Porting creatures to NWN in Blender, which already have a foreign rig

Rigging is a pain (at least for me)! Even if you use the “Automatic Weights”-approach in Blender, you need to do a lot of adjustments! So why not use the rig/weighting, which was originally made for a mesh or has been added by specialized app?

So, a while ago, I started to explore ways to make use of already exsisting rigs and it worked!

This tutorial shows a way to port already rigged models (but not NWN-conform) over to NWN. It is written for NWN 1, but the “adjusting the Vertex Groups-“ part would also work for NWN 2 - tested and confirmed!

I tend to be quiet extensive in my tutorials to explain some bits on the background and my trains of thought, but if you worked yourself through this tutorial once, you’ll see, that the basic steps are pretty fast to accomplish! So don’t let you discourage yourself by the number of pages (13 including appendices)! :-D

The tutorial mostly covers “just the port” and not details on rigging/weighting. For this, my older tutorial might be of help:

https://neverwintervault.org/article/tutorial/rigging-blender-279-tutori...

In this download package you find:

- the tutorial-PDF

- needed scripts as extra text files

- a simplified NWN1 female elf model (which I used for the example in the tutorial)

Special thanks go out to Symmetric for creating scripts, which simplified the process!