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In response to post #91951913. Exactly. I just hope they never implement this stuff to the full games we can buy (if they will even allow us to do that in the future). I don't want to live in a world where future Fallout, Starfield, and Elder Scrolls have limited exe's on purpose becasue they were too lazy to make an unlocked version compared to the gamepass one. I'd hope the community backlash would be big enough it would force MS and bethesda to stop doing it if it ever were to occur.

How I make female armors for Skyrim Special Edition: - Blender 2.90+ for modeling (no nif plugin needed, export meshes as OBJ for outfit studio) - 3D Coat (optional tool of course, can use a 2d paint program or another 3d paint program for textures): UV unwrap and texture creation/painting - Compressonator 4.0 for converting textures to DDS - Outfit studio for paint weights and converting OBJ meshes to nifs - 3DS Max 2012-2015: (optional step, if you have no HDT is not needed) Create any new custom HDT physics bones for any clothing on my armors that has physics - Nifskope: Final texture and mesh cleanup - Creation Kit to hook it all up for the game and create the esp/esl I've not done any male armors but even though outfit studio is made for female characters you could still import a male body and set it as a reference to conform your armor pieces with the proper paint weights then export that nif to make the _0 and _1 nifs manually. In the end, the program(s) you use to make your 3d models and texture them is irrelevant. As long as those tools a can export in a compatible OBJ or FBX format and you can convert your png/tga/tiff files to the proper DDS format and meshes to outfit studio and nikskope it really does the rest to get the pieces workable for SSE.

Solution: After 5 days and probably 40+ hours or trial and error and literally trying to attempt every single thing I could think of I finally found the answer for Skyrim Special Edition HDT-SMP when it comes to custom meshes not colliding properly with virtual collisions such as legs. It turns out it was a combination of my custom HDT bones setup and some extra XML tweaking to finally get it all working. To start becasue my dress goes 180 degrees around the waist and all the way to the bottom of the floor the issue was the first bone length to the second one was too long. The first bone in each HDT chain is kinematic meaning it doesn't follow the HDT physics but will follow the animation of whatever bone its parented to (in this case parented to the pelvis). As a result becasue bone #2 in my chains were so far away when I would do any extreme action like walk or crouch the top kinematic bone was forcing the rest to ignore the collision becasue it would just animate though and follow the pelvis rotation. So as the picture below shows the fix is the 2nd bone in each chain should be close to or almost right after the first one so it can immediately start having physics right at the waist point. I never ran into this issue with my other custom HDT meshes I think becasue they were smaller pieces of skirts or capes and as a result the bone lengths were way shorter so I never would see the bad kinematic animation clipping occurring. (The the bones in the image below is the correct way to do it, before they were way to spread apart from bones 1 to 2 in the chain) The bottom right picture shows even in extreme sprinting mode the dress will fully collide with the legs. Of course, there will still be micro-second instances the legs/thigh will appear to pop out in front of the dress but after observing many other HDT armors made by other modders this is to be expected (skyrim is an old game and amazing we can get HDT working in it at all to this degree). I think it can be mitigated even more by increasing the iterations of HDT SMP in the config file (not tried it yet) but another way if you want more extreme animation poses that look nice in HDT for screenshot purposes is to just slow time down in the console command 'sgtm 0.3' or even slower 'sgtm 0.1'. With slowed down time the HDT physics can calculate way more accurate per frame and the clipping really never happens no mater the animation I do. The last piece of the puzzle is I had to tweak the XML weight threshold settings and margin multipliers a bit more with the bone relations. Its also recommended to set your meshes in the XML with the tag <shared>private</shared> this will prevent any outside meshes not part of your HDT mesh to collide with the dress. I found when I didn't have it private the arms on my character would hit the dress bones on the side for example and push them in odd directions causing annoying clipping so that tag is one thing you can keep in consideration as well. With all that combined I finally have a decent looking HDT dress that I feel is now comparable to many of the other good HDT armors other modders make. Hopefully this post helps anyone else trying to find an answer. I literally think I scoured the entire web for a specific answer to this and even a 100+ page HDT thread over at lover labs and couldn't find definitive answers. It all came down to observing a few other HDT armors that dealt with long dresses and seeing how their bone setup was placed. Maybe there is another way I could have fixed this problem I had but it worked for me and until an HDT expert comes along and can post a better answer this will hopefully work for anyone else that runs into similar issue with their custom HDT's. Just posting some keywords so this post can show up in search queries for anyone looking for an answer if they run into the same issue: Skyrim Special Edition HDT leg clipping Custom HDT meshes clipping in legs virtual leg collision - virtual proxy leg collision

Yeah I once had bumped the margin as high as 20 and it just makes the dress spaz out more but legs seemed to still pass through. I removed bogus nodes and removed unused strings when I first made the nif as well to keep things clean so don't think that unfortunately was ever an issue. I sent you the files to take as look, thanks again for looking into it. I'm really hoping its just something I set wrong in the nif or the XML, I'd love to see the legs finally collide with the dress so it looks good in game. Who knew a simple dress with HDT could be such a pain, I've spent more hours this week trying to debug the HDT issue than it took me to model, texture, and rig it lol. I've never run across an issue in all my years of modding Fallout 4, Skyrim, and other games that I couldn't eventually solve so I don't want to have to admit defeat now. Edit: So I've been messing around with the XML and nif and still no concrete answers. I've played around with the margin/penetration/weight threshold values more, changed the tag names to different things, reordered the collision bstrishape nodes in the nif file to be a higher number than my HDT meshes, changed the partition number I had that was 46 for all the meshes to generic 32 body, moved in the XML my leg collision section to different areas and still no major difference. By adjusting the penetration, weight threshold, and margin the feet seem to now make the bottom of the dress move. However the legs and knee area still will clip though without a care and crouching they pass through still. Edit 2: In continued process of elimination I even went so far as to create my own custom ground collision just to see if it was something wrong with the custom collision meshes I was making from scratch (virtual ground I was using before was a shared resourced not made by me, thought there might be some special nif setting it had compared to the ones I made). I made a hexagon virtual ground and even named it 'ground_v2' just so it was as different as possible to the original one. It worked perfect in-game as expected so I am not sure why my legs virtual collision still wouldn't be affected by the dress the same way. So far the only conclusions I currently have is: - Something with non-static collision meshes isn't working - I'm missing some super obscure XML combination of values - My dress bones are too close to legs so collision will never properly work (I highly doubt this could be it though, the dress is nearly touching the virtual ground and it interacts fine so why would it be any different with the legs being somewhat close?) - Possibly some form of constraint is needed for the legs and front of the dress so the dress bones always stay in front of the legs? (even though I've seen no such evidence of this being needed in other XML files from other HDT armor authors) - Something inherently wrong with my HDT dress/bones (but this also begs the question if it works well with the virtual ground and bends fine why couldn't it work with virtual legs the same way?) Edit 3: I believe I have finally found the absolute solution. I do want to make sure I get my HDT 100% good in game first for a result I'd accept as quality before I post the answer and realize its not actually a real fix and I feel really confident I found the answer at last.

OK so here is a better visual for you to see I have the collision mesh in the nif and XML are the exact same: Then the dress itself: Top left is my custom HDT bones and the dress, I feel nothing with the bones or paint weight would be an issue there, its far away enough from the legs I don't see it having issue when it does need to collide, everything is painted where outfit studio does not give any errors about weighting missing or anything. Top middle image is expected, just character standing in place. Top right is the misery I currently find myself in. Bottom left is showing the dress does flatten like a pancake when it collides with the ground. And lastly on the bottom right is the collision legs with a texture so it is indeed in the right location, covers the cbbe legs, and deforms when needed. I've tried just about everything from double checking the Skin Transform is not off center, all the mesh data is similar to other HDT modders meshes (vertex | UV's | Normals | Tangenets | Skinned) and (flags is 2, 3, 4, and 19 (no anim sync (S)). Tried my XMl with and without weight threshold too (looks worse without the weights)

Thanks for reply. Yeah I definitely have it set as per-triangle-shape. Think I've tried a couple different names but I'll try one more. If that doesn't work I'll try adding a texture shader to it like you said and seeing if it actually where it belongs (I am assuming it would be considering all my other custom meshes are and I check the nif data that transforms in the skin are not anywhere else but 0,0,0).

Sometimes I feel like I got HDT working (as it works fine on several armors I've made) but then I'm back to square one with new HDT mesh. I made a dress that has a skirt that goes all the way to the bottom of the ground. No matter what settings I choose in my XML the dress never collides with the virtual body that includes low poly thighs, legs, and feet. However If my character crouches the dress perfectly collides with the virtual ground, also doing any movement or fancy spinning the dress physics look great, it just collision with the lower body that isn't working. Is it important what name I choose as the tag in my XML for the virtual body collision? I just have it as a generic tag of <tag>body</tag> and the name of the mesh in my nif file is called name="VirtualCBBE" so I would assume when my character crouches the dress will deform to the shape of the legs but instead the dress mesh just goes straight through but it collides with the ground as expected. The dress meshes do not have any '<no-collide-with-tag>' for the body so technically it should be colliding with the legs just like the ground right? I have the XML associated in the nif too and since ground collision works I know its 'working' but some reason the body collision just seems to be ignored every time. I don't need to be using the <can-collide-with-tag> for this to work right? Meshes by default should collide as long as they don't have the <no-collide-with-tag> associated with eachother? EDIT: I should make note the hdtSMP64.log shows no errors for my XML or HDT setup, I always check to resolve any errors for my HDT meshes if the log show anything so I know all the bones are present and working for my HDT.

I still prefer MO2. I love the virtual file system it uses and very quick profile swapping, the virtual file explorer is pretty great too. Plus MO2 still get updates/support from those who took over the tool so its not a 'dead' tool. One of my favorite features is the colored separators too, really lets me organize my mods for each game neatly down to their priority order. The only time I'd quit using MO2 and look for another mod manager when it comes to bethesda games is if MO2 was directly sabotaged or couldn't support as newer game but I have no doubt when I new bethesda game released the team would update it to work with it just fine.

I'm sure there are better RPG's out there but I like the Elder Scrolls and Skyrim especially not just becasue of the ability to mod them so much but also they are single player offline experiences, its very hard to get stuff like that these days with every company wanting to be a 'live service'. I am not really into online tied mmo stuff. I want a game where I don't have to worry about online servers or monthly fees. This is why I don't play Fallout 76 or ESO. If they both offered a true offline experience with the option to toggle online then sure I'd like them more. A friend tried to get me to play ESO for example and I just didn't like it. For me online requirements in a RPG is a huge negative point for me. The only exception would be if like Elder Scrolls 6 is a fully offline experience but you could choose to co-op but it wouldn't mean I have to be connected to the internet 24/7 if I didn't use that feature.

As I said over on reddit: I really hope this doesn't mean the end of modding for pc games like skyrim, fallout 4, and future games such as Elder scrolls 6 and starfield etc. I hope the original vision bethesda has with those allowing full modding on pc will continue.If anything I hope it means the xbox version can have MORE modding like script extenders and such. However, MS could have a different 'vision' and idea of what is 'acceptable' and be like "na we're don't need to allow them such open ability to mod the future titles, creation club will do fine, if the mod can't be on the console its not allowed". I really am worried, making mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4 has been a lot of fun having no restrictions really. I was hoping I could do the same with Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6.

Sony doesn't seem to be the type on a new console to all of the sudden just start allowing external mods if their policy has disallowed it this long on PS4. Maybe the most you'll see is the game running at peak performance with the extra power a PS5 can offer, but unless Bethesda like patches the game i don't think graphics wise it'll change too much. If you want a console I'd go with the Xbox Series X with all that raw power I'm sure you'd be able to mod Skyrim console wise even more than it can be now since on xbox external content is allowed (but still limited when compared to pc mods). Of course with script extenders and the like the ultimate way to mod the game is still on pc, I can't play vanilla bethesda games on a console anymore after dipping into the flexibility modding these games on pc offers ... and I own a PS4 and Xbox One X as a hardcore console gamer. I will most likely get a PS5 and Xbox Series X one day but still be modding these games on pc.

GND meshes are used for what appears in the inventory and when an object/armor piece is dropped what it looks like on the ground.

True I forgot 2.90 just came out, any version will work really and any program that can create 3d models that you are comfortable with is viable. I'm still on 2.83 just becasue I have some add-ons I'm waiting to get updated for 2.90 But yes, outfit studio works great for armor in Fallout/Skyrim. You import your 3d models as a obj/fbx and then you just adjust the armor (if needed) to fit the body then copy the bone weights and export the nif and its been fully skinned . If some deformations look off you can paint or change the paint weights for each individual bone too.

How I make armors for human races in Skyrim/Fallout 4: Using cbbe (or whatever body you are making your model on) export the zeroed slider version of the body, hands, feet from outfit studio as a obj or fbx into a 3d modeling program of choice. If its for a male just do same thing, import the male body nif in outfit studio and export as an obj or fbx. For me, I use Blender 2.8.3 (latest version) where I model my armor/clothing. You can then go from there and unwrap the model in blender and create textures from a 2d program like Photoshop, gimp, affinity, etc. However for me I take my models from blender and use 3D Coat to unwrap and make my textures, it is a 3d paint program. From there I have my models and textures and at this point the art side of making an armor is pretty much done. I then use compressonator program (which is free) to make my BC1 and BC7 compressed dds textures. For the model I paint the weights in outfit studio and export the bodyslide shape data as a nif. With nifskope if I have to do any texture setup or model adjustment I will tweak it in there. After that I have the bethesda compatible nif and dds files which it just comes down to hooking it all up in the creation kit. Unless you are doing complex HDT physics where you need to add custom bones and such no need for 3ds max, you don't need to keep using old versions of blender (if you don't want to) either since outfit studio handles nif creation just fine. My workflow is quite fast. I can model a leather strap for example around like the character's arm or leg and have it in Skyrim in less than 30 mins. Obviously more detailed and complex armor I'll spend more time on but as far as creation from scratch of a simple mesh to in-game it doesn't take me that long.

Isn't this kinda that already? https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Skyrim_Special_Edition Maybe it could get more documentation and tutorials added but seems like what you are looking for. Personally for me, when I am making a mod trying to document everything I do at the same time in the sense of making a tutorial out of it would be a ton of work. In most cases no one cares how I made my mods or why. I have long descriptions on my mod pages explaining some of the behind the scenes and no one cares 99% of the time already. I feel as long as core tutorials exist out there on stuff like how to edit the worldspace, make a weapon, armor, etc etc that should cover a lot of the core stuff and from there you can create your own mods, the one thing that cannot be learned is creativity though, each modder has to know what their design philosophy is and how to make something interesting.