Now that I'm done with porting weapons for a while, I thought it would be a great idea to bring Lucario over from Super Smash Brother Brawl and have him become a Companion in the world of Fallout: New Vegas.

Initially, I thought it would be a good idea to start with using a creature mesh as a template, but I just went ahead and used the "UpperBody" mesh of a Human NPC.

Let me just say that I have no prior experience with modding/rigging armors or anything related to bodies. But I went ahead and copied the NiTriShapeData of my custom mesh and paste it over the vanilla mesh; much like you do with creating a weapon out of a custom mesh. I also took the liberty of creating other "NiTriShape" branches out of the vanilla branch. At first, I thought this was a good place to start..

So I'll post some pics here so you can see my node branches and what not...

Lucario's Body:

Lucario's Head:

As far as the eyes go, I'm not so concerned with having movable eyes at this point, so I just went ahead and added it to the head mesh.

And I'm not worried about any mouth/teeth/tongue movements, because to my knowledge, I believe Lucario speaks telepathically.


Once I was done with that, I created a folder in Textures and Meshes...added the textures and Nifs...just like you always do. Then I went into G.E.C.K and created a new Race and linked all the Nif files I made. When I added them, this happened:

Spoiler:

So the meshes didn't appear in G.E.C.K.'s rending screen, nor does anything appear in-game.  I'm pretty sure I missed something huge that was procedural.

So when it comes to what I'm trying to do, what did I do wrong? ( I'm sure a good bit of things).

Anybody have any experience with creating a companion that has custom meshes? Can anyone point me in the right direction to solve this issue?

Any help will be much appreciated.

You have to export creatures/races/bodies with specific settings or they are invisible in game/GECK, just like that.  Mind you it could be one of a couple dozen OTHER things, but I'd check your export settings for sure.

Re-export your mesh from Blender using these settings, and see what that does:

http://imgbox.com/ZlSGgdqN

Also, you need to line the arms up with the skeleton properly. Shouldn't be T-posed like that, the arms need to come down around 18 degrees at the shoulders. Otherwise the model will not animate correctly, hold weapons properly, etc.

Hmmm...

I followed your instructions and used Blender 2.4.9's Niftools, made sure I had the exact setting as seen in the screenshot, and the meshes remain invisible in G.E.C.K. This is quite puzzling.

And I couldn't find any good tutorial on the topic either..

Zip em up, upload and PM me a link.  I'm headed out for a movie date, but I'll take a look when I get home.