(Continued...)

The moveable collision meshes on Bethesda’s objects come in many shapes, from completely square to the round one you find on a head of lettuce. There are also several different kinds of bhk shapes used for these movable collisions, such as bhkboxshapes, bhktransformshapes, bhkconvextransformshape. When I learn more about these, I may add a section in this tutorial on those. For now, we are not going to deal with the more complex bhk shapes, we will stick to something very simple and basic. So, one of the simplest movable collision meshes you can get comes from Bethesda’s books. The weight of this item, the sound it makes when you drop it and its reaction to being hit by weapons is generic enough to use for many types of clutter items.

In the Oblivion BSA archive files, find “folio1.nif” (located in Meshes\clutter\books), copy and past it into the Oblivion\Data\Meshes directory or your own subdirectory there. If you don’t know how to access the nifs inside the BSA, get “TES4BSA” by Ghostwheel (Link Here)

Using Nifscope, open “folio1.nif”. (This tutorial uses version 0.9.6 of Nifscope (Download Link Here))

Click on the book in the Nifscope window, you’ll note that the book mesh is made of 2 parts, the cover corresponds to “6 NiTriStrip” and the interior pages correspond to “12 NiTriStrip” {Sample Picture 1}

Now click on the “0 Ni Node” at the very top left of the screen. In the “Block details” window below, click the plus sign next to “children” to expand that. You will see that the Ni Node is linked to the 2 mesh parts I just mentioned (6 and 12 NiTriStrip) {Sample Picture 2}

We are going to disconnect the NiNode from those two mesh parts. Double click where it says “6 (folio 01:0)” change that number from 6 to –1. Do the same thing to “12 (folio 01:0)” change that number from 12 to –1. You will now see “none” next to where it says children. {Sample Picture 3}

Next, open a second Nifscope window by clicking on “File” and “New Window”. Load your model in the new window.

Click on your model in the Nifscope viewing window. That will select the block on the left that corresponds to the model's mesh part you just clicked on. In this picture you can see my model “Poly the Pig” is a single mesh part corresponding to “1 NiTriStrip” {Sample Picture 5}

Right click on the “1 NiTriStrip” (or whatever your model's block is) and select “Block” and “Copy Branch” {Sample Picture 6}

Now go back to the first window with the book mesh. Right Click on “ 0NiNode” and then do “Block” and “Paste Branch”. {Sample Picture 7} . You will now see your model sitting on top of the original book mesh. If you click again on the “0 NiNode” you will see that Nifscope automatically added your mesh as one of the connected children blocks. {Sample Picture 8} . Don’t worry about the 2 unused children slots as those will disappear after you save your mesh.

My pig model is just one part. If your model has multiple parts, just copy and paste each mesh part in the same way.