Given the appalling lack of support for custom NIF meshes in Skyrim, I was wondering if anyone has any information concerning what sort of official conversion utility Bethesda uses for meshes in Skyrim and if there was any method for (legally!) acquiring it. Many games use the NIF format, and it would be very helpful if I could somehow acquire a license for whatever export utility may be provided.

Failing that, I would also like to know why Skyrim is completely unsupported by the NIFTools team, the only entity that seems to have done any work for previous installments in the series. One of the reasons why the NIF format is even used in Skyrim right now is because Bethesda assumed that there would be a significant community investment, which there has not been. If I am mistaken in this judgment, please let me know what viable alternatives do exist that I have not yet been made aware of.

Specifically, my problem involves the conversion of ~2,000 custom Oblivion meshes into Skyrim, mostly static buildings, decorations, and scenery, which would take me years of work using current workarounds. A handful of them are animated, but I'm willing to overlook that issue until I can solve this most basic one. They must have collision and retain their UV mapping.

This appeal is basically my last recourse before I must abandon this project I've been working on. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

There is no official converter because converting meshes from one game into another is a no no. Beth does not allow the re-use of their assets even between their own games. If they did, everyone would be doing it.

You can create your own meshes with either 3DSMax or Blender. I understand NifTools are behind in their development, they are of course doing this on their own time so we just need to be patient. 3DS has Skyrim export support but Blender does not. Neither tool has viable collision support at this time but it's still doable.

There are workarounds to creating your own Skyrim-ready meshes in Blender, such as using FallOut or Morrowind export methods and a little magic in Nifskope. This method is documented in many places such as the Nexus wiki or the CK wiki.

Good luck on your project.

More to the point, Bethesda's converters will be based on code libraries licensed from Gamebase and from Havok (and maybe other companies). Licenses like that tend to cost in the thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars per user. There is absolutely no way the owners of that code will allow Bethesda to distribute it without paying, and no way Bethesda is going to pay for hundreds or thousands of licenses for modders.

It just isn't going to happen.

The movement of assets from one game to another is beside the point - especially as that isn't even what Z705X wants to do. He (she?) wants to convert their own, original meshes from the NIF format used by Oblivion to the NIF format used by Skyrim.

They are not Bethesda's meshes. They are user-made meshes that were originally created for Oblivion, as I initially stated. Unless Bethesda owns the rights to every mesh used for mods in each game, there would be no legal hindrance to doing it, merely a technical one of actually going through with the conversion process. I don't even need a converter per se, just a method of exporting custom assets to Skyrim without going through different data values of every piece of every mesh I have.

I did not know 3DS Max had any sort of support past Oblivion. Development of the 3DS Max NIFTools plugin was discontinued a while ago and there are no longer any active developers working on it. The Blender plugin actually has developers, but I have no idea if they're actually doing anything because Skyrim support status has remained unchanged since the game's release almost a year ago.

Modding just seems like a hopeless rut at the present. There is much that I want to do but little I actually can. This has been a problem for me since day 1 of the CK's release, and if it's not the difficulty of making new models, there's a new bug every patch that renders at least one feature of the CK unusable. Hopefully this doesn't last much longer.

Sorry, I did not notice the word "custom" when I first read it. I didn't mean to offend. Disregard my first paragraph but the rest is still valid.

The Niftools plugin for 3DS has the most support at the moment, there is none for Blender-to- Skyrim at all (they seem more focused on working on Blender 2.6 support). As a modeler I feel your pain. The workarounds are time consuming. I can't imagine facing 2000 meshes to convert manually.

So why is it listed as "inactive" with the last version up for download having a date in 2010? Has someone forked it, or is there a bleeding edge snapshot build that you guys are using, or something? I thought everyone was using Blender now...

There's http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5622 fork. I've no idea how good/bad it is (I'm struggling along with Blender ), but if you have Max it's probably the best hope you have .