SO after a while of searching on how to sight guns on the forums and not finding a thing, i searched for the old method of doing sights in FO3 with iron sights mods. i tried for a good while (about 2 hours) but couldn't get the nodes to move correctly or animate correctly so i decided to give the vanilla weapon meshes a look. note however that my first few tried kind of worked, but only for the body, and the reticule stayed in place instead of disappearing. anyway after a bit of looking through i noticed that my gun was missing the node ##sightingnode. after copying and pasting this node from a game mesh to my gun the iron sights worked perfectly without much adjustment. here are the results;

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/8281/screenshot10mk.png

so the steps are VERY easy;

1. open up your weapon in nifskop
2. extract a similar vanilla weapon from the game bsa and open in nifskope
3. in the vanilla weapon search for ##SightingNode and copy the branch
4. switch to your weapon and paste the node onto the mesh (you may need to rename the node to ##Sightingnode)
5. (In the GECK be sure to set sight use to 1 otherwise it'll sight like FO3)

now just save the mesh, load it up in the GECK etc and in game your weapon should be able to use sights as any other vanilla weapon. you may need to adjust the axis and weapon height as needed for you weapon, but that's pretty much the basics of it. I'm only a very basic user of nifskope and i cant even use blender, however i'm sure you could add the node in blender or whatever rendering program you use. after trying to adjust this weapon for a few hours it became frustrating, so i figure i'd save the better modders the time and post this up.

ah yeah forgot to add, but earache made it a point; you can move the node in the x,y,z axis and it will align the sight on the gun. x moves the sight closer to or further away from the actor, y moves the sight up or down, z moves the gun side to side. you'll probably want to leave z at 0 or closer to 0 though.

Another important tip: the ##sightingnode does not use the orientation you give it. I.e. it will always be aligned with the main axis of the weapon. This means that your ##sightingnode, rear sight, and front sight must be in a straight line parallel to that axis.

thanks for confirming that. i was looking at the Browning in nifscope but they did not line up, i am guessing now it was due to perspective. i did have a hunch though.

is there a way to do the rigging an positioning in max? honestly i never really got past copy/pasting meshes onto tristrips with nifscope. being able to do the work in max would be preferable.

Thanks andtheherois I know this will be helpful to the peeps out there like me that aren't even close to be a seasoned modder.

Also it's really encouraging to see J.E. “Serpiente” Sawyer here helping out, off topic and I don't wanna steal a thread but JES but will we get a GECK fix for Havok?

Thanks
bigcrazewolf

Curious. I found that fiddling with the ##SightingNode works in all three vectors. Z-axis shifts in the node seem to work to align the gun in-game.

Now if only ANY of the tools could handle mod kit records ...

was not my info. thank the OP =)

Sorry my bad.....fixed now :facepalm: