Fallout 4 Modding Tools
I’ve downloaded 9 tools to make one mod! I don’t think I’ve ever had to download so many tools to make one thing work before.That was me talking to a fellow modder (who was teaching me yet another undocumented feature of gamebyro) when I was once again complaining about Fallout 4’s mod pipeline – I had been doing that a lot about it since I started using it. This statement was a punctuation for the two month long project to realize a seemingly simple goal: adding a single conventional firearm into Fallout 4. I ran a gamut of emotions in my personal quest to make one mod work in Bethesda’s Fallout 4 – a game they marketed as a, RPG. After going the distance and actually making a mod from concept to release, I’ll be happy to refute both those claims, at least on some level.Fair warning, this is a wordy piece, but it does have nice pictures!Prelude – Picking a Project, Choosing a TimelineI just want to start by saying that I like Fallout 4. I’ve got close to 400 hours in it.
I pre-ordered the version with the pip-boy because I knew going in that dollar-per-hour, I was still going to get my money’s worth and then some. I was first exposed to the franchise when I bought Fallout 3 not long after launch and it was the game of my summer – my whole summer.
The Top 10 Fallout 4 Settlement Mods. This is a great mod to use with Settlements Expanded, but be aware that the more settlers you have in your settlement, the buggier the area may be. Some settlements, like Hangman’s Alley, will also not have enough physical space to hold more than the vanilla amount of people. When you're done with Fallout 4 (or are just starting out), you may want to install a mod or few. Here's how to do it without causing nuclear fallout. How to install mods for Fallout 4 on PC.
I’ve wracked up well into the 4-digit range of hours for both Fallout titles and Bethesda RPGs.I like Fallout 4’s weapon modding system. I think it’s fun and added a lot to the game. One thing I didn’t like is that it meant that a few classic guns got merged or omitted as they became variants of other base guns, like the plasma and laser pistols, or more apt to this article, the classic sniper rifle.The was always my favorite gun in Fallout 3 and New Vegas – the was a gun I’d make a b-line for on new character runs once I got the required lockpicking skill to open the chest, and the was something that always found its way into my inventory in Fallout 3.
Fallout 4 Modding Tools Minecraft
It was a mid-to-late game replacement for the hunting rifle, and although it wasn’t the most powerful sniper on the block, it was versatile enough to be a good gun to have on hand. Fallout 4 had a different approach: the hunting rifle, when fully modded, filled the role of the sniper rifle – and if you didn’t like that, you could mostly transform the combat rifle into a ‘sniper’ if you slapped a scope onto it. The hunting rifle looks like an impressive sniper, but the stats make it worthless late game. Even with expensive.50 ammo, it has half the damage output of other guns at lower calibers, and is useless unless you always get the drop on your enemy. Late game relies too heavily on the slightly overpowered Gauss Rifle (which is true to FO3, I suppose) but the FO4 version of that gun feels more like a massive cannon then something you should be able to stealth around with. I like the gauss rifle, just not as my main sniper.This mod should be fun to make, it’s useful, and I have a personal interest in getting it done!So for the sake of making swiss army knives out of a few guns, Fallout 4’s designers sacrificed a specialist gun that was, up until that point, iconic to the series. Aside from Fallout Tactics, every Fallout game has had generally the same sniper except 4.
I feel that far harbor’s lever action rifle is an admission of the loss, with its low fire rate and incredibly high damage (and broken reload animation???). With a clearly missing slot ripe for the taking in the base game, I found a good opportunity to make a lore friendly weapon mod that pays homage to the old series and fills a gameplay void that suits my personal playstyle. This mod should be fun to make, it’s useful, and I have a personal interest in getting it done! Prefect opportunity to really put everything into a project.Although the idea peculated for a couple of months, I decided to hold off until it seemed that the stars aligned for it. Wasteland Melody released a weapon mod that had all the hallmarks of what I wanted out of my mod. The success of that mod and its scope meant that the mod I wanted to make was possible.
The creation kit was in beta, but out there. There were official tools for modding this game! I figured that it should make things easier. In order to stimulate the mod community, nVidia partnered with Bethesda in offering up a very attractive mod contest, where finalists would win a graphics card and winners could get $5-10k! It was a tight deadline, but sometimes a little motivation is good for making a project actually happen.
Given my window, I risked burnout, but could avoid it if I paced myself and made forward progress weekly.Modeling and TexturingI started working on the model in late April. I started by building my references – I decided that with Fallout 4’s mod system, it would be very possible for me to not only make a 1:1 recreation of the guns from Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I could also make the ‘mods’ necessary to have a close representation of the Sniper Rifle from the first two Fallout games. What really made this project easy for references, though, is that I could just go into New Vegas’s archives and extract the mesh and textures to get the base mesh almost exactly like the old one.My goals for the mesh were pretty simple and my direction was clear – take the existing design and translate to a current gen environment. Take some artistic liberties where things don’t make sense or could be improved, but keep the critical things like silhouette and first/second glance look the same.
This was the approach that the Bethesda art team took for the other ‘translated’ art in Fallout 4. I love the more detailed work the artists did for things like the 10mm pistol, the Protectrons, Sentry Bots, and the like – they look like they always have in your mind’s eye, but with enough artistic license to have some of the models make more physical sense.
I think those are good intentions worth copying. Modeling A direct reference made matching the larger shapes easy!The tool of choice for this project was 3dsmax, with a little zbrush sprinkled in – I wanted to use something that had the importer/exporter functionality to Gamebyro without third party tools. Start to finish, the modeling phase took about a week for the base high and low poly.High poly Render – 3ds MaxI finished the baking for the first texture map over a weekend – I kept most everything floating geo, so most of the work was in the explosion and combining all the individual bakes into a single texture map.
I’m pretty handy with photoshop action script, so most of the monotonous work of recombining bakes was automated.Bake of first texture sheetNext phase was a second texture sheet for mods and magazines. Most of the objects on this one weren’t going off of a solid reference; this set was more open to my own interpretation. This is a rare opportunity for most gamedev, usually you have to keep in tight guidelines or are following a reference to a T. Modeling, sculpting, and baking this set took another week.This was me having a little fun with shapes.Dipping into ZBrushOn projects like these, I try to push myself to try new things, this project was no different. I decided to explore polysculpting – I intentionally chose some hard surface that would be best served with a highpoly sculpting pass, and the best tool for sculpting is zbrush, which is a tool that I need to learn to work better in anyway. I tried sculpting my basic shapes and texture for the wood stock and grip.
I watched a few tutorials on youtube, tried a few different techniques, and I can say that although it’s not the best wood sculpting ever, I feel like I could take some lessons learned on this project and apply them the next time I try it. I also tried to leverage the recently popularized workflow for a few weird things that would have been very difficult to model traditionally. I ended up using the results for the trickier button insets over the trigger and the weird shapes in the stock. The nVidia Mod ‘Contest’I was going to write up a ton here, but I think this article is gone on long enough and I have nothing good to say on the subject, and writing a rant won’t change things.
Fallout 4 Mods Pc
ConclusionI can wear the fact that I’ve made a successful mod for a gamebyro game like a badge of honor.Despite the ups and downs, as a whole, this has been a good experience. It was a real trial by fire that pushed me to my limits, and the reception from the community made it all worth it in the end. Coming out of this project, I can wear the fact that I’ve made a successful mod for a gamebyro game like a badge of honor and I can walk away with a deeper appreciation for the mod community that has revolved around these games for years. Art side, I was able to leverage and refresh my highpoly modeling skills, and try out new techniques. This time using zbrush was better then my last, and I’m hopeful that next time will be better still, walking away with lessons learned this time around. Another legendary material – the COS Sniper rifle from FO:NVI hope to release at least one or two more updates to the mod to make up for what I missed and what I had to cut, and I’m deeply honored that it has started to weave itself into the colorful tapestry of common Fallout 4 mods.I want to try my hand at making the Wattz 2000 – a laser rifle variant using the same receiver, but I can easily see myself teaming up with someone talented/experienced on the ‘modding’ side of gamebyro so I can focus on the art.
Fallout 4 Configuration Tool
Back to blockout!Who knows. It’s obvious there is an audience for this work, and many are eager to see more. That said, modding simply can’t take up as much time as it used to for me, I’ve got too many responsibilities that take priority.If you have Fallout 4 and want to try the mod, here are the links to the released project: PC/Nexus:Xbox One:PS4:Artstation (3d Preview):Post-Release Media:If you actually read through all this, wow! Thank you for reading!