[LE] Fish disappear when player swim close

[mycatlikestuna]

I'm trying to re-mesh the vanilla salmon in Skyrim, and although I've cleared some major mountains during these past few weeks, my first mod still has a few bumps to clear before it's ready to be released.

 

One of these bumps is simply that my fish disappear whenever I swim close to them, but the vanilla fish do not.

They seem to disappear during certain phases of their animation, or not even when I am close to them, but just whenever I look at them.

At first I thought that it could be a problem with the collision mesh, but the fxambwatersalmon file doesn't have a collision mesh that is assigned to the salmon trishape. It only has one that is assigned to the Box, or Editor Marker.

Since it can't be that, maybe my .nif file is missing an animation key somewhere?

But it isn't. I spent hours going through ever detail of my .nif file making sure that everything was exactly the same as the vanilla. Nothing is missing or wrong that I could see.

So maybe I missed a step whenever I changed the model in CK?

 

At this point I can only guess as to why my fish are blinking.

[mycatlikestuna]

UPDATE:

 

I've been playing with my fish to see if I can get it to work, but no luck.

 

Things that I've tried so far: Updating tangent space

Re-centered Radius in trishapedata

Applied face normals to main trishape

 

Things that I have noticed so far:

 

- When observing new salmon mesh from a distance (without first interacting with bounding box), the salmon swims normally with no side effects. No blinking or disappearing, and no random teleportation.

 

- These effects begin and persist only AFTER the player swims into the bounding box area.

 

- I do not believe it to be a problem related to animation.

 

- Once the player has triggered the effects, and has left the bounding box the salmon still continues to blink and disappear.

 

- I don't know if this is important or not, but the fish disappearing happens randomly (as in sometimes it does disappear and sometimes it doesn't), whenever the player/camera is centered on the fish. HOWEVER the fish *always* disappears whenever it is in the periphery of the camera/screen.

 

I don't know if bitangents are important at all, (or even what they do for that matter), but I noticed that the bitangents in the editor marker's nitridata are different from the ones in vanilla. I shall foolishly change them to see if it fixes my problem, though I bet it doesn't.

The bitangents are only different in the version of my mesh where I updated the tangent space............

- I changed the bitangents in this version of my .nif file, but it did not seem to effect anything.

Edited March 1, 2017 by mycatlikestuna

[Tamira]

Can you upload your new salmon nif, so we can have a look at it?

[mycatlikestuna]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sis18qripkkm4lt/Sa_osm_FX005.nif?dl=0

[Tamira]

Well, I managed to create a nif where the salmon is not blinking (heh, in German blinker means spoon-bait)

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/43nq16570krh8rt/NEW_fxambwatersalmon01a.nif?dl=0

 

Don't ask me what was causing the issue with yours.

I noticed that the salmon NiTriShape was present twice so I made a new nif using the vanilla fxambwatersalmon01a.nif and copied your salmon NiTriShape to the respective NiNode, then deleted the vanilla NiTriShapes.

As I first was using the older Nifskope 2.0.1 (I am more used to it), the copied NiTriShape showed up upside down so I had to make changes to the rotation until it worked. (Additionally I set "has vertex colors" to "no" as there are no vertex colors checked in the BSLightingShaderProperty.)

 

This was a bit confusing to me, because when I did this with the new Nifskope 2.0.6 the copied NiTriShape of the vanilla salmon did not show upside down ...

Well, at last the new nif worked when I tested it.

[mycatlikestuna]

Thank you so much!

I downloaded and tested the file that you sent and it worked perfectly.

I really do wish that you knew what fixed it.

 

As far as having 2 NiTriShapes present, that was something that happened whenever I inserted my mesh into the vanilla .nif file. Whenever I tried to delete the duplicate NiTriShape both sources would be deleted leaving me with no mesh. I thought that there was no way around it, and that my scene would just have to have two.

 

Again, thank you SO much for your assistance! :D

[mycatlikestuna]

So I thought that maybe the duplicate NiTriShape might have been what was causing my problems, but inserting my mesh into a new vanilla file without producing a duplicate still produced the same result. The fish still disappeared.

 

Eventually I would like to pin down what's causing this, because I'm planning on making more than one Salmon mesh. I could try and swap my meshes out with the fixed file that you gave me, but in the event that this doesn't work I will need a back up.

 

Would you mind walking me through what you did? I know you replaced the vanilla NiTriShape with my mesh, set the vertex colors to "no", and then flipped the rotation, but I'm just wondering if there is any small step I'm missing that could be the cause of my problems.

 

I suppose I could also try downloading an older version of Nifskope and see if that works......

[Tamira]

I cannot tell you more than I already did.

If you run into trouble again with another mesh we can try together to find out how to solve it.

[mycatlikestuna]

Well, thanks again for helping me. :happy:

[mycatlikestuna]

I took a little break from my project to focus on school, so I'm sorry if I haven't been as active lately.

Anywho, I'm currently on the second stage of my project, and it was having the same problem as the first stage.

My fish model would disappear whenever the player entered the bounding box.

I decided to follow Tamira's advice and use an older version of Nifskope, instead of the current one, and guess what??

It worked!! My model no longer has that silly glitch.

 

Overall, I just want to say thank you to Tamira, if you hadn't responded I would have never figured that out.