Hi modders and learners, in this thread I'm going to share with you some techniques I've picked up during my time modding. Hopefully these tutorials will help you get fully set on modeling & texturing to your full potential. This thread will contain tutorials made by myself and others in which I will credit them for their contribution to helping new modders.


Modeling 1.0: Echo_Blender_Tutorials by Echonite
Here was my exact starting point, these videos made by Echonite of Tesnexus helped me pick up the basics of navigating Blender.
Recommended: 3_Cubed_Sword_Tutorial - Blender_Exporting

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=19303


Modeling 1.1: Block Modeling by Alex2avs
Alex Valentine's block modeling techniques helped me learn how to quickly model awkward and complex weapons from a 2D image by using multiple meshes and extruding them to get the basic shape then quite simply adding multires or subsurf levels to increase smoothness and detail.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=28319

Here is another really awesome example of block modelling and how effective it is. This guy is pretty pro in blender, I can see pick up on most of the techniques he uses but some of the stuff in he does in the video is hard to pick up on.
Song: SR-71 - Goodbye
Credit to youtube user DeathniteR


<Will continue to add to this thread>

These are excellent resources.

I have one request for future tutorials, though. I am already pretty familiar with modeling and texturing at this point (though more is always better), so any information specific to preparing the models for Oblivion or Skyrim would be extremely helpful. I'd need to know about placement of the model for linking it to the hand, for example. Is using an existing NIF file and splicing the new model in the only method currently known?

Anyways, good work. Keep it up.

If you're referring to weapons, it is the easiest to use vanilla placement/collision as else you have to assign the data to the nodes yourself. It's not impossible, just annoying as the game is quite strict on where you place things . Trial and error will always be a factor unless you would note down the exact position of the hand and it its reach, hold and then modify it into blender.

Now I think of it, none ever bothered to create a hand-model to check if weapons fit correctly...it might be something for skyrim to create alcron .