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Rigging Brand New Armours in Outfit Studio – HELP


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I'm currently creating a brand new armour set, the kind that comes as separate arm, torso and leg pieces.



I've modelled the armour and created the textures though I have yet to set up any materials for the .Nifs or convert the textures to .DDS.



Here is what the armour is supposed to look like.



http://i.imgur.com/S43QkE4.jpg



The problem that I'm having now is rigging the armour for use in game using outfit studio. I've done some very, very basic rigging in outfit studio before (I made a simple park ranger hat.) but when I attempted to use the same techniques I had before something obviously went wrong.



This is how my attempt at rigging the Torso piece of the armour turned out.



http://i.imgur.com/8n3pGyP.jpg



I assumed that weight painting the chest section to bones like “Chest” and the groin plate to “Pelvis Skin” that it'd at least be somewhere close to the body. I've also attempted cloning the bone influences from a vanilla armour but that ends up with it kinda melting into the player character.



Anyway, I'm a total noob at this so any help would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks.


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Wish I could be more helpful, but I wanted to say that this armor looks fantastic.

When I made outfits using outfit studio I just copied bone weights from the body. It may be possible to import, say, the leather body armor piece and copy the weights from that.

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I'm currently creating a brand new armour set, the kind that comes as separate arm, torso and leg pieces.

 

I've modelled the armour and created the textures though I have yet to set up any materials for the .Nifs or convert the textures to .DDS.

 

The problem that I'm having now is rigging the armour for use in game using outfit studio. I've done some very, very basic rigging in outfit studio before (I made a simple park ranger hat.) but when I attempted to use the same techniques I had before something obviously went wrong.

 

I assumed that weight painting the chest section to bones like “Chest” and the groin plate to “Pelvis Skin” that it'd at least be somewhere close to the body. I've also attempted cloning the bone influences from a vanilla armour but that ends up with it kinda melting into the player character.

 

Anyway, I'm a total noob at this so any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

 

 

Well, that looks...interesting. I have no idea what happened to your weights for the torso being so deformed. Could have been an invalid skeleton reference. Or who knows what else. Without seeing the screwed up nif it's really hard to say.

 

Regarding weighting the parts. I'll say this for anyone else who might be reading. Who knows you might find it useful too. Using Outfit Studio there's really only two options. One is hand paint (described below), or attempt to have it auto paint by proximity relation (Outfit Studio's copy weights function). When auto painting be aware that it will flex just like the reference object would. So if your reference is the base body and you're copying weights to a metal armor, it will flex and stretch just as the body would. If you want it to be rigid you'll probably have to hand paint. It will also try to weight to *any* bone that is within proximity to the vertex it's painting. This can have undesired effects. For example if you have a thigh armor you might end up with weight values for the wrist or lower arm area. Or upper arm weights on a torso armor. You would typically need to clean those up by hand. The alternative is to manually select which bones to weight against and only have it copy weights for proximity to those bones (copy selected weights option).

 

To hand paint:

  • Open outfit studio
  • Load the body reference (not 100% necessary but makes things way easier)
  • Load your model you want to paint
  • Click and select the shape you want to paint in the shape selection window.
  • Above that click the bones tab.
  • Select the bone you want the piece to be affected by. If you skipped loading your body reference you probably won't have any bones. In which case right click and select to add. Then pick them. For example the torso piece would probably use Chest_Skin, Chest_Upper_Skin, and Chest_Rear_Skin if you want to support the weight slider, or just Chest if not.
  • At this point you should have a cursor that lets you paint weight value. You can change the brush settings by expanding the settings on the top left of the render window (click the arrow). A dark blue color is a "light" weight. A deep red is a "heavy" weight.
  • Paint it as desired. Just left click and drag like you would in any painting application. It will likely take some practice and experimentation to get the results you want.

 

Note it only applies value change when crossing a vertex. Turning on wire frame will make it easier to follow.

 

You can see examples of how other armors are painted by loading them, then selecting the shape and scrolling through the bones. It will highlight the weights for the selected bone as you scroll through. If you have a reference shape selected it will show the weights on both the reference and the selected shape (if different) at the same time.

 

Picking the bare nude body and scrolling the bones will give you a pretty good idea of where the different bones are visually. Especially when you get to the legs and arms where the distance from the bone root is closer to the skin surface.

Edited by BigAndFlabby
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Looks like a bone or node got flipped, to me.
Maybe open in Nifskope and compare orientation to a vanilla piece.
Also, and I don't remember for sure, but I believe Full Precision (double click object) has to be ticked in Outfit Studio per piece...but I don't even remember what exactly that does, heh.
Yea Full Precision has to be set per shape. I don't recall if it had to be set on *all* shapes or not though. I had problems getting it to work properly when I was working on a mesh port. So I ended up just remodeling it and fudging things with a normal map.
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