[3DS] Razorwing's Guide to Bounding Boxes

[Razorwing]

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As an Oblivion modeller, you'll often enough find that models are the wrong size. This is particularly common if you are working on a model you imported from an .obj file, such as stemming from Blender or Poser or other 3d programs, as those models tend to get imported severely dwarfed. We're talking hundreds if not thousands procent smaller than they should be.

Your first instinct might be to select the model and use the Scale tool. This will indeed resize the model, and the resize is reflected both in-game and in the Construction Set - but the bounding box will be screwed up if you do it this way.


Here is a screenshot to illustrate the problem.

What you need to do instead is to select all the vertices of your model and then use the Scale tool. This will result in a correct bounding box for the NIF.

- The thing I call the bounding box is that oddly-colored box around a model that shows up if you select it in the construction set. It's important that the bounding box is correct, because otherwise it will be hard to select and move your model in the CS.

- If your model consists of several meshes, just select all of them - CTRL+A - and Group them. Then add an Edit Mesh modifier to be able to select all the vertices and scale them.

- To learn more about how you can export models to Oblivion, please refer to Blocky's thread.

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Hope this little guide can be of some use.
In case you'd like to repost it, feel free to do that.

[Razorwing]

After experimenting a bit I believe my old tutorial above is not the best way to normalize bounding boxes. Instead, I now believe it's better to use the "Reset XForm" tool on the Utilities panel. Apart from fixing the bounding boxes it also seems to recalculate the position of the model's vertices if you've resized your model, so it strikes me as a really nifty tool.

Be sure to back up your scene before using it though. If you've rotated for instance a cylinder 2,1923 degrees in one direction and 55,3923 in the another my tests seem to indicate it's as good as impossible to return it to the old position, because the Reset XForm tool also resets all the meshes rotation to zero (without affecting their real rotation in the universe, naturally).

At the moment I'm going through my backlog of models and adjusting the bounding boxes, as well as creating collision meshes and adding vertex paint. Inbetween I try to squeeze in a bit of modding on the town exterior