importing/exporting question

[Randomdays]

Among other things, I'm working on some meshes from 2 other games to bring into FF.

Wildlife Park 2 uses a system simular to FF - a nif, single kf, kfm file and a dds texture.

When using nifscope, the nif appears but 1) has a string of errors like "11 vertex weights not found" and 2)the texture won't appear, either as dds or tga.

The other game is Empire Earth 3. The nif appears fine and textures fine. It uses multiple kfs, one for each action.

For both games, trying it with FFVTTR gives a "unknown nif version" error.

Basically, I'm asking for help in a number of areas. Can the nif be converted to work with FFVTTR using blender or some other program?

Can the single action kfs be combined into one big kf?

How is the vertex weight problem affecting me, does it matter, can it be fixed, and is it keeping the texture from working?

I'm just starting with nifscope so any help will be very appreciated. Sample files available for anyone who needs one.

Thanks in advance for any help

[GogglesPizanno]

- Using the nif tools exporters, I have had reasonable success importing nif's into blender and then exporting them out using the FF specific export option.  You have to use Blender 2.49b as the exporters haven;t been fully converted to the big 2.5 rewrite. This is too bad because the 2.5 version greatly improves the interface issues that most people have with blender. Though I suppose you could import into 2.49, save as a blend, work in 2.5 and then export via 2.49... if you were a glutten for punishment.  Personally once I got the hang of it, i find it fairly easy to work with.

- Combining keyframes believe can be done, by opening multiple instances of nifskope and cutting/pasting nodes into a single kf file and then renaming each according to FF specific animation calls -- but this was using FF keyframes. It may be that the other games format them slightly differently so that even combined they may not work. Others have more experience with this than I.

- To get textures to appear make sure the DDS file are either in the same location as the nif itself OR you have texture paths set up in the options to look elsewhere OR make sure that the texture reference itself in the nif is not some absolute game path that isn't matched by your system. They may use a path to the texture relative to the game installation etc...

[Randomdays]

Thanks Goggles, that really helps for a place to start.

For the texture issue, I did set up pathways in nifscope and also placed the textures in the same root directory.

I tried to do an export of the nif to obj, and got the warning message that the nif HAD textures and the export was not supported with obj (or something close to that). So I'm wondering if the texture is there and not showing due to the "vertex weight" errors I'm getting

[GogglesPizanno]

If you want to post the file somewhere or email it to me, I can try taking a look at it.

I'm not as well versed in 3D specific as others, but i don't think vertex weights are gonna have anything to do with whether a texture shows up. So I'm guessing its something else...

[Randomdays]

thanks Goggles. I'm not at home right now, but I had sent a copy of the WP2 croc to compare to the one from ZT2. I'll try to forward the files to you

Thanks once again