Blender, Dungeon tiles and lighting

[Tefnacht]

I have problems with a “self made” dungeon mesh and I really don't know what to try anymore. I need help from people who actually know what they're doing.

For my project I needed a VHallSm1Way dungeon tile with observation windows in both walls. The vanilla game doesn't have such a tile, it only has a tile with a window on one side.

No problem, I thought (idiotically) and fired up Blender to make my own tile and so I did. I turned VHallSm1WayWin01 into VHallSm1Way2Win01. This new VHallSm1 tile has windows in both walls.

What I exported from my Blender 2.49b and tweaked with NifSkope worked just fine … until I started adding lights to my cell. Well, actually my tile didn't really work right from the get go because the havok collision part was bullshitting me and treating the entire mesh as “glass” giving me the wrong sound when hit with a projectile. However, I could live with that. There probably won't be any gunfights in that area.

The thing that totally does not work and is a deal breaker is the lighting. For some reason my tile refuses to join the other tiles in smooth lighting. There is always a hard barrier visible between my tile and the vanilla tiles.

I don't know what I did wrong. It's probably real simple but I am out of ideas. Its not the face normals, its not the vertex normals, its not the shader settings … I don't know what is going on here.

First, here is my tile NIF file in question:
vhallsm1way2win01.nif

 

This is what it looks like in action: (1) Only ambient, (2) Active lights, (3) Me nitpicking

 

And two more examples of how horrible my tile does lighting in active gaming. (That is my own follower using her pink pip-boy light.)

 

I am out of ideas. Please help.

[Tefnacht]

Figured it out

Like it is so often the case with these things, in hindsight I just want to punch myself.

What happened is that in my zeal to keep my meshes tidy, I removed a lot of double vertices during editing, thus connecting parts of the geometry that were supposed to be separate. The people who made the original meshes knew exactly why, for example, they did not connect the floor and wall geometry using the same vertices: It royally screws up the lighting.

Of course I didn't know any of that and felt so clever “cleaning” it up, patting myself on the back for my files being so much smaller. Duh. I redid the tile from scratch and now the lighting works as intended. Yay!

Another thing that gave me much more of a headache than it should have is that the Nif exporter scripts I am using (2.5.5) seem to be equally tidy and reuse the same alpha property block for different parts of the mesh.
I went over that file like 20 times, fixing the alpha property settings of different parts again and again, wondering why they would always revert back to being wrong. Until I finally noticed that I was editing the same alpha property block over and over, just linked from different NiTriStrip blocks. The resulting facepalm actually left a mark

 

Oh, how I love to hate modding.

[Guest]

Figured it out

 

Like it is so often the case with these things, in hindsight I just want to punch myself.

 

What happened is that in my zeal to keep my meshes tidy, I removed a lot of double vertices during editing, thus connecting parts of the geometry that were supposed to be separate. The people who made the original meshes knew exactly why, for example, they did not connect the floor and wall geometry using the same vertices: It royally screws up the lighting.

 

Of course I didn't know any of that and felt so clever “cleaning” it up, patting myself on the back for my files being so much smaller. Duh. I redid the tile from scratch and now the lighting works as intended. Yay!

 

Another thing that gave me much more of a headache than it should have is that the Nif exporter scripts I am using (2.5.5) seem to be equally tidy and reuse the same alpha property block for different parts of the mesh.

I went over that file like 20 times, fixing the alpha property settings of different parts again and again, wondering why they would always revert back to being wrong. Until I finally noticed that I was editing the same alpha property block over and over, just linked from different NiTriStrip blocks. The resulting facepalm actually left a mark

 

Oh, how I love to hate modding.

 

 

Sorry for reviving this almost two month old post, but man, what would I do if it wasn't for you. There are almost no data about blender and fallout anywhere on the internet, meaning we have to learn on our mistakes. It was very kind of you to post the solution here. 

 

Thanks.