Good news (to me!): It’s time to finally, finally retire from my mod-making pipeline, and welcome as its replacement!
For context, using was a workaround carried over from the times when I first started making mods in 2018. Back then, there was no up-to-date plugin that could handle NIF files, so you either used to skin and export NIF meshes, or you opted for (which I wasn’t familiar with at the time).
I chose . I solely used it to skin meshes to NPC skeletons and export the actual NIF files – all the modelling was done and continues to be done in . And even though I used minimally and mostly via scripts, I had my fair share of problems with it: The GUI is unintuitive and cluttered (it is much more suited for architecture design than character modelling), its native scripting language is a genuine headache and lacks proper documentation, and the constant licensing issues (is a proprietary software that you need a license for) made me dread opening the software everytime.
But thankfully, no more! Over the last year, I have been using extensively, and it achieves everything did, and then some! is an open-source plugin that brings NIF file format support to , and from all my time of using it, I can confidently say that it works flawlessly. Importing and exporting NIF meshes is smooth, the skinning feature works great, and especially its more recently introduced shape keys support has been very valuable for me as a facial animation designer.
So, I will be retiring from my mod-making pipeline. Removing a whole software from the process like this significantly cuts down on overhead, and being able to do all my modelling work solely in has done wonders for the efficiency and comfortableness of creating and editing new meshes.
Therefore, my sincere thanks go to ’s developer and all other contributors for providing us with such a helpful tool! It has truly made my life that much easier.
For anyone interested, you can check out on . Leave it a star while you’re at it!