Indexed Tutorial Site For Veteran Modders

[SickAlice]

This me reaching out to anyone from the old school still hanging about. I'm going to draw a line on this one about treating me like a noob and ask that this conversation is not used for that purpose please and thank you.

The project I will be undertaking this summer is making a page/site that is an indexed clear tutorial. I've been working on it already for about a year and a half now on my hard drive. Thanks to Tomato for getting the hosting end taken care of here, I am in his debt for it. The idea I am going with right now is this will be through where my page is hosted, partly in the event that gives the community access to it in the event something happens to me in rl.

A few people have been working here on restoration of files and content. There is a lack of that for tutorials. I have a volume of tutorials on hand including material that was not hosted for Freedom Force, like the original Niflib documentation for example. CyberBurn with Daglob in tow painstakingly had collection tutorials and converted much to PDF's and sent them to me before their passing. They went to lengths to contact people who weren't here and get permissions, they have a distinct directory of things they did not get permission for. If anyone does have an issue with their tutorials being hosted though please speak up OR if you have been personal spoken to by anyone who said they did not want their tutorials hosted online.

As it is the page will be separate from my pages and standing alone. I will be away during March but anyone that wants to help or throw in I would appreciate it. Also I consider community access and editing in the future but this is ultimately up to Tomato as site master. But it is going to be straightforward otherwise, a single place with tutorials in an indexed form much like the documentation that comes with the games themselves. Different categories like 3d modelling, animation, basic usage of Nifskope and so forth. All clickable via an index, I'm still working the visual out but I am thinking a floating side bar for that.

So there you have it. There is time again to collect all this before any sort of launch. Feel free to input and share right in this thread about it. Whatever you have.

[Randomdays]

You already have my original tutorial on your site. Update and change anything that needs it from what we've learned over the years since then.

One thing that we talked about back then that I think might be mentioned is how hard hands are too rig. From what I've seen from some of Gren's meshes and their readme's, it appears that he would just slice on well rigged hands from another mesh and use those with his new one, instead of rigging them new.

"Mesh by Grenadier - added hands by Johnny Patches"

I think my second lesson on material colors, posing with pivots, importing and exporting kfs from other games and alpha channels has some good info on it as well.

Same as above - change what's needed.

[SickAlice]

Good that you chimed in, I was wondering about Part II. Glad I downloaded the 1st prior to the image host going down speaking of.

That's what I do for hands as well. If the model has the old "mitt" I slice off the hands and put some Gren/JP hands on it and just weld each vertice. The texture coordinates already line up so I take a screenshot of the new wireframe, export it to an OBJ then import it in Blender and weight to any nif that already does have hands.

Edit: Realizing I might not have been clear on that. You have "NeedsHands" nif (model) and "HasHands" nif (model). So male_basic_effects and any Gren/JP mesh for one example.
1.) Import both separately to Blender. Export both to .OBJ separately. So they lose their rigging.
2.) Import the .OBJ's to any 3d program after (make sure to rename the first one since Blender will name any export "default").
3.) Delete the hands from NeedsHands.
4.) Delete everything but the hands from HasHands.
5.) Maybe line it up better as needed then weld every vertice, that is 5 per male or female wrist and 10 total, individually.
6.) Combine the body and hands models into a single model. Export the new model to .OBJ.
7.) Import the "destination nif" into Blender, say the original male_basic character.nif
8.) Import the new .OBJ model you just made
9.) (After smoothing the faces of course) weight copy from "destination" to the new .OBJ and go through the process as usual. Added bonus is you do not have to pose anything nor retexture it since it is already lined up.

That or I already converted all Gren's/JP's fingered models to the standard basics and made them available to download on my Workbench page so anyone can just avoid all this.

[Randomdays]