How do I go about "cropping" a model in Nifskope? Lets say I wanted to take an object in NifSkope and literally cut it in half (both halves don't have to be preserved). I am very new to NifSkope.

How can I do this?

(The actual mesh I am editing is the barenziahsstand.nif so that the player can have a "mannequin/display rack" specifically for circlets/helmets/necklace's etc)

as far as I know Nifskope supports no modeling features

I see, that explains some things. Haha.

What programs do members of this community typically use for this sort of thing then?

Usually 3dsMax or even more commonly Blender.

Cheers. I'll look into them.

Actually it can be done in Nifskope but is a very tedious process -- you have to move\delete individual vertices in the model by their x,y,z coordinates and it gets tough on more complex models (ie. the model you mention has 156 vertices) - so you would have to move probably half of them if you wanted to slice it in half.

What exactly were you wanting to do with it - what half were you wanting to get rid of ? For example if just wanting to adjust the bottom of the stand it is only a few vertices to move upward ( I just moved all vertices with a z= 0.0383 to z= 70.0383 (of course you then also need to adjust the collision box vertices as well and the UVmap of the stand portion ) but it can be done with Nifskope.

As an example here is the base adjusted to make it just a small base -- http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc189/JDFanning_bucket/stand.jpg

Was a bit bored this afternoon so decided to test the adjustment in game -- http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc189/JDFanning_bucket/sTANDINGAME.jpg

That's pretty much exactly what I want to do with it!
Although the base is going to be very minimal as I will be covering that up/mounting it (when need be) with other objects.

As a side note: I'm looking at giving it a more wood-ish looking texture and I'm I've got two repurposed vanllia textures that I'm pretty happy with. One works perfectly but the other doesn't map very well. How do I edit the UV Map to clean this up?

EDIT: I right click > Texture > Edit UV = "Could not load texture data for UV editor."
right click > Texture > Export Template = strange file I don't seem to be able to do anything with

Quick question JDFan, how is it your NifSkope can preview the current textures on a model? This is all I see:

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m57/will_cuthill/Temp.png?t=1349230175

This is where I'm at:
http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m57/will_cuthill/UVMappingIssue.png?t=1349238138

Going from the left; I'm pretty happy with the first two textures (with respect to mapping) but I'm not sure if I'll incorporate differing iterations. My preference is to use the brown one but as you can see the mapping is horrendous.

Please advise.

To see the textures you have to set Nifskope up so it knows where the texture files are located --

- Open Nifskope
- On top line (where File View Render Spells Help are located) click on Render
- Bottom of popup click Settings
- Go to Rendering tab
- Under Custom click Add Folder
- Highlight Choose a folder
- Lower in that area next to Folder Click in the box that now says Choose a folder
- Type in your Skrim path ( ie. Mine is D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\Common\skyrim\Data ) and press enter
- go back to Nifskope render window should now show the textures (might have to unpack them from the BSA files if you haven't already)

Doing this may also correct your error as right now it can not find the texture file so can not load the data for the UV editor - thus the error !

The file it exports is a .tga file and can be loaded into a photo editor like Photoshop to create the texture (it shows a wireframe image of the UV map layout so you can see how the texture is arranged.

That's an error I get if I forget to remove the NiMaterialProperty and replace it with BSLigtingShader when I make something new in Max. It shouldn't be present on Vanilla meshes that are already properly set up.
Don't know if this is related to the error, but what version of Nifskope are you using?

Thanks, I've got it sorted now.

I've been using NifSkope 1.1.0c8 rdd5949c. I'm pretty sure this is the latest version and unrelated to my problem.