So I'm working on creating turret spells and I'm looking to have the actual turret be a floating sphere which will fire projectiles at enemies.

I think the behavior of the Magelight spell will be perfect for what I need the turret to do. It should float a bit off the surface of whatever the launched projectile hits, and then start launching its own shots.

For the sphere itself I've decided to use the icons from the spell menu in-game. For the Shock version, for example, I'd be using the electrical sphere that you see when you highlight any Shock-based spell in the spell menu.

I've already extracted the NIF files from the meshes.bsa archive so that I can actually select those NIF files for use as the "model" for the hazard. Just for a preliminary "proof of concept" test and to make sure those menu icons are actually usable as in-world and not just in menus, I went to the Magelight hazard (TestLightHazard) and I replaced the normal model with the MAGINVShockSpell.nif file, which corresponds to the menu icon for shock spells. Went into the game, casted a Magelight at the wall to see what would happen.

Now the good news is that it does actually produce a viable object in the game world. The icon looks like a full 3D object and actually looks quite nice, animates correctly and everything too. But the bad news is that it doesn't float like the Magelight hazard does. It just sticks to the wall / floor where the impact occurs. Since I merely switched the art file of the existing Magelight hazard, it should float like the Magelight does, at least if the behavior is contained in the hazard entry or something. But it doesn't, it sticks to the floor.

So what actually determines the behavior of an art piece? Is it something within the .NIF file? If so, how easy would it be to edit that type of thing, being that I have absolutely no experience with any sort of model / animation program? If not, then what determines it?

Bump?

Hmm. Guess not many people have done much spell mesh editting.