Oh, boy, am I mad this morning. I woke up only to find that my new TV/Monitor wouldn’t turn on. I’ve been having this issue with it for a few weeks now, but usually a hard reset would work. Not today. So of course they want me to send it in, being under warranty. In the mean time, I’m back on the two itty bitty monitors. Blergh. Already missing my 1900×1080. Knowing my luck it will likely be two months before I get it back.

Putting that aside, it’s a new day for learning something. Back in the Oblivion days I had made some small models for things like swords, bows, and books. It had been a long complicated process to do, well, pretty much anything with Bethesda’s beloved NIFs. It still is.

It has been long enough that I don’t even remember how to do it, and hey, it’s been five years. So, it’s about time to break out the tutorials. This post is mostly going to just be my notes on it, for my own personal use, but if other people can benefit from it, why not.

From my initial observations, you need Blender, Nifscripts for Blender, Nifscope, and GIMP.

“Why the hell would anyone want to use GIMP?” That’s my question. GIMP is lame. I already have it, but if it’s for the DDS editing, I far prefer Paint.NET*. I’m holding my breath on this one. If the tutorial needs it for some specific task only it can do, then maybe.

Blender’s a bit out of date by now. So I fix that and update to 2.6.7. Then I realize that even the more recent tutorials say that Blender’s nifscripts only work for 2.49b. Flipping-… Well, easy enough to install a second version of Blender into my Tools Folder.

…and this version of Blender requires Python. I have Python. Oh- you wanted an UPDATED Python, that’s dif- what do you mean Python doesn’t have 2.6 up on the website anymore? I guess I’ll take 2.7.4 then. Hurrah! It works. Then I realized I had 2.7.2 in the first place.

…

I install 2.7.4 anyway just because it’s good having latest versions of everything, right?… only to read in Nifscripts installation that it has to be 32 bit because 64 bit lacks xml parsing.

Flipping eggs.

Now for Blender Nifscripts. You really need to be careful here about what tutorial you’re using and where to get the nifscripts. Some otherwise updated tutorials linked me to an older version of nifscripts, which confused me for a moment because my downloaded file (the correct, latest version) and the file they wanted downloaded did not have matching filenames. Make sure they’re definitely the latest version. As a good rule of thumb, this NifTools page may be the best place to check.

Then I realize there’s a note on that page.

So here’s the divvy. You need:

Blender 2.49b
to work with:
Python 2.6 and above but NOT the 64bit version
and the latest:
Nifscripts for Blender, which doesn’t support Skyrim.

Flipping flying freaking eggs.

Why does this have to be so hard. I just wanted to de-boobify the steel plate armor….

 

*As for why I prefer Paint.NET: You don’t have to install plugins to get it to open dds files, because it does it natively, and also generates mipmaps if you don’t feel like doing it yourself. I’ve had some pretty good success with my O Starry Night mod where GIMP and Photoshop both had issues even displaying DDS for me. The stars texture is heavily transparent, and neither program displayed the transparencies very well reading from a dds file. The one thing I find is a drawback to Paint.NET is it lacks some useful brush tools and a lot of the functions that are in Photoshop. Transferring the image is the major difficulty with that drawback, as there is no file format that you can save to that supports both layers and transparencies either Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro can open. I generally solve that by saving all layers in transparent lossless PNG formats and reassembling it in Photoshop or Paint.Net. Creates some clutter, but it works to import and export, and you get backups of each layer in case you need to import a fresh copy of layer X but not of layer Y.