Merging Armor

From NibleWiki

Many Morrowind-fans may miss the look of wearing a Robe over some armor, with the pauldrons sticking out - well, let's recreate that look, though we can't get the extra enchantment slots in Oblivion.

[edit] Aim

Combine parts of Armor to something new.

[edit] Needed Software

NIBLE starting with Version 0.5 DB 20070211

[edit] Step by Step

Let's open meshes\clothes\monkwhite\m\shirt.nif - it's the white monk robe, even though it's called "shirt". Now choose File/! Bone Merge and find the ebony cuirass ( meshes\armor\ebony\m\Cuirass.nif). Time for a coffe break, the program will have to resort the data a few times - it has NOT crashed, I assure you. Have an eye o the status bar to see how far you're through the process, it will go through

• Preparing blocks to merge....

• Analyzing Structure....

• Rebuilding Structure....

• Removing double Bones....

• Meshes combined and reboned, unlinked Blocks removed

That's when you're back in control again.

Be patient during this!
Time to save our work and have a look at it in the construction set - I won't describe how to add Armor meshes to the game and Armor to a test char, there are tons of tutorials for that. As you can see, there's the whole Cuirass sticking to the Robe, with some ugly clipping in the lower regions.	crude mixture
Have a look at the newly added Trishapes in NIBLE: using the "hide" checkbox in the "Actions" panel, you can prevent these mesh parts from beeing rendered. Try them and check the effect in the CS (hit F5 to reload the meshes). Eventually, you'll find that 59:Upper Body and 69: Arms are the ones we don't want to see.	Hide to find what's not needend
Of course we could leave the model like that, but for performance reasons in Game, we should remove the unneeded (and now hidden) parts instead of just making them invisible.	pauldroned robe
To do that, Image you need to use the "Detach from Parent" - Button in the "Actions" Panel of the Trishapes to delete (marked 1. in the picture) - you'll see them moved to a new part of the component tree, labeled "Unlinked Nodes". When you have completed that step for all the Shapes to remove, hit the "remove Unlinked"-Button, marked "2." in the picture. That's another lengthy operation, though not as bad as the merging itself. Save your work.	a little cleansweeping

Well, that's it!. A little comment on finding identical bones on the meshes: Game and NIBLE alike identify bone nodes by their names, so if there's any trouble like having two left upper arm bones in the final mesh, check the spelling in the base material.