Rigging in Blender (2.79) - a tutorial for NWN1 models

This is a step by step tutorial on how  to rig a model (= a "skinmeshed" model) for NWN1 in Blender (2.79) using Neverblender. Though it does show the way for NWN1, the general rigging part is, of course, usable for any system, e.g. NWN2!

The plan to create a tutorial was announced some weeks ago and  I finally managed to finish it. English is not my native language, so you might stumble upon weird sentences, grammatical or spelling mistakes. But I hope, that it’s understandable enough.

It has gotten quiet long. This is due to the fact, that I wanted to write it also for Blender newbies and thus I used many screenshots and a lot of explanations! But don't let you be frightened away by the number of pages (58 ATM)! It doesn't take too many steps to get a basic weighting and once you wormed yourself through this, a basic (automatic) rig should be managable in a much shorter time period!

A BIG THANK YOU goes out to Symmetric, who not only improved his Neverblender tool while I was trying to do a NWN1-rig, but also supplied me with tons of information and findings on how to accomplish certain things in Blender, which I knew how to do in Gmax, but not in Blender.

This is covered in the tutorial:
- Some basics / usefull functions (e.g. un-hiding objects)
- Setting up the scene to have an all-over lighting
- Preparing / adjusting the NWN1-model (which will be used as a skeleton) and the mesh to be rigged
- Creating the Armature (= the Blender skeleton) with the help of Neverblender
- Rigging basics
- How to do a manual rig of the mesh to the Armature
- How to do an automatic rig
- An ecample weight reference
- Adjust the position of the dummies for adding weapons and such
- How to export the skinmeshed model with the help of Neverblender
- Tripping hazard
- How to change the silvery base texture of a NWN1 creature to show transparency (instead of silver)
- Hiding the crosshairs/axis of empties/dummy nodes
- Bending fingers (with the help of a Lattice modifier)
- Slowing down the animation speed for the Blender view port

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Addition:

Two simplified human NWN1-templates based on a_fa and a_ba.

- All unneeded parts have been removed (cloaks, shoulder, ...)

- Material entries have been removed

- All parts are set to Render=No and Shadows=Yes

- Meshes are partly simplified (e.g. the female head)

You can use these for humans to create the Armature and, later on, to link your skinmeshes to - for the NWN1-export.

They have the original animations. Ignore those "Shield-"ones They only animate a part of the upper body. The walking is drawn from another supermodel. There are enough others to use to check your rigging. If an animation of your model is not working IG, you might have to set the supermodel to a_fa/a_ba, because they are drawing on other supermodels and their animations.

Edit / addition (July 2018):

Exchanged the a_fa / a_ba templates (= now version 2): They now have dummy daggers and shields (all = small, large and tower), which make it much more easy to position the item nodes after rigging (see page 42/43 of the manual). Of course, they will not render, nor cast shadows (= turned off).

To position the weapon/shield nodes, select the according dummy of the NWN1-model (e.g. rhand, lhand = weapons / lforearm = shields) - NOT the item or the empty/dummy of the item! - and move it.

[For the record: version1 (=withouth daggers and shields) had 15 downloads so far]

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This tutorial doesn't cover EE additions. Here is an info and a link, which will help to expand a rig for EE:

 Quote Symmetric:
"Neverblender supports all new parameters: Normals, tangents, colors (vertex colors), materialname, renderhint, multiple tverts (uv maps) and multiple textures. You'll need to enable the checkbox "Export Normals and Tangents" in the export options for normals and tangent support (disabled by default atm)"

A nice tutorial by TheBarbarian is here:
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/aribethorial-aribeth-mod...

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Please report anything, that is not correct or unclear, so I can update the tutorial, if necessary.

Happy Rigging!