nifskope VS PyNifly

Nifskope can also be useful for viewing your nif files so you don’t have to load the game for each test. You do have to set up the resource directories in settings though.

Another thing is how textures are handled in the game. Essentially Skyrim models are kept in .nif files, which, as far as I know, is also an engine-specific filetype. Textures are linked to models via setting the path within those .nif files. Nifskope is the tool you're going to want to interface with those files. I'm afraid that's essentially as much as I can tell you regarding this side of modding - as mentioned, never really dealt with it myself.

Get the morrowind blender plug-in and a compatible version of blender and import the model. I suggest importing a head, helmet or even just the xbase_anim.nif skeleton from the morrowind game files as well so you can compare sizes (if you’re just adding a helm). It took me a bit to make it look good in game. Once you do that and have the plugin enabled, export it as a Morrowind .nif and open it up in Nifskope to make sure the mesh is correctly imported and has textures applied (choose them in Nifskope if they don’t appear). Then you move to the construction kit and add it as a bodypart/armor.

In-game, use More Informative Console to get the name of the object NIF file. Use the Filter in the MO2 Data tab to locate the NIF file in the mod folder. Open the NIF with NifSkope and find the Texture Set definition, which will name the texture files. The MO2 Data tab can also be used to locate those texture files.

I wish you the best of luck with your ideas, the character meshes are an absolute pain to work with because they're in .nif files, which are a proprietary format. I still haven't quite figured out how to wrangle them myself. But definitely grab Nifskope which can view models. There's also a plugin for Blender that loads in NIF files but it doesn't work with NIF files from Special Edition. So you gotta downgrade them with SSE NIF Optimizer if you want to import them into Blender. I hope this saves you the hours of research I had to do to figure all that out!

You'll need Nifskope

It's right here https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/releases/tag/nifskope-1.0.22

I would try DL again, ( https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/releases ), and just put it on your desktop and play it safe.

https://github.com/BadDogSkyrim/PyNifly/releases AFAIK

Not in NIFSkope; you need a real mesh editor like Blender or 3DS, with a plug-in that understands Skyrim NIFs (or something like https://github.com/BadDogSkyrim/PyNifly that can transfer between Blender and NIF). You have to edit the mesh to add the bones that move the mesh, then generate the xml file to control the physics. You can look at some of the SMP jewelry mods to see how it's done.

Not sure if this is relevant, but I also prefer using pynifly for .nif import/export.

I personally find PyNifly much easier to use, so I’m more familiar with that.

https://github.com/BadDogSkyrim/PyNifly use this - it is much better - currently using blender 3.1 and it works great. No scaling or rotation issues - faster and simple - exports in LE and SE nifs - Select all your objects ( weapon and blood fx meshes) and export into a new nif - choose a vanilla weapon with a similar profile and save a copy of the nifs to the same folder (1st person and 3rd person meshes) - open both the nif you exported from blender and the vanilla nif you are using as a template simultaneously - copy the BStrishapes from you exported nif into the vanilla nif one at a time and set all your BSshaderproperties and flags up accordingy, using the vanilla nif as an example - once you are happy with the way the new model looks, delete the original weapon and blood fx meshes and save the nif as a new file and name it accordingly - after that, in xedit, find the records in the vanilla game for the weapon you used as an example - right click and copy the record as a new record into a new plugin - give it a new ID - after you tweak the new plugin, save it and give it a unique name and note the ref ID you gave the weapon - activate the plugin and enter the game - open the console after loading and type player.additem (YourRefID) 1 or type help (YourWeaponName) 4 and get the ref ID there and then add it

PyNifly is probably the easiest for you to use.

You can use PyNifly to import/export NIFs with Blender. It’s under active development and works with the newest version of Blender too. I find it a lot easier to use than the NifTools plugin.

(https://github.com/BadDogSkyrim/PyNifly/releases/tag/V5.10) This is the plugin I was/am using.

You can get more info on using PyNifly on its wiki here: https://github.com/BadDogSkyrim/PyNifly/wiki