Pursinta

Hey. I've seen this issue brought up a few times but the solutions either do not seem to work or there weren't solutions listed in the topics. I am trying to get custom eyes on my vampire character without removing her out of the vampire race. I realize I could just replace the eye file to a mesh with a different .dds, but the thing is, I have multiple characters who are vampires and I want them to have different colored eyes (from each other) without swapping mods every time. It should be a pretty simple process, but I can't figure it out. I have tried going in game, setting my race to the original race (Nord), changing the eyes and setting her back to Nord-vampire, but it returns the glowing dawnguard eyes, which (while awesome) are not how I intend for my character to look. Ideas on how I can go about this? It should be easy but none of the mods seem to add options for vampire eyes that can be changed in showracemenu. I'm willing to make this myself, but if it's already out there, could someone kindly point me in the right direction? =) On a side note, I think it would be really cool if a script activated an alternative mesh when certain spells were being cast (like nightvision) to cause the character's eyes to glow, rather than to have them glowing all of the time. But that's probably fodder for the mod request forum. :)

I really enjoyed Dracula X, actually. Truthfully, Symphony of the Night is my favourite -- I loved the twist and the music, but Simon's Quest (despite being really hard to figure out without a guide) was my first, and so it also has a special place in my heart. In general I find these games really awesome! Lease favourite is Castlevania 64, because it didn't even feel like castlevania to me. You make me want to pick up some of these other castlevania games for the DS! It's been awhile (though I did play through SotN recently to show my boyfriend.)

I wasn't aware of a clothing replacer! I'll try to find that. I searched for it in the past and did not find it for some reason. I would honestly, really like to help in some way if it were possible. Unfortunately, my meshing skills aren't anything close to par right now. I have (for personal use, unless/until I were to get permissions?) found a few different sets of high heels, mainly those included in Apachii, which I have been trying to get on a Robert's Female to no avail. I have probably molded the feet into the shoe (leaving the ankle in place, so that it would connect correctly to the leg?) three or four different times in blender, but it doesn't work. I must be missing some very basic concept. I try using the skeleton that is attached to the foot, and the toes (despite being moulded) stick out strangely -- I use the skeleton attached to the shoes and the feet get hurled up together in the center between the shoes, completely disjointed from the body. Changing the shoe size also seems to have some negative consequences. Naturally I've been changing out skeletons, attaching everything to one, but that's where the problems start. I've also tried cutting and pasting in Nifskope, since blender sometimes likes to goof with data (probably my fault, actually) -- but nothing useful gets accomplished. All of the elements are there and look right in blender/Nifskope, but goof up in-game. The only thing i know to cause that is skeleton issues. I think the original shoes are for Exnem's or HGEC? If you have any advice on this, let me know!

Ah, nevermind. :) I managed to fix the issue by importing the body fresh through nifskope, and then reopening the .nif in blender to edit out the parts I didn't need. Once in the game, everything worked fine! Hopefully I will have the same luck when attempting the same thing in the future.

I'll attempt to be brief with this. I have some vanilla armor, previously collared up to the head, in which I am trying to remove the collar so that some of the body underneath is visible. So, I import a vanilla body into blender, remove the vanilla skeleton (which imports as Scene Root.00) and attach the body to the skeleton for the armor. When I load it in the game, the head and body are disconnected by a small space. It doesn't matter whether I load the upperbody from Robert's male or the vanilla version, the disconnection still occurs. I assume it may have something to do with the skeleton. It doesn't seem plausible to do the reverse -- attaching the armor to the standard upper body skeleton. Is there an easy way to adjust this? I try moving the shoulder/collarbone area in blender, but moving it up doesn't register, I suspect because of how it's attached to the bone.

Yeah, I saw your post and wondered if you might have had the same issue. Check for that portion in Nifskope though and see if it's appearing correctly under all of the meshes in the .nif file. If not, it's most likely the source of the trouble. Thus far, my only successes in blender are only with editing other already-working meshes. I can only work with the meshes I start with; anything I create from scratch doesn't work. But you seem to be working only with information already in the mesh, also. Could it be that the NISkinInstance data was lost for the cuirass when you added in the arms from RF? Possibly when you redirected them to the new skeleton? *shrug* I'd say to compare it side by side in nifskope with the vanilla armor to see what doesn't follow the pattern. The other thing (however tedious it is) would be to try to retrace your steps per what you did, maybe simply by making a new file and swapping in the RF arms real quick, to see if it suddenly works. Blender has been a bit unforgiving toward me at times and making a simple mistake and neglecting to undo it can sometimes goof up everything else subsequently for that mesh. Could just be my luck, though. lol

I've managed to get the collar working (I have some clipping I hope I'll be able to solve) ... I still haven't figured out the trick behind getting the NISkinInstance to appear with newly created meshes, though. This is my main concern, so if anyone knows what I need to do in blender to ensure this, let me know. Thanks :)

I love you. I've been using Robert's female (along with Robert's male, obviously,) and I'm grieved by the lack of support. As far as I know, there isn't even a clothing replacer. (Though in its defense, Robert's female is one of the most compatible mods with vanilla clothing as it is -- I could never get HGEC to work the same for me. Why is that?) Needless to say, I've been working with Robert's Female for personal modding and I don't intend to convert everything and switch to HGEC, even if that's where everything else is. But the lack of support compared to HGEC has been so frusterating! I first started using Robert's Female because I loved Slof's Khajiit Retexture and didn't want to give it up for anything. (Slof, you have done absolutely gorgeous work!) I'm still very much a modding noob and have released nothing that I've done for myself, either because it was done by private request or I just don't think it's quality work -- but if I ever do, this will certainly be the female mesh. Plus, it makes making matching male/female textures much more effortless. I couldn't imagine trying to create an HGEC version of every texture I mess with for vanilla or Robert's male. Eep. Not trying to diss HGEC here! A lot of hard work went into that, I recognise that. But I'm so happy to hear more support for my favourite female mesh, which is more realistic to me anyway. Thanks a million, guys (and gals) :D

I am trying to create eyes that glow in the dark (vanilla eye mesh, for reference.) Simple enough, when you make a minor adjustment and up the "gloss" on the eye meshes, then utilize a glow map (or none at all.) But I have a slightly different goal. I have a vampire character whose eyes are blue, but I would like them to glow red in the dark. This doesn't seem possible without giving her very light blue eyes a red tint in the light. Is it possible to construct a glow map (with the alpha layer or otherwise?) in such a manner that it can influence a very bright red in dark settings while not at all impacting her normal pale blue eye colour when in daylight or lit settings. (Yes, my "vampire" character is immune to sunlight. :P) I believe it's possible to achieve this effect by means of editing the mesh in nifskope, but in doing that, I would need my NPC to use an entirely different mesh for eyes. And the only way I know how to achieve that is to create a new race for her -- otherwise every imperial is going to have the same bizarre effect, and i don't want that happening. A new race might not be an entirely bad idea, but that requires creating a new race for every race I want to duplicate the effect for, and that's very tedious. (I should note that I have settings and mods fixed so that the vampirerace race doesn't impact her appearance, even her eyes. that wasn't doing very preferable things cosmetically.) I realize that there may simply be too many limitations caused by oblivion, since it doesn't seem possible to grant an individual NPC unique meshes or textures. :( I have an alternative, perhaps even a preferred thought, if this is not possible. I'm also wondering if there is a possibility (perhaps via scripting) to have an NPC reference a different eye mesh or texture, or even a localized special effect in a certain instance, such as when enacting night eye or attacking. I would be interested in making my vampire's character's eyes glow red when attacking and using night eye -- which makes sense to me. I realize, however, that this also might just be a bit much for oblivion. Still worth asking! I hope there's some way to realize this. It is for a custom CM Partner of mine, and I am trying to make her as true to her original, fictional reference as possible. And I do hate limitations! :P Thanks! Pursinta

I'm certainly a blender-noob, so this question may not even indicate my thinking in the right direction. However, I will take a shot in the dark here, because I do need help. I've somewhat been training myself while editing another mesh to attempt to make something akin to a "dog collar" -- a simple collar with a tag, attached by a metal chain. (It's for personal use, not for release, of course.) I got the original mesh for reference out of a file from the Exnem Goddess pack, or something to that effect. Granted, that is a much more complicated collar. Anyway, when making minor adjustments, things don't go too wrong. I sometimes struggle with separating linked files to apply different textures (textures that were previously linked -- i.e. a gold metal attached to a gold collar.) I have a rough time adjusting the collar's texture path so that the collar can be a different color without changing the gold metal in Nifskope. I do eventually manage, but only after tweaking a number of other things that don't actually accomplish the purpose and may be ruining other things. So that's one thing I'd like to be set straight on. (I am still obviously getting used to the interface.) The other issue, and probably the main one, is that I run into issues with the skeleton. Often the collar never seems to export with the correct data to attach itself to the skeleton, thus the mesh does not show up when equipping in game. All my normal texture files are in place, and that is evident because I can "drop" the item and it shows up perfectly fine while floating. (I don't have a ground mesh yet and am substituting the main one in for now.) Needless to say, if I don't mess with much, I can get it to basically look the way I want. But I'm not satisfied with the coin-shaped "dog tag" that I'm trying to use on the tip. I try to flatten the gemstone on the original mesh I use, but the mesh is oddly flawed in one part. My preference is to create a new mesh from a simple cylinder, but when I do, I can't seem to get it to recognise the skeleton correctly and the result is an invisible mesh in the game. When I analyse and compare the meshes in NifScope, I realise that whatever I am doing in blender, despite adding "bip01 neck1" and "bip01 head" in the object's vertex groups and adding UV mapping where necessary, is not generating the node for "niskininstance" in nifskope, which seems to contain the crucial data for linking the mesh to the skeleton so that it can show up in the game. This is, of course, an observation. I don't precisely KNOW what I am doing wrong. As a minor aside, I want my cylinder "coin" to have a single flat face so that I can wrap a UV map and have a name show up. But all I can seem to manage is several side-by-side faces or a pie effect, so the UV map never works quite like I want it to. I'm not sure where I need to go to find this. I know that a tutorial is probably the most ideal thing, and I have used tutorials as guides, but somehow it never quite suffices and I end up with a number of issues. Again, I am a total blender noob. I've been scratching my head over this for awhile, but I don't want to give up. If I can master this, I know that I'll gain the confidence to gradually generate my own meshes from scratch. That is a very much desirable goal, because I do enjoy this if I could just get it to work right. :) If it is necessary, I can upload my mesh and allow someone else to look at it for themselves. It might be easier to analyse my failed work and tell me everywhere I'm going wrong. I hope I don't sound lost beyond hope for blender! Thanks for any help folks can give. :)

Alas, an NPC that has not been placed also crashes the CS, so it does not seem to be making a difference. :( My boyfriend's XP computer loads the AI just fine. It's a real shame it won't work for me, because it looks like a very fun feature to work with !

Goodness, if that is the case, I'll upgrade to Windows 7 just so I can use XP constantly. ;P

Hm. I've seen HGEC versions of her khajiit retexture, but they're usually hidden with other mods like the Tabaxi race. Well, if you have a way of viewing the textures, look into that. Make sure the texture shows what sort of appears to be a "bear rug" format instead of a texture with arms down to the sides. If you can't do that, try simply reinstalling them. One more thought. Awhile back, I ran into a very odd issue. I had extracted some texture files directly into a texture folder in the the oblivion directory, not the data folder, and forgot about them. Later on when I switched to a different body mod, the old retextures were still hiding there and somehow overriding the ones I wanted to be used. It caused me a great deal of confusion for a very long time until I realised where the problem was coming from and removed the files I no longer needed.

Thank you both. I discovered that even in compatibility mode, I'm still experiencing the issue. Interestingly, if I don't load any mod at all I am able to access the menu under the "Player" NPC that's found by default in the construction set. It's when I attempt to access the menu with all of the Oblivion data loaded that I run into problems. Attempting to edit or alter a package on an NPC in any way results in an immediate CS crash. I'm hesitant to move directories, first because it seems like a lot of work (I have a lot of personal modifications throughout folders -- would I have to reinstall it all?) and second because others who have had this issue did not seem to get it to work after doing that. What should I know before making this move? Per windows 7, I consider it. I'm a little frustrated at how quickly they seem to be pumping out OS's. If only it were easier to upgrade to XP, if you get my drift! I'm going to test the construction set on my boyfriend's computer tonight. I don't know what he runs, but it isn't Vista. I'm somewhat surprised there hasn't been a patch for this yet, but it seems hard to pin down the precise cause. I've had the CS crash at other points before, but they're usually random, usually when I'm moving too quickly. If there are any other thoughts or suggestions I'll be glad to hear them! I'm just curious. Where is all of the data for AI packages located? Is that in oblivion.esm? Could the .esm be corrupt?

Several things could be causing the issue with missing hair. It sounds like you had a mod loaded along side the character you are editing that gave her custom hair, and that you neglected to load it the second time through. When you select all of the information from the mod whose face you are copying, make sure you select everything in the face you are pasting it into and hit paste. If the race is not identical, there will be great variance. (It can be comical to select face information from a Khajiit and paste it over a human head. Absolutely hideous!) I also find when changing the face of NPCs in current save games that it requires simply cleaning the save to make everything take effect. That means disabling your mod, loading the game, saving, exiting, reenabling the mod, and loading the game again. The new saves should take effect. I had to do this when making changes to my own CM partner, whose old changes had already loaded in my present save game, at the time. They would not change until I "cleaned" the save as described above.. PS -- A custom race or custom info that comes from another mod is going to complicate your own mod. It means that folks who use your mod are either going to have to have that race previously installed, or you are going to have to incorporate it into yours via merging. It is better to simply use the custom race/custom hair/etc as a master file for your current mod. To do this, you will have to use a program like Gecko4TES and convert the race file you are using for your mod to a master file, load this masterfile along with your active plugin in the CS so that the CS knows to rely on it, and then preferably (so that you don't wind up with duplicate races) use wrye bash to edit the masterfile to the .esp of that custom race rather than the .esm that you created with gecko. it sounds complicated but it actually works very well. If you have/use CM Partners, these instructions are probably laid out more clearly in the help file for creating custom partners. The method for custom race partners and any other custom race NPC is the same.