Pineappletree

Random trick I learned when working for a CGI studio: Never spread trees and bushes evenly across the the landscape. Arrange them in "clumps" which is both more realistic and more interesting to look at. Same goes for human made environments. Don't just place random props in every open area but build specific points of interest for the eye to catch on to. Tell the story of the place. The neat shop owner will probably try to keep the entrance of his shop clean and stack old crates and barrels in the backyard. The old pirate running a seedy bar in a bad part of town on the other hand might just throw that stuff out the front door. Give the player's mind material to come up with its own interpretations and ideas. What's the meaning of a pile of discarded furniture lying in front of a house? Of a window sill full of neatly arranged flowers? Of business papers and lettes littering a back alley? Of a hole in a thick hedge? Gather "fuel" for this design work through active observation. Whether you're watching movies, playing games, brwosing through pictures on the interweb or driving around your hometown, make it a point to notice how things are arranged and what they tell you about the location and its inhabitants Even a simple dirt road that curves around the natural topography of the land tells of a vastly different place than a broad, straight as the arrow cobblestone road that just cuts through hills and bridges valleys...

All playable species in Skyrim have separate meshes for head, hands, feet and body. So what you have to do is to get all of them into the same scene in your 3D painting program. How you do that exactly depends on the capabilities of your painter of choice. I don't know if there are any NIF import plugins for 3D painters, personally I have never seen one. So your best bet is probably to use a 3D package like 3dsMax or Blender to import all meshes into a single scene (and if the importer does a proper job they'll be correctly aligned and scaled automatically), then export the meshes into a single file your 3D painter can read (OBJ is usually a safe bet). While you do this, you have to make sure the UV information of the meshes stays intact and gets exported with them! Once you have the meshes in your 3D painter you'll have to tell it which textures to use for which mesh. How you do that exactly once again depends on the program. It might not be able to work with DDS textures for example. Or it might not be able to work on several types of textures (diffuse, specular, normal / bump, etc.) at the same time. In any case, make sure you only work on copies of the textures you want to use as a base, not on the originals in your Skyrim folder. So if anything doesn't work as planned, the textures you have in your game stay intact and can easily be copied back into the painter. With the proper textures loaded you should then have complete body model ready for painting.

Ooooooh... Well... I feared you might say that. Because there are differences between the Skyrim LE and SE file formats and, frankly, I have little idea about the SE side of things. From what I do understand (after taking a quick look at some SE armor meshes) you're fine with not having seperate NiTriShapeData in your BiTriShapes in this case. But you still need a NiSkinInstance or BSDismemberSkinInstance to bind your mesh to the correct bones (there's also a "Skinned" flag missing from the NiTriShape / VertexDesc node of the barrel you posted). Which still means there's a problem with your exports from Outfit Studio. Which in turn means I'm once more unsure how to help you as I do all my skinning in 3dsMax and have no expirience with this part of Outfit Studio. Maybe the Outfit Studio documentation can help you find the issue? Maybe Outfit Studio simply has problems with converting static meshes? Maybe someone else here has an idea? €dit And taking another quick look at Outfit Studio, there's a "Skinned" flag in the Geometry tab of the Shape Properties of any mesh. Did you set that? One has to assume weight data won't be exported if this is not checked.

Did you check your Outfit Studio's settings (File > Settings)? Is your "target game" set to Skyrim?

Well, looks like your barrel is missing all kinds of important data, not just weighting information. An armor NiTriShape needs at least three sets of data to function correctly: NiTriShapeData which contains information about the actual mesh needed by the engine. Even static objects need to have this. NiSkinInstance or NiDismemberSkinInstance which contain the weight data binding the mesh to the character's bones. BSLightingShaderProperty which contains material properties and shader information for the engine. Example You barrel is missing the first two of these data sets which TBH makes it surprising you got the barrel to show up in the game at all. So what you need to do now is to retrace your steps to find out where you lost the NiTriShapeData of the barrel. Here's a comparison of your barrel's NiTriShape (left) and that of the original barrel from Skyrim: As you can see the two are quite different which makes me suspect you exported the barrel into a non-Skyrim NIF format at some point (there are lots of different ways to organize a NIF internally, depending on the 3d engine the NIF is supposed to be used by). You've got to correct that. Once the NiTriiShapeData is restored you then need to find a way to generate correct skin (weight) data (as Hanaisse said earlier by using either the Caliente Body Slide Outfit Studio or a "proper" 3d package like Blender or 3dsMax). Just copying the Spine2 node / bone to the NIF is not enough for this. It just tells the game engine there's a bone you want to work with but not what you actually want to do with it. Which would be why your barrel is just following your character's root but not the actual spine bone at the moment.

Hmm, to me that still sounds like the barrel is either skinned to a wrong bone or not skinned correctly (so it just follows the character root). To share the NIF you need to upload it at a external file sharing service and post the download link it gives you here. E.g. I always use this one for quick exchanges here on the forum. Simple and free.

In that case it would be helpful if you could further specify what you meant when you said the barrel rotates but "doesn't "sitck" to my back as a backpack should". Do you mean you want the barrel to not be rigid but distort to follow the spine of the character like a "soft" backpack (or piece of clothing) might do? And / or what Hanaiise said...

Short answer: The NPC Spine bone is the wrong one to skin a backpack to. Take a look at this picture of the female XP32 skeleton: You see that thin dark grey line with the X in the middle there? That's where the NPC Spine bone sits. It's basically part of the pelvis and when you bind your barrel to it the barrel will not move and rotate with the upper body. For a backpack, which is usually connected to a person's shoulders, try skinning the barrel to the uppermost spine bone NPC Spine2. (And only that bone, since a barrel is rigid and not supposed to bend and flex like a full spine made from multiple bones does.) If you also need the long answer, explaining what all this skeleton and bone and skinning business is about in the first place, just say the word.

NP And if you have problems with the NIF export from MAX, here are the export settings I used to get the mesh working. Maybe they'll be of help. (Keep in mind though, that I still use MAX 2014 and NifTools 3.8 for Skyrim, so the menu might look slightly different for you.)

So I had a quick look at the main armor in your files (EskTorso_X.nf). Your BSShaderLightingProperties all looked good, however the BSShaderTextureSets were all over the place with many texture links leading to nowehere. I examined the mesh in the NITriShapeData and found it was indeed lacking all tangent data (BS Vector Flag has to have the Has Tangents flag and a >Tangents node has to be present in the NITriShapeData), which is why your mesh didn't react correctly to light sources. You have to make sure you this data gets generated when exporting your meshes from 3dsMax.. (Also, we had another user with the same problem in the forum here recently and they reported setting the Consistency Flag to CT_MUTABLE (which you always should do for armor meshes anyway) was enough to fix the issue. However I was not able to reproduce this.) I proceeded with importing the EskTorso_1.nif into 3dsMax and found another issue in that all Polygons of all meshes were seperated from each other (which could be both an import (from W3) or export (to Skyrim) problem), which lead to an unecessarily high vertex count (and therefore performance impact in the game). By welding all vertecies with a very low falloff I was able to reduce their count from ~40000 to ~8000 and half the file size of the resulting NIF. Keeping your meshes as tidy as possible is important for both performance and workflow reasons. By exporting the mesh back into a NIF I was then able to restore the afromentioned tangent data and got the armor to work correctly in Skyrim. I also had a quick peek at the armor's specular map and everything I said above about it applies. I'm not sure what this map was used for in W3 but I doubt it was as a specular (certainly not of the "regular" type anyway). If there isn't a "proper" specular texture to be found in the W3 files for this armor, you'll have to do the work to convert the current one into a specular that will look good in Skyrim. Inverting and darkening it is a big step into the right direction but still leaves many issues with parts being too shiny or not shiny enough. I uploaded the files I worked on here so you can have a look at them, but keep in mind theses are for reference only, not finished products. (You'll find I also combined all armor parts into a single mesh, which isn't strictily necessary. Just something I did to speed up the workflow.) Hope this helps, GLHF

Thanks for the screens. From what I can see you have all kinds of problems to deal with here. For one, what you have in your normal map's alpha is definetely not a correct specular map that will give you good results in Skyrim. It is much too bright overall (which, technically, you could correct with the specular multiplier in the NIF), but much more importantly it assigns bogus values to the various parts of the armor. E.g. it assigns what should be dull leather the same amount of shinyness as the metal belt buckles. I'm not familiar with W3's engine and what this map in the normal's alpha is used for. But a regular specular map you could just use in Skyrim it is certainly not. And that last screenshot tells me your NIFs have some major issues as well. Could be missing tangent data or flipped polygon normals. As I said, it's very difficult to from afar. In both cases I highly recommend you take a look at the NIFs and textures of other (properly working) Skyirm armors and check your own files against them. It's important that you get a feel for what a Skyrim specular map should look like (and how it works) and that the many flags inside your NIFs are set correctly. Also, if you need further help you could make your armor NIFs available for download somewhere and maybe I'll find the time to take a look at them over the weekend. €dit Never mind my last sentence. I'll take a look at the files and report back when possible.

There are a lot of differences in how different 3d (game) engines intrepret textures, so if you really did just convert W3's textures for Skyrim without any further modifications it's quiite likely that's the (or at least one) source of your problems. That you don't observe any reflections in the armor is certainly an indicator for this. So here's a quick overview of what information goes into which texture channels for armors in Skyrim, You always need a diffuse and a normal map, other maps are optional. Diffuse (no suffix) R, G, B channels: Color information Alpha channel: transparency information, black is opaque, white is fully transparent (needs further setup in the NIF to work; if you don't need transparency, save the texture without alpha channel) Normal (suffix "_n") R, G: normal information B: not used, remains plain white Alpha: specular information, black is not reflective at all, white is fully reflective (for simple highlight reflections, further adjustments can be made in the NIF) Environment mask (suffix "_em"): R, G, B: reflection information, monochrome (all three channels contain the same information), black is no reflection, white is full reflection (for highly reflective surfaces mirroring their environment; environment to be reflected comes from another texture; "environment map" shader needs to be set up in the NIF for this to work) No alpha Environment map / cube map (suffix "_e"): R, G, B: color information of the enviroment to be reflected (asymmetrical texture consisting of six square "inside views", needs to be saved as cube map DDS to work) No alpha If your textures are correctly set up and you still experience issues the problem is in your meshes / NIFs. If you need further help in troubleshooting those, please give further information about your export process and / or access to the files, as a diagonse from afar is always difficult.

NP. And if file size is an issue remember: A half resolution 8:8:8:8 has the same file size as a full res DXT but, in the case of normal maps, usually produces better quality anyway.

Problem with compressed normal (mip-) maps, perhaps? Ever tried whether the issue persists when using 8:8:8:8 normals instead?

I'm still on max 2014 / nif tools 3.8 for Skyrim but maybe this'll help anyway: