How do I start editing armor meshes?

[TotallyNotCrazy]

First off - I have NO experience with any sort of 3d modeling whatsoever.

What I'm trying to do : I'm trying to remove the collar from the upper armor of this mod

 

I've trying to look for alternative ways to doing this aside from getting blender and learning how to edit it in blender itself. If someone could suggest a way to do this, I'd very much appreciate it, as the wiki tutorial states that there is no skyrim support and that has me concerned that it might hugely complicate things (as if trying to learn blender from scratch just to remove a collar wasn't right? :c) . Also if you can recommend a good beginner's tutorial on getting started with blender that would be great.
In addition, if I do get the collar removed by deleting the mesh - would I have to edit the texture files and remove the collar texture from the dds file as well?

[KicklerOfButts]

Here's a tutorial that Zquad1 made, I think it's a bit outdated but it very much works.

 

You'll need Nifscope and a special version of Blender (I've attached the blender version for you so you don't have to look that up, just unpack it somewhere and you can run it from the .exe immediately), just make sure if you have other versions of Blender installed that you use this specific one.

 

The tutorial is for converting armors to other body types, but you can just not re-shape the mesh when you get to that part and instead just delete parts that you don't want from the armor. (You don't have to edit any texture files.)

 

Took me a long time to get down, but once you get the workflow going you can manage simple edits in a couple of minutes.

 

By my experience, Zquad is also very helpful and friendly, so if you run into troubles or have questions you can probably just pm him.

Blender Armor Conversion Tutorial with Pics.docx

X-Blender 2.49.7z

[TheOniNinja]

Removing pieces like that can most often be done pretty easily in nifskope just by opening the mesh up, right-clicking on the piece you want removed, and going to Block>Remove Branch. Sometimes though multiple parts of the armor are "glued together" into one NiTriShape so removing one will remove them all. I wrote a crummy tutorial here for removing pieces from such meshes using outfit studio's Zap Sliders if you're not adverse to learning it. (It also has a link to a much better tutorial on BodySlide and Outfit Studio in general).

 

It's much easier than using blender and is pretty great for modifying armors however you want with minimal modelling know-how.

 

Edit: And no, after removing part of the mesh you don't need to paint it out of the textures. It only works the other way: after removing a part from a texture you either need to remove that part from the mesh as well or (much more easily) add an alpha property to the mesh, which will make the transparent part of the texture invisible. (Which is another way to go about removing parts from a mesh, depending on the circumstances)