How to properly attach mesh pieces in Blender?

[SickAlice]

As the title suggests. For example, say I take a mesh thats already made, Ink's Marvel Girl for example. I Import the nif in Blender. Now, I have a torus .obj that I want to attach to the skirt of this mesh (could be anywhere, female_basic, whatever, but for example). I line this torus up in the place it needs to be. Here is where I seem to hit a stumbling block. I tried a few methods out there, like running a script to assign vertex weights for example. I export my new nif, and it does so without any error warnings. But, when I animate the torus piece just floats there and doesn't animate with the skirt, nor the rest of the mesh.

[Randomdays]

When you import the new piece and line it up with the mesh, the next thing to do is select the new piece, hold down shift and select the main mesh and then join the two together, I think with (Ctrl) +"J". this will add the new piece to the main mesh and it will no longer be a seperate piece anymore. The order of that you select the two pieces will determine which becomes the main mesh and does matter - either you join the skirt to the main mesh, or you join the main mesh to the skirt.

In the case mentioned, I would probably assign all of the skirt to the pelvis bone, and depending on length, the sides to each thigh bone so the legs won't poke through the skirt when walking/running.

Let me know if this works or not.

[SickAlice]

No luck yet. My nif exporter is pretty feisty. In the case here I'm going of Marvel Girl Rachael 2. The skirt is a separate entity on that mesh, and hangs out in the main nerve, rather than directly in the Biped tree. I'm attaching a sculpted torus to the bottom to create frill. As it is I've used reshaped exported torus from other meshes, and even made them scratch. All of them end with an unweighted piece error during the exportation attempt. Weighting pieces as it is happens to be another stumbling block for me. I might just make a new skirt, with frill and attach that directly to the pelvis through Nifskope instead, though that tends to cause the poke through problem you brought up. I could extend the skirt out just far enough through to bypass the Thigh range, that sometimes works. I'm not going to kill myself over this eitherway, to many other things to do and if the skin ends up scrapped so be it. Sorry for the late response as well, I've been swamped with health problems and putting together a journey across the country lately, so I usually just flicker online and off quick. Totally need a vacation.

[Randomdays]

So I think what you're saying is you're adding a fringe to the bottom of a skirt that's already on the mesh.

You need to find out what vertex group the skirt is assigned to. Select the skirt in object mode and then go to edit mode. The "n" panel needs to be active. click on any vertex on the skirt and it will tell you what vertex group it belongs to.

After you join the frill to the skirt, export and get the unweighted error, it should automatically put you in edit mode with all the frill vertexes highlighted. You should be able to goto the vertex group menu in the bottom left corner of the screen. Select the vertex group from the list that the skirt belongs to from the list and then hit the "assign" button to add the highlighted fringe vertexes to the group.

Editing changes don't register when you export, so make sure you exit back to "object mode" before you export again.

If you're still having trouble, you can send it my way - it would probably only take a minute to set it up and send it back to you.

[SickAlice]

This works, thanks. I'll need to make some adjustments past this to get it more uniform, but the frill piece now follows the same animations as the skirt piece. This will open many new doors for me with other mesh ideas. Thank you.

[RockLegend2]

Hang on. Could this method be used for weapons, too?

[Randomdays]

sorry - been away for awhile. But, yes. You can import any item really to a mesh and attach it to something already there once its aligned and sized correctly. Its possible to do both in Blender and in nifskope