Export problem 3dsmax

[idonotlikeusernames]

Okay, so I thought to take my first baby steps into modding the Skyrim models.

For my first project I thought to take the Knight of Thorns armor mod, remove the skirt and retexture it to make a custom leather armor.

I can import it into 3dsmax fine but what are the steps I need to take to export it after I've deleted the skirt parts?

The tutorial I've found says to make a skinwrap and add the body to it and then to make a bsdismember modifier on top of of that before exporting, however the the problem I have is that the Knight of Thorns armor model doesn't have any body under it nor does it have bsdismember modifiers on it's pieces. In short I'm stuck.

[Cyndi]

Import a body to skinwrap it to, convert said skinwrap to a skin, then delete the extra body you imported.

Or....  watch a lot of weight painting tutorials/swear/curse/pull hair out/repeat.... but get infinitely better results.

 

You don't always need a bsdismemeber, Bodies do, armor usually... but not always.

 

A bsdismember hides things when it needs to, that's the bigger point to them (they do other stuff but I haven't had enough coffee to explain that without sounding like a crazy person). Like a body, or vampire armor (dawnguard) "should" have 3 of these, body, forearms, calves. 

What happens is you put on say your vampire armor, notice it's ankle length pants? Put on vampire boots, notice those ankle length pants not clipping through the boots?

That's what the bsdismember is doing. Those boots use the calves slot, and keep the part of the pants on the same slot from rendering.

 

Some things will let you can get away without putting a bsdismember on them. It's not always a good idea not to use one though.

 

 

[begalund]

Although you'll hate hearing it as much as I did, start by watching the first 10-12 videos of the nightasy series on armor modding.  

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/NightasyTutorials/videos?flow=grid&view=0&sort=da

 

They really help you out with understanding the basics.  Once you get the easy stuff out of the way, then start playing with your armor.

 

However, since I know you'll want to jump right into it like I did you can also follow this guide:

 

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Creating_an_armour_for_Skyrim._Part_1

 

Now it is written for blender, but after you've watched the nightasy videos and figured out the skinning and bsdismember parts (video #7 in particular) this guide will help with the importing back into nifskope and fixing the textures (because strangely, you've likely just changed some settings that you'll need to fix) - specifically the BS num UV sets on the NiTriShapeData needs to be reset to 4097 (it'll likely be set to 1 for example), and little things like that.  

 

Although nightasy does an excellent job in explaining 99% of what you need to fix, there are a couple of things I learned by other guides, and I'm not anywhere close to even leaving the rank novice stage yet - seeing as how I haven't posted my first armor mod.  I'm too much of a perfectionist and still trying to complete it the way I want it.

[dashipper]

Okay, so I thought to take my first baby steps into modding the Skyrim models.

For my first project I thought to take the Knight of Thorns armor mod, remove the skirt and retexture it to make a custom leather armor.

I can import it into 3dsmax fine but what are the steps I need to take to export it after I've deleted the skirt parts?

The tutorial I've found says to make a skinwrap and add the body to it and then to make a bsdismember modifier on top of of that before exporting, however the the problem I have is that the Knight of Thorns armor model doesn't have any body under it nor does it have bsdismember modifiers on it's pieces. In short I'm stuck.

 

If all you are doing is deleting the skirt parts, you're trying to do a lot of unnecessary steps.

 

For just removing part of the model and not trying to shape it to a different body or anything, simply leave the skin modifier that the model imported with in place and remove the parts of the model you want to remove.  That's essentially it.  You don't need to import another body, you don't need to replace the old skin with a new one (so no skinwrap).  As for bsdismember... personally, if the mod author doesn't find a bsdismember modifier necessary on the original model, I'd just leave it without one until you get the hang of using max and nifskope.