Lantern Aura tutorial

[eluvium]

Could someone walk me through how to create a male basic compatablie Lantern Aura, that I can add to a variety of meshes? please?

[mac402]

The easiest way would be to take a green lantern mesh already with aura and skope the body and parts of another character on it. That way you will get a fully functioning character with aura and GL keyframes. You could then maybe add more keyframes for animations from the original character if you find none of the GL ones are appropriate. The other way i.e. skoping the GL aura onto a non-GL character will also work but the aura will be permanently turned on as it is controlled by kf. I once found a Guy Gardner mesh that I liked but it didn't use said aura, so I skoped it onto Hal or someone else (don't remember now) and the results were very nice.

[eluvium]

I need to learn how to get nifskope working, I should talk to benton

[SickAlice]

The easiest way would be to take a green lantern mesh already with aura and skope the body and parts of another character on it. That way you will get a fully functioning character with aura and GL keyframes. You could then maybe add more keyframes for animations from the original character if you find none of the GL ones are appropriate. The other way i.e. skoping the GL aura onto a non-GL character will also work but the aura will be permanently turned on as it is controlled by kf. I once found a Guy Gardner mesh that I liked but it didn't use said aura, so I skoped it onto Hal or someone else (don't remember now) and the results were very nice.

I have some on my site speaking of, outside I pretty much mastered the process and just gave a tutorial on how do this yesterday here on this site. I'll give it again here again.

Anyways level of experience is need first (at least understanding of Nifskope as well Blender/other 3d program).

Proper method in short:
- Create an aura 3d model and weight it to the original. An aura should be the approximate shape of the original model as well all of it's parts but have a much lower face count. Export and import it into the choice nif. I've cheated at times and made separate aura parts, for example for female hair sometimes while learning the process.
- End by copying the values from and already made aura, they all have the same values so it doesn't matter which. Again I have a stock of these.

Improper method but working:
- Copy the models in a nif and resize them.
- Copy the values for an aura once again here to the copied and resized models.

The latter is a bad method but workable in that the nif will become high poly, assuming multiple Corpsmen are going to be used in any mod, and the segmented aura will look off.

So you have to understand how to use Nifskope, how to use values and how to use a 3d program with exportation (see: Randomdays Tutorial for example). And yeah for aura switching and off (I don't think it matters greatly imo, it kind of depends on the character and what anims are in play) but that also then requires understand how to manipulate keyframes.

Else swap from any of the number of examples I already made on my site between two full pages of Lantern Corps. I give full kitbashing permission always. I made all of it for others to enjoy however they please as it is. It was also the entire point of the large scale Lantern Corps project I did for about three years, so that anyone could make whatever other Lantern I mean.

http://catman.freedomforceforever.com/pages/green.html

http://catman.freedomforceforever.com/pages/green2.html


Some more auras scattered through these pages.
http://catman.freedomforceforever.com/pages/dc.html

http://catman.freedomforceforever.com/pages/super.html


Outside my links basic male and female Lanterns and keyframe sets have already been created long ago to us for this. I used the same ones as a base for my own work.

[eluvium]

comprehensive, thank you, I do understand values, as I've toyed around in Maya 3d before, I have blender predominantly, and tutorials about skoping and such with blender or nif skope would be awesome, are thye on Ewzzy

[SickAlice]

Values are attended to in Nifskope.
Skoping isn't done in Blender, weighting and modelling is.

You need to learn to those things first, sounds like you have a head start on Blender already before proceeding. This website itself is where tutorials are. Just hit the search tab.
Randomdays tutorial on weighting in Blender for example but I also host a PDF version on my site at the link below. Anything about Nifskope is on this forum, most of it in the Hex Editing section.
http://catman.freedomforceforever.com/pages/workbench.html

For values you are looking learning the basics of texture values in Nifskope, refer to this site. It's pretty easy to understand, if you get Maya and Blender this will be a snap for you. When it then comes to auras it's a matter of copying the values from an already made one. Again I spent about three years making an auras for most body (and hair, so on) shapes that exist in this game that can just be copied and pasted in Nifskope (that means the values are already done) on the links I provided. If it's a Lantern Corps member of any color on those pages it already has an aura built into it.

Here is the very basics of Nifskope. More than anything just try playing with it and getting a feel for it.
http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope/Working_With_Nifs_101_:_Basic_Use

[eluvium]

thanks sick alice