Hello again my great community! Here i am to torment you all again with my boring questions with annihilating power!
And now, let the chaos begin!

You see , i've been watching a lot of weapon concepts from this person: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/users/2856652/?
And, i don't know, those weapons are extremely good looking , new and remain very lore-friendly. Too bad they are just concepts, not real mods... Yet.

I have no idea what i'm doing, because i never modded a weapon in my entire life, but for those concepts to come true, i'm going to start and try.. But, i would like to ask all of you if you coukld help me, with basics of modding and maybe guiding me in the steps to make this weapon compilation come true (I will follow the concepts, so it's not going to be THAT hard, i think?) .

Cheers, buddies!

Two parts to kitbashing: acquiring parts, and trimming them.

Acquiring parts, find a mesh where you want your part from (ie. sniper scope, barrel, etc.) and copy it over to the base gun (ie. the gun which would have the most similar reload to your end-result). Doesn't matter if you have to copy the entire gun over just to have the part, that's where part 2 comes in.

Trimming them: import the mesh to 3DS Max or Blender, and select and delete the individual faces/vertices you don't need. Export the rest, and copy the exported stuff's NiTriStripsData over to your base gun's respective part.

Hey Niar26, I would like to help you. I have quite a bit experience now in modding weapons, even started to make my own models in 3ds.
So if you have any question, feel free to send me a pm.
For the start you should get familiar with nifskope, because that is one of the programs where you will spend most of the time when combining parts.
And like dazzerfong said, you need a 3d program. Here is the link to all programs you need to use blender with nifs: http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/Blender
If you decide to get 3DS Max you need a version below 2013. There is a plugin for 2013 but I think it is not finished yet. Anyway here is the nif plugin for 3DS 2010: http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/3ds_Max
On this site are also some good tutorials to start.
Good luck!

Alright guys thanks! I will try to make something ... I hope murdock you will have time for me

Try something simple. One of the first things I did was choose a custom gun that I wanted to modify. I chose one of the HK416 models. Than I opened up other guns grabbed pieces from them (copy branches), such as fore grope, flash light, laser sight, holo sight etc and paste branched on the HK416. Wyckedgurl used to help me on in this area when I was a noob. Than you align the pieces to your gun to make your custom gun.

http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/images/76474/?

The sniper rifle would be my first weapon to make, and it doesn't look too messy... You think it's doable even by a noob like me? If you were a noob, trust me, i'm like a noob for the noobs..

Sure of course it's not too hard to mash up pieces together. When I first joined VGU this was one of the first things I did, in a few days I made a bunch of my own weapons.

Alrighty then!

Let's guide me. I installed all the files needed for Blender. Now, what should i do?

Blender? I would install nifskope first. I didn't even touch Blender/3ds max until I started to port things. All you need is nifskope to customize weapons (basic customization). Unless you want to make custom models.

Alright, got nifskope aswell. I just need to learn how to make (for example that sniper) those weapons made from combining parts from other weapons right now

I can't talk much longer as I have class soon.

But load up your nif file of the sniper gun you want as the base.

Than load up the nifs of other guns and copy the pieces you want only. Copy branch.

Than go back to your original gun hit "0" and than paste branch.

It looks like the base is of the 12.7mm SMG actually, should i load it first?

Yeah, are you trying to copy what he did? You might have to unpack the files if it was part of the original game.

Yep i am!

Opening the weapon in Nifskope loads it correctly, but i see a lot of yellow lines which impair my sight of it

I still don't get how i can cut the individual pieces and then add them on the weapon i want to change ( the base weapon, this case the 12.7 smg)

DVAted wrote:

most vanilla weapons have their entire body as one branch
you still need blender to cut apart the stock or the barrel or the scope,
if they're welded together in one single branch... just saying, Nifskope can only do so much

also, replies like
"yep I am" and "let's start" belong in a messenger/skype conversation, not on a forum topic
I know you know this, I'm just reminding you. Otherwise, you could take this to the chatbox, that would also be better

oh yeah good point, I was assuming you were doing what I was doing and using custom models.

I tried to import the Sniper Rifle in blender, but the weapon gets improted without textures, it is "full gray". Is it correct?

yes it is. You can show the textures by selecting the textured draw type. Next to "Object Mode" is a brown box. If you click on the arrows you should see 5 types to choose from. If you click textured, you should see the texture on the model. But I think the textures need to be in your gamefolder to be visble. So you have to unpack them from the BSA's.

Niar26 wrote:

but i see a lot of yellow lines which impair my sight of it

While youre obviously in nifskope go to Render> and tick Draw Nodes,Draw Constrains(optional),Draw Furniture(optional),Show hidden.Untick the Draw Axes,Draw Havok(collision).

And have in mind to have your F2 and F3 windows displayed as are the only you need.