really quick so I could test out nifscope and see how it looks in morrowind. I believe I correctly UV mapped it, but I can't seem to get it to export as a .nif even when I follow the instructions. I'm not really sure where I went wrong or what's happening, I'm pretty sure whatever it is is probably a simple fix I don't know how to do. Do you think one of you could take a quick look at it to see what I'm doing wrong?
https://www.mediafire.com/?37io7uw73x3z0sx

[DestinedToDie]

There are 2 texture slots in your material.

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

Texture is set to UV correctly. Tex is not. Click on Tex and do as per instruction of this next screenshot:

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

That fixes the first error about incorrect map input. The second error you will get after that is that you have no image in Tex. So just delete it by using 'clear' with Tex selected.

Now it exports fine for me. Just remember not to have any extra texture slots that don´t do anything and the ones that do should have input as UV.

Edit: By the way, did you use .obj to carry it over to Blender 2.49B? Because it looks like we got some .obj problems. Have a look at this screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/arCtxEX.jpg

I could go into detail on how to fix this, but it´s instead way easier to simply use Blender legacy save format.. As a bonus legacy format also doesn´t introduce additional texture slots like Tex, which caused your initial problem.

[Vyrukas]

Thanks for the reply, I know it was something stupidly easy. Those problems you're seeing are probably from me not being the greatest at 3D modeling yet as I saved that as a .blend file in 2.77 and just opened it in 2.49.

But hey, any progress is good progress.