Blender NIF Scripts 2.4.7 released

[amorilia]

I'm new here on these forums, so first: hi to everyone!

As current maintainer of the blender nif scripts, I thought you might want to know that some of your friends here (mac1415/Flintlock1415 and The_Coyote in particular!) have been pimping civ4 and civ4 colonization support for the blender nif scripts, and a first big step in improving things for civ4 with their help has just been released:

Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=149157&package_id=166219

• New option to import extra nodes which are not bone influences as bones. These extra bones are useful for exporting leaderheads which must have these bones to work in-game.
• Added support for shader textures and tangent space. The export of shader nifs can be toggled in the export dialog.
• Fixed scaling bug if scale was not 1.0 in certain cases. In particular, this fixes import of leaderheads, and probably also many other nifs.

The changelog has full details. I'm aware of at least two more problems:

• import and export of envmaps (but these are easy to add in nifskope)
• skinned meshes sometimes look messed up as in http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=208253&d=1238002023 (may be difficult to fix - depends on how quickly the cause is identified)

These issues will be addressed in the future.

Anyway, I hope of course that these updates are useful, and if you spot problems, please do post them, with *as much information as possible* in particular enough info so that I can reproduce the problem and know where to look in the nif. In order of preference, most preferred first (i.e. where I am likely to look first...):

• post on the niftools tracker https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=149157
• post on the niftools forum (see my sig)
• or just simply post here without further ado (I'll do my best keep track of it, but you know how these things go )

Yours,
Amorilia

 

[The_Coyote]

Hi amorilia,

welcome here , and a great thank to the entire niftools team for the work you / they did and do for the civ4 community

 

[Flintlock1415]

Hi amorilia,

welcome here , and a great thank to the entire niftools team for the work you / they did and do for the civ4 community

Ditto.
Thanks for all the hard work!

 

[amorilia]

Thanks guys!

PS. Flintlock1415, you must be mac1415 on niftools, I've corrected my post!

 

[Flintlock1415]

Yup.
Just noticed my name in the OP.

 

[Deliverator]

Wanted to add my thanks for these scripts. They make a lot of cool stuff possible!

 

[achilleszero]

Hi all, I just installed these new scripts hoping may be to solve my blender problem yet after 2 months and several reinstall I still can not import nifs. It always gives me a check console error after about 5 seconds of loading. With 2.4.7 it seems to be a slightly different error than before. Here's what it says.

Blender NIF Scripts 2.4.7 (running on Blender 248, PyFFI 2.0.0)
Traceback (most recent call last):

File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts\bpymodules\
nif_common.py", line 995, in guiButtonEvent
self.guiExit()
File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts\bpymodules\
nif_common.py", line 1304, in guiExit
self.callback(**self.config)
File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts\nif_import.
py", line 3464, in config_callback
importer = NifImport(**config)
File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts\nif_import.
py", line 256, in __init__
self.importRoot(root)
File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts\nif_import.
py", line 304, in importRoot
vertices, normals = niBlock.getSkinDeformation()
File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\pyffi\formats\nif\__init__.py", line 4264,
in getSkinDeformation
bone_matrix = bone_block.getTransform(skelroot)
File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\pyffi\formats\nif\__init__.py", line 3648,
in getTransform
raise ValueError('cannot find a chain of NiAVObject blocks')
ValueError: cannot find a chain of NiAVObject blocks

I have no idea what any of this means other than that last line must be the error. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[amorilia]

Could you share the nif which you are trying to import? I've not seen this error in any of my experiments with the civ4 demo.

 

[achilleszero]

Could you share the nif which you are trying to import? I've not seen this error in any of my experiments with the civ4 demo.

Its just a reskinned spearman that I reboned to use phalanx animation. It works just fine in game but I want to edit it more.

I get that same error from most units I try to import from the database.

Here is a different error that I got when I try to import simple battleship reskin.

Blender NIF Scripts 2.4.7 (running on Blender 248, PyFFI 2.0.0)
niftools.blender.import:WARNING:Texture 'Environment_FX_GreyMetal.dds' not found
 or not supported and no alternate available
niftools.blender.import:WARNING:Texture 'Battleship_glossmap_128.dds' not found
or not supported and no alternate available

It imported but then gave me the above error when I try to open it.

 

[The_Coyote]

are you sure that both textures are in the same folder like the nif if you try to import (the standard folder for 'Environment_FX_GreyMetal.dds' is the shared folder)

could you also please give me a link to the spearman rebonded to the phalanx (or to explain a possible reason - if you did this with nifviewer you have two scene roots and sometimes also same named bones - to import such a nif in Blender you have to do some work before in nifskope (a very short description is here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=305606 - irrc page 19 of the pdf) - the model itself is fine, only the bone structure is not really civ4 vanilla)

 

[achilleszero]

Coyote you were right about battleship earlier errors dissapeared (dont know why original artist didnt include those dds), but now when I try to open It wont open and says error and the console now says this:

Blender NIF Scripts 2.4.7 (running on Blender 248, PyFFI 2.0.0)
In BPY_call_importloader(name=C:\Documents and Settings\Jamin  Davidson\Desktop\
civ art\battleship\battleship.nif)

Here is spearman. I changed it a little with nifviewer but now just want to try to animate the cape a little. I took cape and its bones from warlord. Even without cape and just the base model I get errors.

View attachment 213707

Will have to check out that tutorial later, after I go do some actuall/unfun work involving hammers and saws and such.

 

[The_Coyote]

ok the battleship is weird, without the nif i can´t say something about it (the original BB worked fine for me - at least the 'Environment_FX_GreyMetal.dds' is in the shared folder and therefore used by every model which need this texture- so no nned to include the file)

your spearman is also a bit strange, beside the two scene roots problem there is also a second problem in the nif, i could import the model after fixing the scene root problem and the deletion of the cape branch (if you want the cape - nifswapping it again in the nif worked fine - i was able to import the mesh to blender with cape)

 

[achilleszero]

your spearman is also a bit strange, beside the two scene roots problem there is also a second problem in the nif, i could import the model after fixing the scene root problem and the deletion of the cape branch (if you want the cape - nifswapping it again in the nif worked fine - i was able to import the mesh to blender with cape)

Yeah, It was the very first model that I ever edited, so its messy. It is being used by a mod and works fine in game. Except I removed cape bones and warped the cape straight down with 3dsMax. I am trying to create animations where the cape actually flows instead of being stiff. Unfortunately I can't get Blender to import and I cant figure out how to properly reassign all its original textures in 3dsMax (ie: make it shiny again like it is now). Not just this model but every model I have ever tried to import to blender.

I was unsure if extra scene roots could be erased. In the past I've tried to erase seemingly irrelevant nodes and it caused problem. So I try to leave things alone if they dont interfere with the unit.

Your tutorial is very nice. Have already learned much, glancing through it. Tutorial explains things very well. A lot of tutorials out there use bad examples and only half explain things. Thanks for your help so far. Usually everyone just ignores all the questions that I post. So figuring out things on my own has been arduous.