A thought that I have had for about half a year: convert Granado Espada armors into Skyrim. Sounds easy right? Just take pre-existing meshes and textures and put them into Skyrim. And that's where ol' Sheo pops onto the side of my ear and shouts "WROOOOOOOONNNNGGGG!"

Things can, and always will go wrong when modelling. It's not just wearing tiny T-shirts and striking a pose, as I soon found out. My biggest problem? Sleeves. Granado Espada's models are put in T-pose, which is a long way away from Skyrim's "motorcycle" pose. In order to make conversions, I would have to:

A. Manually adjust the sleeves

This presents a whole suite of problems. Moving from T-pose to Skyrim-pose isn't easy. Not many tutorials are available detailing this subject. Nobody has ever tried to convert Granado Espada armors it seems? In either case, they either come out ugly, detached, and deformed every time I try to adjust them to fit the Skyrim pose.

B. Learn to Rig

Now this would probably be the more viable option since there are multiple resources on the site courtesy of Gerra6 to do this. Unfortunately, coming from learning how to work 3DSMax, I found blender rather intimidating. What is that cube that is sitting in the middle of the screen and what is it doing there? What's this python thing that I can't touch outside of Blender? The whole strangeness and newness of Blender kind of scared me off, and I shuffled back to trying to use oblivionskeleton to pose my stuff.

Thankfully, Gerra6 also supplied me with an important piece of information: I could just convert my Granado Espada obj files into .nif for Oblivion, use the pose converter and pose the mesh through Blender. This gave me the idea to import the obj files and an Oblivion body, pose them for the oblivion body, then use Someone123456's Oblivion skeleton to autopose the mesh for me.

That worked, and I am eternally thankful to Gerra6 for his advice. Without it, I honestly don't think I would have gone beyond swimsuits and thongs. They're great to work work with, but I really wanted to see some of the more iconic armors from Granado Espada in Skyrim.

Then comes the problem of ignorance. In my haste to convert the files, I realized that the armors came in pieces. No problem, all I have to do is to attach them together right? I'm pretty sure Sheo was shouting in my other ear "WROOOOOOOOONNNNGGGG" the whole time, but I pressed on. One morning and half an afternoon of mountain dew later, I finished my Le Blanc armor for elementalist, ready to be exported as a Skyrim nif.

Then disaster struck.

3DSMax has experienced an error and needs to close, would you like to try and save the current scene?

Out of the blue, and the very first time I ever had an error exporting .nif files.Well, there goes my morning, into the trash it goes!

I only learnt this morning that attaching parts permanently changed the model, and since the GE armors used two different texture sets, attaching them together makes the textures go haywire and 3DSMax does a cockroach and goes JOHJOHJOHJ~, refusing to create the .nif. I either had to dump the textures and make my own, or dump the entire mesh and start from scratch. Both very painful options.

In the end I dumped the mesh, after adjusting the clothes three times for all three attach options. Only to find out that the group option > Edit Mesh was superior and I had to skin each part of the armor individually. After tweaking the mesh completely three times, and failing.

I guess at this point of time, two quotes are rather applicable. One is Bush's famous "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on you again." And the other is Edison's "Failure is the mother of success." Somehow, I have this feeling that Edison was secretly laughing at the reporter who was furiously scribbling down his golden nuggets.

In either case, barring any future problems, I'll get this done soon. Right? Right?