Fallout 3 Mei Wong
Andrew Schiavo
It has been so hard. Soooooo difficult to talk to someone that can tell me on where exactly do i begin making mods. I ask any fellow modders, how do i start. I know modding is complicated so let me just start off by telling what exactly is my goal.
Like the modder Dragbody does, my goal is to understand and be able to execute the ability to port characters, weapons, clothes, armour, furniture, etc. from other games and put it into fallout new vegas or FO3 or FO4. I want to be able to take for example, ada wong from resident evil 2 remake, and make her a playable race and/or replace an npc with her body and face. I don't care how long it could take, or how hard it can be, but someone.please.HELP ME! I'm so lost as to knowing what it takes to begin modding fallout.
I understand the G.E.C.K has a big part in modding. But that's really about it. Did i answer my own question just now? Do i just look up tutorials on how to mod using the G.E.C.K? I understand the modding community isn't as big as for example, the drawing community. Learning to draw was a breeze with the amount of courses, guides, books, and videos i could find on how to draw ANYTHING. But modding tutorials just seem so, scarce. No help at all. Or please tell me if i'm just not looking correctly? At least for PORTING i cannot find any tutorials.
In general terms, the Nexus Wiki is an often unknown resource for beginning mod creators. But you are correct: there are few articles about how to create mods because the process is so dependent upon the "development kit" required by the different games.
For Fallout New Vegas, texture assets have to be in dds format. The game can't use jpg textures or other common formats. Most modders use GIMP to create or convert images into dds format. Paint.Net (not the paint that comes with Windows but it's free) also works but is much less popular. GIMP requires a dds plugin to be installed. Paint.Net supports dds files without requiring a plugin.
3d models have to be in nif format. There are nif tools available for Blender and 3ds Max. Blender is free. 3ds Max is not free (at least not the version that works with FNV and the nif tools). Most modders use Blender just because of the cost of 3ds Max.
I haven't played Resident Evil 2 Remake and I don't know how the game is put together, but I suspect that Ada Wong is 3d model. Fallout New Vegas doesn't actually use different 3d models for different NPCs. Instead, FNV has a whiz-bang-spiffy face morphing system that starts with a single mesh and texture for each gender and then morphs those and shades the textures differently for different faces and skin tones. What this means is that you can't take a 3d character model from another game and just use it in FNV. Instead, the best that you can do is to set the various face sliders in the GECK to make the NPC's face look like the face of a character from another game. The shading bits used by FNV's facegen system are extremely difficult and annoying, so getting a face to look right takes a LOT of effort. I personally have found that it's best to just randomly generate faces until you get one that at least has the textures pretty close to what you want and then modify the face geometry from there.
So basically, you can't port Ada Wong (or any other character from other games) to FNV. The best you can do is to create an NPC in the GECK's miserable facegen system that looks something like Ada Wong.
Now as far as other things go (weapons, clothes, armor, furniture, etc, as you mentioned), those things can be ported. The main reason you won't find any tutorials about porting these is that you basically just import whatever the assets are into a 3d modeling program (again, Blender or 3ds Max) and convert the assets to nifs. Once you have the meshes as nifs and the textures as dds files, you just add the item to the game using the GECK. So other than the bit about importing the assets into your 3d modeling program, all of the tutorials for creating these types of assets and putting them in the game apply. So if you are porting a piece of furniture into the game, just look up a tutorial about how to add a static or a piece of furniture into FNV. Note that "furniture" in FNV means a static object that you can interact with, typically with some sort of associated animation, like sitting in a chair or leaning up against a wall.
Static objects (things that you don't interact with) are the simplest and easiest. Clothing and armor are basically the same thing as far as FNV's game engine are concerned. One tricky bit is that the "upperbody" mesh includes the human body with it. If your clothing is shorts, a T shirt, and a pair of sneakers for example, the human legs and arms also need to be included in the mesh (but not the hands or head). The mesh also has to be rigged to the human body armature (aka skeleton). If you don't know what rigging is, you need to look up some generic tutorials for 3d modeling and animation.
So let's say for example you have an outfit from another game, and again I'm going to use the example of shorts, a T shirt, and sneakers. You want to port this to FNV. The first thing you need to do is load this outfit into a 3d modeling program and unparent the mesh from any armature that might be present. If the mesh came with human bits (arms, legs, hands, head) you'll want to remove those bits from the mesh. Then save only the mesh and not the armature. Exit out of your 3d modeling program, restart it, and now load in one of the body meshes from FNV. Import your un-rigged clothing mesh. Adjust the mesh in your 3d modeling program so that it fits the body properly, and rig it to the FNV armature (skeleton) that came with your body mesh. Export the whole thing as a nif. If you are using Blender, you'll need to use a program called NifSkope to fix the shader flags since Blender doesn't export those properly. Now add the outfit to the game using the GECK.
Weapons are similarly tricky, because there are all sorts of weapon nodes that need to be defined and things have to be named properly and done in a certain way so that the weapons animate the way that they should in-game.
So basically, if you are porting clothing from another game, look up tutorials about how to create clothing and armor. The tutorial won't show you how to import the mesh from the other game, but once you have a basic understanding of 3d modeling, importing something is pretty simple. If you are making a weapon, look up weapon tutorials.
One important thing to note is that Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas use the same basic game engine, with very few differences. If you import a hat from FO3 and use it in FNV it ends up rotated by 90 degrees (which is easy to fix), but most other assets (clothes/armor, body meshes, clutter objects, statics, etc) all just copy from one game to the other. This also means that tutorials for FO3 also generally apply fairly well to FNV.
FO4's game engine is different enough that porting assets from FO4 is much more difficult. You can't just copy things over. FO4 is closer to Skyrim SE than it is to FO3/FNV as far as how the game engine works. The rigging and armatures between Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are completely different. You don't have things with wings and tails in Fallout.
You've got a lot to learn. Start simple. Start with the GECK and do simple things like adding assets that already exist in the GECK to various interiors, or make some new NPCs, that sort of thing. The GECK's conversation system is baffling at first, but makes a lot more sense when you realize that it evolved out of Morrowind's conversation system, where multiple NPCs could say the same thing and conversations were organized by topic instead of by NPC.
I know what has been said so far is a lot, but do be careful about asset porting on the Nexus. Their policies allow Royalty Free assets (STALKER has these) to be added to the game, but if you do something like say, port an armor from Fallout 3's Pitt DLC to NV they will take down your mod and possibly ban you. If you want to port game assets that aren't free-to-use you should probably post on the Gun Network, to my understanding they do allow asset porting of any capacity.
Trueee. Games each have different developement kits so you'd have to look up tutorials for each different game. For example, fallout has g.e.c.k, and i guess garry's mod has it's own development kit? Thanks for the links, it looks overwhelming but i'll take it slow.
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