[LE] Quick question about making 3D models

[Siegtorias]

Hi. I've recently seen people talk about how Immersive Armors' meshes could be better. Though I've never had a problem with them it makes me wonder what would be done to fix this. For making my own meshes in Blender, is there a process I should take them through? Should I worry about this throughout the whole creation or is it something I can do afterwards?

[testiger2]

Well quite a lot of the armor mashups from the earlier days of skyrim modding use a workaround method instead of using 'proper' 3d editing.

The method works by throwing a number of armor meshes together in nifskope and then hiding the parts you don't want by using alpha channels in the textures.

This is the dirty way of doing it and has a few major drawbacks.

 

- Because the geometry is not removed and just hidden by the alpha the game needs to process said geometry -> bigger performance hit

- Seperate Alpha channel > Seperate Texures > No compatiblity for retexture mods out of the box

- Shaders like blood effects etc. may conform to the hidden geometry and cause the effects to float in the air for example

 

Well the obvious path if you want to fix this is by importing the meshes into your 3d program of choice and then start chopping away the actual geometry.

In this special case i think Outfit Studio is your best tool for this.

It has a feature called 'Zap Sliders' (or something like it) that lets you paint a mask onto the mesh(es) and when you export your file, the geometry hidden by the mask will be completelöy removed. This is exactly what you need for this and should be the easier way versus using blender or 3ds max

[Siegtorias]

Outfit Studio seems to be a game changer for modding. I guess this issue won't affect me making mods if I'm not doing a mashup. I was concerned there was something other than retopology for mesh making that I should be doing. Thanks!