Textures and keyframes

[DEATH]

This'll be my first attempt at doing anything with Nifskope.  I want to try 'skoping the skull head from a Red Skull mesh onto the Nazi General mesh in place of the default head.  Seems like it should be possible...

1st question: how is the texturing handled, as the two meshes have very different layouts on their textures?

2nd question: how are keyframes handled, as the two also have totally different keyframes?  I don't particularly care if the skull head isn't animated, as long as it stays in the right spot...

DEATH

[Revenant]

You can attach a piece (the skull head) onto a mesh and it'll stay there... but in order for the Nazi head to not stick out in any places, you'd have to somehow make the skull big enough to cover it entirely... Might look weird

A different solution would be to stick the Red Skull mesh onto the Nazi mesh, and hide the Nazi mesh's body, so that the Red Skull will obey the Nazi keyframes.  Some meshes can be overlayed onto the Irrational meshes and still use the irrational's keyframes.  I'm doing this for my avatar with  the Tombstone keyframes and a male_basic mesh.

[DEATH]

Revenant,

     Thanks for the reply.  Hmm, I think I understand.  What I'm really looking to do is use the Nazi mesh body, animations and textures, except for the head.  I want to grab the head from the Red Skrull (preferably the vx version) and graft it on.  All the Generals animations and texturing except the head. 
     Sooo...what about sticking the head on and hiding the Nazi General's head?  If I do this, where does the Red Skull head get its texture info?  From the Nazi General's main texture?  Would I then have to kitbash the generals texture?
     Another question I have is how do I remove contacts (or leave_hands) from an animation?  I'm trying to drop two leave-hands from a 3 contact ranged animation.  I can see how to go about adding more contacts, but every time I try and remove contacts, I get errors when I attempt to save the mesh, and the changes don't seem to have stuck...

the error is  [spoiler]unassigned parent link
failed to write nif file  "I:/Program Files/Irrational Games/Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich/timewarp/Art/library/characters/nazi_general/character.NIF"[/spoiler]

DEATH

[joemama]

If I'm not mistaken, this

failed to write nif file  "I:/Program Files/Irrational Games/Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich/timewarp/Art/library/characters/nazi_general/character.NIF"

happens when the mesh is read-only.  All Irrational's Meshes are read only when you extract them from the .ff file.

Don't know about the other part.  Sorry

JM

[JKCarrier]

Sooo...what about sticking the head on and hiding the Nazi General's head?

Should be possible. Shrink the Nazi's head down, then paste the Skull head onto the Nazi's neck node.

If I do this, where does the Red Skull head get its texture info?  From the Nazi General's main texture?  Would I then have to kitbash the generals texture?

The Skull head will still use the same texture it had before ("male.tga" or whatever it's called). Just copy the files over from the Red Skull's skin folder.