Septfox

I've read around a bit and found various ways to import and export meshes from 3ds, but generally it seems to involve swiping the skin from the vanilla version of the mesh being worked on and various other corrections after export, via Nifskope. Since I not only want to modify the existing skinning, but also add bones if possible, it doesn't seem like this sort of workflow would work. So, is it currently possible to import the face and facial skeleton, modify them, and export them properly in one fell swoop? If so, which version of Max and the Nif import/export plugin do I need? Despite apparently importing fine, the unofficial 3.8.0 plugin doesn't appear to export correctly.

Ugh, I haven't done scripting since Oblivion...and I understand that whatever Oblivion used and Papyrus have various differences. Guess this is as good a reason as any to pick Papyrus up. Even if the function doesn't work, it wouldn't hurt to bring myself up to speed anyway. Thanks for bringing it up.

First thing I did. I derived what I was doing from how CBBE went about "patching" it, after all (since CBBE textures don't have a provision for scalp/headback). This all went on via PMs, putting up in the thread for future generations: TL;DR assigned headparts are stored in a small dictionary in the NPC's data, including the Player's modified NPC that's stored in the savegame, and LooksMenu presets also store the headpart dictionary. I was expecting everything to be pulled from the race as Skyrim does it. So to change the headback, you have to create a plugin with the new headback, then assign it by editing a saved preset (easiest way would be to use a LooksMenu preset since they're plaintext, NPC presets have to be poked with FO4Edit). Thank you to VlitS for showing me what needs to be done with the currently available tools.

No go, in my case. Obviously I've skipped a step somewhere, but I'm not sure where. I even went and messed with the material path on the headback and gave it a unique, modified file, since I had some problems with a piece of armor until I realized how things deviated from Skyrim's way of doing it. I'd imagine that what's set in the CK overrides it anyway (or should), but eh, worth a try. The plugin (older version without any changes to humanrace, presets and no extra formlist), textures and meshes are uploading, I'll PM you a link in uhhh...16 minutes. Yay for DSL and substandard upstream speeds \o/

Trying to make a mod to separate the player art assets from everything else. There're a few out there already that partially accomplish this, but I want to go all the way; including head textures. Unfortunately, I've hit a brick wall when it comes to the back of the head. Regardless of what's set in the player race or player NPC, the game keeps pulling the vanilla headback. The only way I've found to force it to use what's actually set is to check "Override Head Parts List"...which does what it says, overrides all the headparts with what's set in the Race/Face Data list. This would be fine if not for the nasty side-effect of forcing the hair model to stay on the one set in the parts list, too. I doubt anyone wants to use the Default Generic Mom hairstyle forever...I know I don't. To be clear, I have: * Made a unique copy of the vanilla headback and textureset for it (extension of how CBBE goes about it) * Set it in the custom playerrace's Race/Face Data And tried: * Creating a different Formlist for the player race and assigning assets to it * Changing the base player NPC to the created player race and made sure the assets were assigned * Using the custom-skeleton anti-crashing method (assigned the new headback to HumanRace and having the player race use the vanilla one); same problem, HumanRace ignored what was set and pulled the vanilla one too So what stupid, obvious thing am I missing?

Hello~ I would like to request some full-length stockings for the UNPetite body, similar to Newmiller and Zlushka's stockings. Texture optional, I have one I can use already...I just can't seem to get the mesh side of things working. I'm much better at modifying than I am at creating anew :\ Er, that's all.

It's possible, in a roundabout way. To the best of my knowledge, skeletons are assigned on a race-by-race basis. Individual NPCs will use whatever skeleton that their parent race has assigned. What this means for you is, if you want your special NPC to sheathe his weapon on his back, then you'll need to create a custom race for him alone - or easier, modify the race that he is now and give it a unique ID, then make him that race - and assign that race a skeleton that's been modified to have its side sheathe node parented to one of the spine bones, just like the two-handed weapon node is. You can probably get such a skeleton out of one of the numerous back-weapon mods floating around. While you're at it, you'll want to reassign the two-handed sheathe/unsheathe animations to one-handed, so when he pulls his weapon out or puts it away it looks right. You can also do what I used to do in Oblivion; use a script that monitors whether the NPC has his weapon out or not. When he does, switch to a one-handed weapon nif. When he has it sheathed, switch to a two-handed weapon nif. This doesn't work very well for weapons that actually do have sheathes though, and the sheathe/unsheathe animations won't look right without some creative scripting for the timing. There might be an easier way, but if there is I don't know of it...then again, I'm not experienced at all yet when it comes to mucking around in the CK.

'lo guys. Horses are decent for getting around and all, but the vanilla riding animations are decidedly un-ladylike. As such, I would like to put in a request for animations of the character riding sidesaddle. ... So uh, I'll just leave this here I guess. *wanders out*

Hey guys. Back in my Oblivion days, I found that I rather liked one of the coolsims hairstyles. I tweaked, prodded and experimented until it was perfect for my character. Ended up using it until I stopped playing a while back. Fast forward to the year 200x. I find that another of the coolsims styles is about right for my character, so I load it up in 3ds to add my personal touches. Everything goes fine; I import it, make my changes, export to a nif, and copy the LightingShaderProperty and AlphaProperty blocks from the old nif so all the settings are right, check normals to make sure they are in fact normal, make sure tangents are updated, etc etc. The game loads fine, no unusual loading time, no crash. But my hair...well. Before: After import/export: (just to clarify: the hair actually uses two nifs, the outer, nicely-transparent hair you see the most of, and the inner, mostly-opaque hair that provides a backdrop since Skyrim's transparency handling is kind of bad. the problem here is some spots in the outer nif don't seem to be lighting the same as the rest) I don't get what I've done wrong. I didn't add or remove any vertices, only moved some, but it still seems like some kind of weird sorting error. 3ds import/export settings: Any ideas? Do I have something set wrong, or am doing something stupid here?

Yea, 90% sure that it's a lighting quirk, probably having to do with self-shadows judging by where the lines generally appear, though some have suggested that it's the fault of improperly-made body/face texture replacers. Strangely, I haven't seen it happen at all while running ENB, so it might be that it runs some sort of fix. If the lines bother you that much, and you have some graphics power to spare, perhaps you could try giving ENB a spin? Even the basic configuration that it comes with might be adequate.

I can see all sorts of things underwater in a swimming pool, if you can't then you probably need to clean yours :/ If you're having the problem where your underwater view is completely opaque and you can literally see nothing, I used to have this problem, but I don't remember exactly what I changed that fixed it. Probably turning Dof off (set bDoDepthOfField in SkyrimPrefs.ini to 0), since DoF is part of what causes the underwater effect. Confirmed in the mod below's description :v Fortunately, there's a mod available that replaces the apparently buggy vanilla underwater effect and doesn't require you to muck about with settings: Green Water Fix.

Welcome to the er, forum section. Have some punch. ShadowsOnGrass causes grass clumps to be tossed through shadow calculations along with the rest of most opaque objects. Trees, characters, buildings etc. cast shadows on them. Basically, anything that blocks light from the sun, causing a shadow to cast, will cast a shadow on grass. Anything that adds more shadow calculations to the game will hurt performance to a varying degree, particularly on a low- or mid-end card. Grass shadowing in theory is a rather simple type of shadowing though, so it shouldn't hurt the framerate on adequate hardware much, if at all. Adding/modifying the line does have an effect: it needs to be under the [Display] section, and probably in both files. Setting it to 0 causes grass to be ignored when it comes time for the engine to recalculate shadows. Note that changing it and using "refreshini" in the console to reload configuration won't work, it needs a full game restart to take effect. Also, ENB's SSAO is a completely different creature, so it ignores any shadow settings while it's on. What I'd do it find a grassy area with trees (but not too many, you want the sunlight to make you some shadow borders), get a good viewpoint, save your game, reload the game to reset the view to "neutral", record your framerate, exit the game, turn grass shadows off, reload your game, check framerate again. If it's gone up by a significant amount, congratulations, your video card hates grass shadowing. Ah, that brings back fond memories of my Radeon x1600...it found any sort of shadowing in Oblivion repulsive and dropped frames like mad when forced to do it. Though certainly not to the degree my Mobility 9600 did. *sigh* Those were the days... You can try adding/modifying bGrassPointLighting and b30GrassVS under [Grass] in Skyrim.ini, see if those have an effect on your lighting issue. Turning them on if they aren't already will almost surely affect your framerate adversely, but it doesn't hurt to try. s'about the limits to what I think I know, as far as grass goes. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will come in and educate us both.

Do you, by chance, have an Ati video card and are using the 12.7 beta drivers? They're usually the cause of the bars and compass freaking out. The common solution is to change iShadowMapResolution in SkyrimPrefs.ini to something else if it is set to 4096, i.e. halve (2048) or double (8192) it. Preferably half unless you have a high-end card. You can try setting other numbers as well (like say...3072), but in my experience this'll cause odd things to happen. On the other hand, the drivers only address 7-series cards, and apparently have a positive effect on framerates for 6-series cards as well. If you have something older, then there's absolutely no downside to downgrading to 12.6 until 12.7 reaches maturity/official release, and you might even see a minor performance boost.

Running scripts is almost entirely a CPU matter and, yes, if your CPU is too slow for the game the problem that it might be getting caught processing too many other things before getting to your script. To offer any advice on upgrading or optimizing, we'd have to know what you're running right now. CPU, RAM amount, video card model would be all be useful.

Define "problem". If it's the shadowing around the architecture you're talking about, that's SSAO shadows. Try setting FadeFogRangeDay= in enbseries.ini to a lower value. Alternatively, shutting SSAO off completely would remove the problem as well.

From what I've read, you have the lowest-end of low-end video cards; barely better than integrated video. Your processor is also a touch on the old and slow side, though it's probably adequate. You do have plenty of RAM for the moment. I'm not sure why you would think that your computer "should" be able to play higher settings; you should probably consider yourself lucky that it can run Skyrim at all considering how weak your video hardware is. Enjoy it as you can for now, try to fit upgrading components into your budget over the next several months~

Mm, you're right, I shouldn't have assumed that what was true for me was true for others as well. I have an old 5870, and I lose 2-3fps with the 12.7 drivers, so they've obviously gone and messed something up despite not even addressing my series of cards...but if the net effect for cards they DID tweak for is +6-8fps, well then, by all means use them. Not being able to use mid-range (4096) shadows resolution would be annoying to me, but I suppose for those who already use higher or lower and a 7-series card, there's really no downside. Plus the bug doesn't seem to be affected everyone, so...eh.

I'm going to guess that you both have an ATI video card and have recently upgraded to the 12.7 beta drivers. Two solutions: Downgrade to 12.6 drivers and never worry about it again. or... Change iShadowMapResolution in SkyrimPrefs.ini from 4096 to something higher or lower, since having it that resolution is what causes the bug to appear. Likely there's other minor bugs floating around as well though, they're beta drivers after all. Downgrading to 12.6 is preferable, 12.7 doesn't perform as well at this point anyway.

Have any LOD tweaks for the world map set up? Those can cause infinite loading.

If HT is disabled, then you'll be running a dual-core instead of a dual-core with two virtual cores. There's no need to make any modifications in that case. A "quad-core" HT processor, if I'm not mistaken, is laid out like so: Core 0 (physical core) | Core 1 (virtual thread running on core 0) | Core 2 (physical core) | Core 3 (virtual thread running on core 2) AMD FX processors also have a version of HT, but it's more on the hardware side; there's four/eight actual cores, but they share certain resources like cache. Anyway, the problem normally is that the game loads the first two logical cores, which in an HT-enabled CPU are physical core 0 and HT core 1; essentially, 90% of the game's processing on one physical core. Disable HT, and it'll use physical core 0 and physical core 1 because the virtual "cores" are disabled and cores 1/3 become logical cores 0/1. The CPU will also run cooler, consume less power, and probably actually run better. More overclocking room too because of the reduced heat, if you're into that sort of thing. FX processors are different in that they have pairs of cores called "modules" which share resources. The game automatically loads the first two logical cores, in this case a single module, leading to the same performance issues. On Intel processors you can simply switch off HT; on AMD FX processors, you need to disable every other core, e.g. 1/3/5/7, so you only have one core using a given set of resources. Benefits are largely the same; reduced heat, reduced power, no resource sharing means the individual cores don't fight over resources. TL;DR you don't need to change anything if you turn HT off, the game will run better without any tweaks.

Ehh, probably not. If I understand right, Skyrim's updates (and Oblivion's to a point) have most of their files in a cumulatively-updated master called Update.esm, and next to no loose files aside from the updated binaries in the root Skyrim folder. This is why it's important, particularly in Skyrim, to have mods that match or exceed your installed patch version; the patch itself doesn't overwrite anything, so you can potentially have updated files loading from Update.esm, then old files in the Data folders overriding them and causing problems. So in summary: no, you don't need to uninstall mods before updating, but if you have issues make sure your mods are for the latest patch, and make sure NMM actually uninstall's a mod's files if you need it to.

I do see his point. Pretty sure the 1.6 files are something like 250mb at the absolute max, and I find it hard to believe that the base game files were damaged badly enough to warrant redownloading EVERYTHING. Personally, I've never liked Steam. It makes gaming more accessible to people who can barely turn their computers on and can't be bothered to learn anything about basic operations; essentially, Steam is to PC gaming as Macs are to consumer computing. Meanwhile, power users have various problems trying to modify the games that they've bought because of Steam's various quirks, and don't even have the option of avoiding Steam altogether because more and more companies have jumped on the bandwagon, only offering their games on/through Steam or a generally-unmoddable console. And of course, occasionally something utterly ridiculous like this happens. Since Skyrim is Steam-bound, its updates are as well. Back in the day, you could download patches from Bethesda's website; no longer, you're either forced to use Steam or download a torrent, the latter of which the legality is questionable at best. Steam has brought some good things to the internet, don't get me wrong; the Humble Bundles are distributed through Steam I believe, and they've gotten some great little indie games out that would otherwise never see the light of day. But being unable to buy and update games without the idiotic socialnetworkingMSNgamedownloader installed and running in the background...it's just not worth it. Users should have options when it comes to installing and keeping their games updated. /end rant

I'm using 12.6, and just tried forcing AA...no luck. But then, it seems like a rare thing when I have CCC's forcing actually work. AF can be turned on in the launcher options, or added manually to SkyrimPrefs.ini as iMaxAnisotropy= Have you tried SMAA, by chance? It looks pretty darn good in Skyrim; it doesn't blur everything like FXAA, and doesn't hit performance near as hard as normal AA.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen this problem, I could easily afford...a cappuccino from Casey's. Or two. Hmm. Really want a cappuccino now. Check \Data\Meshes\actors\character\behaviors\ for a file called "0_master.hkx". If it's there, delete it. Check your load order in NMM. Make sure Update.esm is as far down in the list as it can go (which won't be far, since it's a master). Edit:

Yep, they work fine. I updated to 12.7 out of curiosity and ended up switching back to 12.6 almost immediately...I didn't mind turning my shadow resolution down, but the 12.7 drivers not only ran 2-3fps worse, they also ended up crashing my game every ten minutes or so :\ Pretty sure they're only to improve Crossfire compatibility anyway, so unless you have two cards, you lose absolutely nothing by going back to 12.6. Edit: woo, late reply. Glad to hear they're working!