I am very new to modding so I apologize if my question seems trivial. I am terrible at search phrases and trying to find a simple answer can sometimes kill my entire motivation on something. So I want to ask here since everyone seems very knowledgeable.

Question: Can anyone point me in the direction of a tutorial for taking assets from one game and plugging them into another? Example: Playing L4D2 as Mass Effect characters. Or Master Chief Armor in New Vegas. I have seen several in the past but have not been able to follow them to completion. In fact I usually get stuck very early on because I get lost and cannot follow. Sometimes it's the way the author phrases a step or because what I am looking at does not match up with their picture. Any help would be appreciated.

And again, sorry if I break any posting rules, this is my very first post.

While I obviously can't speak for everyone here, most of us mod 'gamebryo' games, such as Fallout 3, Skyrim, Oblivion etc.

And while some general things might carry across to modding other games, you're probably not going to find a lot of useful info about that on this site. The best answer I can give you is that you should register at the Facepunch forums, as they are almost exclusively about modding Source engine games (like left4dead) and Source-related things.

I am actually wanting to mod Fallout 3 actually. I just used the L4D2 as an example. My main interest is putting new armors into Fallout and Skyrim.

Ah I see! Well the main things you'll need to mod Fallout 3/NV are:

Blender 2.49b, along with its Nif import/export scripts
Nifskope for finishing touches
Gimp or Photoshop (or some other art program capable of producing DDS textures)
Fallout Mod Manager to extract some of the game's default meshes

You'll need a basic understanding of how Blender works (specifically this version) so you might want to watch some tutorials on Youtube or something.

Its pretty straightforward, but there are a lot of hotkeys and submenus that you'll need to understand before you'll be able to make significant progress.

Actually have all of that working. The part I get stuck on is trying to find the correct male skeleton in the BA files. I use Fallout Mod Manager. I just can't seem to find the correct one that the tutorials say to use.

Wow. Apparently this gives you modding powers because I randomly decided to look again and found it first try. So now I just need to go from there!