First, I don't have any pics yet, so if you can't handle a tutorial with no pictures this is not for you. I may or may not put some up later, depending on how much people annoy me about it.
It shouldn't really need pics because it's very easy.In essence this does the same as a technique Vagrant put up on CI, but it's for Blender rather than 3ds Max. This is how you copy the rigging (also called bone weighting or weight painting or vertex weights) from one mesh to another. You can use it to rig your mesh to an existing body piece so it will not clip, or to copy the rigging from an existing clothing mesh to save yourself the trouble.
Here's what you do:
1. Open the file with your mesh in it in Blender 2.43 or later. Your mesh should already be at the origin in the middle of the view, but if not, make sure it is. If you've already done some weighting, I recommend deleting all rigging from your mesh first so you'll know for sure when this has worked. If you do that, save a new copy in case of need.
2. Import the .nif you want to copy the rigging from. File - import - Netimmerse/Gamebryo. The two meshes should overlap. Don't move them.
3. Set the skeletons to "stick" mode in the edit buttons for better visibility, since it's hard to see otherwise.
4. Right Click on the old mesh. Now hold down shift and right click on your new mesh.
5. Go to mesh - scripts - copy bone weights. A dialog pops up. I use quality setting 4.
6. When you click the okay button, you'll be asked if you want to copy to selected. Say yes.
7. Wait. This may be a long time depending on how good your CPU and memory are. For me it's usually less than a minute.
8. When you can move anything on the screen again, click on your mesh and go to weight paint mode in the dropdown that contains object mode and edit mode. You should see colors where everything was blue before. This means the script worked.
9. Delete the old mesh you copied from. Make sure you get its skeleton, too.
10. Delete the skeleton from your mesh and import a new one. Reparent by right clicking your mesh and then the skeleton, then choose "make parent to armature." Trust me, if you don't do this it's likely you'll get errors after export; Blender doesn't like it when you change weight paints on a mesh that's already parented and then exported as .nif.
11. Also make sure you press ctrl-A before you export. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS PRESS CTRL A. DO NOT SKIP THIS EVER. I am constantly getting questions from people who don't do this and thus get weird-looking meshes ingame.
12. Export. Do the NifSkope workaround dance and playtest. You're done!
For those unfamiliar, here is a link to the NifSkope export workaround that you must do to properly export from Blender to Oblivion:
http://cs.elderscrol..._Blender_Part_2
