I've long wanted to scrape parts out of the Dwarven Elder Scroll chamber, but put it off because experience had shown me that trying to import things from animated building models had a 100% Weird Shit rate. Not moving right in Outfit Studio, crashing the game like crazy if you tried to bootstrap it in... Something or another was bound to go wrong. But man, I really liked all those ring elements.

In the course of building the -BAF- stuff I came across a method that got some other recalcitrant sources to work, in the form of the Centurion and Spider models, but it is a process. 

Load the source model in OS, ignore any parts being in random places, export the elements you want to .obj, open the .obj versions in OS...

 ...ignore the missing textures, slap some weight painting onto them to get OS to stop bitching about it when you then export them to .nif again, open the original source .nif and the newly re-exported parts in Nifskope so you can re-apply all the texture paths and settings to the new files...

...start a new project in Outfit Studio with a reference body, import in the new .nif files (might as well do this all at once, saves time), re-do the weight painting because it probably got lost somewhere, save the project to a BodySlide file (single weight, don't include the reference, point the output someplace you can find it), open the file in BS, build it...

 ...and THEN, finally, you will have meshes that you can actually use in-game without any issues. Probably. Hopefully.

This time, it looks like I did.

Tee hee.

Of course they're not a whole lot of use full-scaled like that, even if they are amusing, but there's not much point in doing any further transforms until after you're sure they're working. Once you do have something functional, you can re-load the .nif in OS along with a reference body and re-scale the things to something a bit more human-use.

Then from here you can save all those individual parts off to their own .nif files, all baked and ready for use... wherever. 

And at this point you can play around with some of those further transformations, to get them into states with even more potential uses at this scale...

All this is time-consuming as all fuck, and was pretty much the only thing I did yesterday and into today- and I'm probably not even done yet, as I still need to go in and tweak the environment map settings to get something a bit less bright- but the results are worth it. 

And unlike the Ballista parts, I do have some pretty definite plans for these...