Creating Harvestable Plant Mesh

[chaospearl]

I'm trying to figure out how to make a vanilla plant into a harvestable plant. After some aggravation I've managed to figure out that the difference is in the nif file being used. You can change everything else and it'll still be harvestable, but the nif files of regular plants are somehow different from the nif files of harvestables and for the life of me I can't tell why. I'm not experienced enough in Nifskope. Anyone better than I am who could tell me what I have to do to fiddlehead fern mesh (meshes\landscape\plants\treeswordferncluter06) to make it harvestable?

[AnkhAscendant]

I tried to do this before (with kelp) and gave up in discouragement. Near as I could figure there's nothing to 'grab'... say when you're harvesting juniper you can't get it unless the crosshairs are actually on the berries, not the tree (which is what make juniper so annoying to harvest)... then when hte berries are gone you're left with the un-activateable static bush.

 

Which I'm sure isn't actually very useful information. I'm going to watch this topic and hope that you get an answer I can use as well.

[chaospearl]

I was working with the fiddlehead ferns, which don't have specific parts. The whole mesh is just one single node. But there's something different about a mesh that is harvestable vs one that isn't. If you look at them side by side in NifSkope, the harvestable one has a bunch of extra stuff in there and I don't know enough about working with meshes to have any idea what it is or how to recreate it.

 

Copy-paste doesn't work; I can copy the whole node from a harvestable plant mesh into the fiddlehead mesh file, but that brings the shape of the plant along with it, and I can't copy over just the node's properties and attach them to a node with the fiddlehead shape. If that makes sense. People who know how to work with meshes are probably laughing pretty hard right now. I know just enough about NifSkope to be frustrated with what I don't know, and to sound like an idiot.

 

I've been arguing with this for literally four or five hours now and I just give up. If I can't get an answer I'm going to simply commit mass floracide and replace every single fiddlehead in the game with a different harvestable mesh. Someone was kind enough to create a modder resource full of harvestable plants. I'll pick one of those. I'm just frustrated because the whole reason I wanted the fiddleheads was for a cooking\food mod, and most of the plants in the resource file aren't food-related.

 

Also, if I knew how to make an existing mesh into a harvestable, I'd go through and add a lot more after the fiddleheads. There are a bunch of plants in Skyrim that I always pass by and try to harvest because they look like a harvestable plant -- detailed, colorful, kinda stand out from the background -- but they're not.

 

I have nothing but free time, and I don't mind tedium, I just don't have the knowledge to do this.

[steve40]

There's a mod on Skyrim Nexus iirc that turns trees into harvestable apple trees. Maybe you should check it out.

Iirc, trees are already made with a flora form, but simply haven't had any ingredients added to the them (a simple drop-list). It should be that easy. Just change the plant to a Flora form if it isn't already.

 

@chaospearl: have you tried simply "pasting over" the NiTriShapeData block from the fiddlehead onto the same block on a harvestable plant?

[chaospearl]

Unfortunately it's definitely not that easy. Believe me, I spent close to 13 hours on this yesterday. Adding an ingredient to the existing flora form does nothing. If the object doesn't use a harvestable mesh, the plant just sits there and has no activator. Even duplicating an existing herb, like a potato plant, and just changing the mesh to the fiddlehead mesh, still doesn't work.

 

I posted this over at the Bethesda forums also, and an extremely nice and knowledgeable person walked me through copying the fiddlehead node data over to a harvestable mesh with a similar shape. That didn't work either.

 

Here is that other thread at Bethsoft, so you can see what we've tried to do so far and what didn't work.

 

There is something about the mesh of a harvestable plant that makes it work differently and damned if I can figure out what it is. Specifically, it's something about the NiTriShape block. If you replace that block on a harvestable mesh with a different NiTriShape, it stops functioning.

[chaospearl]

One more thing. Just because I know someone is going to suggest it, whatever it is about the harvestable plant mesh has nothing to do with the file name of the mesh or the name of the flora object. That's the first thing that occured to me when I couldn't find any other differences. Maybe the filenames of the harvestable plants are somehow hard-coded in. Nope.

 

Quote from my other thread:

If you take a vanilla harvestable plant mesh, say the canisroot01.nif, and rename it to testplant.nif, it still works. You can change its object ID, or create a new object entirely using that testplant.nif, and it works. You can change the ingredient it gives you when harvested, you can change the name of the plant to be This Is A Test Plant, and it still works.

 

What you CAN'T do is use a different mesh. Whenever you use a nonharvestable plant mesh, it simply shows up in game as a static object and sits there, not showing the activator or the Harvest "Plant Name" message on mouseover.

[nonoodles]

No, what steve40 suggested is correct. You can copy the fern's TriShape branch into a harvestable plant's nif and turn it into a harvestable plant that way:

 

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

 

Open an appropriate harvestable plant nif, e.g, 'floraspikygrass01' and c/p the fern's BSLODTriShape over. Delete the spikygrass branch, save.Start your CK, duplicate FloraSpikyGrass or whatever it's called, change its nif to your new model. Test it by placing it somewhere in the world. It's harvestable. And it's about 10 minutes' work, thankfully. : D

 

The only remaining problem is that you need a corresponding inventory model for what you harvest from the fern. If you're comfortable with 3d software, you can just delete parts of the fern mesh and go through the whole nifskope/CK process again. Otherwise you could reskin an existing ingredient texture like 'grass pod'.

 

Guess it would be the same method for turning kelp into a harvestable plant.

Edited October 18, 2012 by nonoodles

[chaospearl]

My original problem with the copy-paste method was that it wouldn't let me copy the LODTriShape for some reason. When I finally figured out how to get the stupid thing into another harvestable mesh, the problem then turned out to be that the activatable area was so tiny I missed it the first couple of times, and never realized the method DID work because I kept sweeping my cursor over the plant and not finding the right spot where the harvest option shows up.

 

But in your picture it looks like the whole plant is harvestable area. I'll go try it exactly the way you did and see if I can make it work.

[chaospearl]

That sound you hear is me banging my head against a wall.

 

I can't get the texture to show up on the new mesh now. What the hell am I doing wrong? The nif is in Data\Meshes\Plants\Fern.nif and the textures are Data\Textures\Plants\swordfern.dds and Data\Textures\Plants\swordfern_n.dds. The texture shows up fine in NifSkope. But when I add the object using that nif into a cell, it shows up with a red exclamation point.

 

Edit: Okay, progress is being made. I now have an invisible harvestable fern in my game. (laughing)

 

In the CK's Render window showing the cell, the red-blue-green outline box surrounding the plant is empty. No red exclamation point anymore, just empty. When I go into the game itself, the plant is there, but it's invisible. I know it's there because when I move my cursor crosshair over the place where I put the plant, I can see the Harvest Fiddlehead mesage. I can even click and harvest it. But I can't see the plant at all, it's invisible!

 

Yes, I am an idiot, thank you. I'm trying my best here, I just... apparently am stupid. Could someone explain to me how to de-invisible my fern? I'll keep trying in the meantime. I'm not normally this dense.

 

Edit 2: Arghhh. Someone kindly sent me the nif file that she created using the same method I did (that ended in an invisible plant). She said that mesh worked for her. Well, I loaded it into the CK -- and it's still invisible. Apparently this is a texture issue somehow, and not mesh-related. I'm still harvesting invisible plants. :(

[chaospearl]

All right. A fresh pot of coffee does wonders.

 

I've gotten to the point of having a visible harvestable fiddlehead plant in the game. Hallelujah. Step One of the master plan is complete.

 

I'm going to attempt to see if I can change the mesh from the original fern plant to the new one, and therefore in one fell swoop make every fiddlehead in the game harvestable. I have a feeling that isn't going to work and I'll need to spend a large part of tomorrow replacing approximately 423 plants one at a time, but at least that's a reachable goal. I assumed from the start that's what I'd have to do.

 

What I'm worried about is the fact that the activatable area of the mesh is very, very small, and located down at the bottom of the plant. If you don't get your crosshair right over that spot, you can't harvest it. From what I've seen of the vanilla static plants in-game that I want to replace, a lot of them are positioned partially buried so that half the stalk is underground and the plants aren't nearly as tall. That's going to be an issue because if I bury my plants the same way, the harvestable spot will be under the ground, but if I don't bury them, there will be literally hundreds of places where there's supposed to be a short plant and I've replaced it with a tall one, so who knows how weird that will look.

 

Do you know anything about what property in a mesh is the one that determines where and how large the activatable area is? Is that possible to tamper with?

 

I really appreciate everyone's help with this, if I haven't said so. Steve and Nonoodles and most especially Hanaisse and Tamira on the Bethsoft forums for walking me through my Nifskope nightmares. If I ever get this mod into releaseable shape, all your names are going in as contribtors. I couldn't have gotten this far on my own.