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:

The border between body and head does indeed change with body weight. The reason for why there are no two versions of the head model is that it uses a different method to store this information than most other body parts and armors. While shape changes for the latter are dynamically interpolated by the game by comparing the _0 and _1 meshes, the head has this change "hardcoded" as a morph in its corresponding TRI file (where other head morphs are stored as well, like facai expressions, etc.). As you saw, the head NIF has the _1 shape while the _0 shape comes from the TRI. Depending on the import / export tools available for your 3d modeler it is possible to import that TRI to get to the correct _0 neck shape. Or maybe you can even find a download for a correctly shaped _0 head exported from the morph. Alternatively you can save yourself this additional step and just model your _0 armor off of the _0 body necksesam, guess the shape of the neck above that seam and then test in the game if you have any clipping problems requiring corrections. €dit Since I never worked with TRIs before, this got me into a quick import / export workflow experimet. I exported both the vanilla male and female head in their 0 weight form as OBJs and, as a bit of service, uploaded them for anyone who might need them: https://uploadfiles.io/98mcpmah (Link expires after a 30 days)

Yes, you have to have all this data in the model for it to work. But if you just want to get the mesh into the game to test it, it doesn't have to be "good" data you put any time and effort into. Skin the mesh 100% to a single bone (shouldn't be too problematic for a helmet anyway), put some auto-generated or primitive based UVs on it (no matter how nonsensical) and give it a plain diffuse and a "neutral" normal map (that's color R:127 G:127 B:255 for Skyrim) as textures. The result won't be pretty but enough to learn all the necessary import / export procedures and get a first impression of the mesh in the game.

Any NiTriShape inside a NIF needs at least three parts to work correctly in the game: The NiTriShapeData, which contains the actual mesh and necessary meta data, Either a NiSkinInstance or a BSDismemberSkinInstance, which contain the mesh's weights and its meta data. And, indeed, the BSLightingShaderProperties, which contains the shader, material and texture information needed to make the mesh actually show up and render correctly. You don't necessarily have to copy the ShaderProperties from another file, it's possible to create them from scratch in NifScope. However, at the start it's certainly much easier to copy the node and then modify its data where needed. Where you get the ShaderProperties from is actually not too important, it is completely independent from the BipedSlot the mesh uses. You could, for example, copy the data from a pair of boots to your helmet and it would work fine. And yes, taking the data from a (well working) mod is absolutely ok. However, to make things easier at the start, you should look for models with material properties similar to what you want your own model to have and copy the data from them. Then you just have to link your own textures to the mesh and should be able to test it in the game. (For that there's another node linked to the ShaderProperties called BSShaderTextureSet. It has nine slots for textures and the ones you definitely need to fill to get the model working are the first slot, which is for the diffuse, and the second, which is for the normal map.) €dit: Oh and just to be sure, let me add that for all this to work you have, of course, to have your model "unwrapped". Which means you have to have created the model's UV information. Which means, in plain words, you have to have told the model which part of your 2D texture to project on which part of your 3D model.

You're welcome! Having multiple meshes in one NIF is a great and absolutely viable tool, so use it whenever it helps you. I make use of it extensively myself, so I can set individual textures, texture sets and material properties for different parts of the model. A chromed metal clasp need an envrionment map shader, the suede leather it holds together does not, for example. And don't worry about your UUNP woes, having to go through the conforming process a couple of times is just part of the game. I have lost count of how often I accidentaly left reference body shapes in my models because I forgot that checkbox I mentioned above...

One note at the start: Please tell us which boots / meshes exactly you have problems with exactly in the future. Makes it much easier and quicker to troubleshoot. So, I was able to repoduce your problem. Took a bit of time because a) I concentrated on the "Leather" boots first, as I indentified them on one of your screens but they worked fine for me. Meanwhile the "Nightingale" and "Shrouded" boots did not. b) the problem only occurs on characers with a body weight between zero and one and the character I tested on had it on one. Looking at the Nightingale and Dark Brotherhood NIFs in Nifscope, I noticed they looked odd and the boots' NiTriShapeData had the BSVectorFlag "Has_Tangents" unchecked (and therefore the tangent data removed). By importing and exporting the NIF to and from 3dsmax I was able to restore the tangent data and the boots then worked fine. In conclusion, the tangent data is appearently needed so Skyrim can correctly interpolate between the _0 and _1 meshes for body weights from 0.01 to 0.99 (if there is no tri file containing the interpolation as a morph at least). Make sure you don't delete it accidentaly while preparing your meshes. While hunting for the problem I also found another few items of note: 1. Several of your boots (Leather, dragonbone and others) have mutliple meshes / parts in their NIF, which is perfectly fine, but you put the NiStringExtraData containing the heel height information on each one of them. That is not necessary. It's enough if one of the meshes has the node. I'm not sure the redundant data would actually cause any problems, but why risk it if it's not necessary... 2. In all of your UUNP meshes you included the whole UUNP body, which is why their NIFs have such disproportionaly large file sizes. When you save your meshes / projects in BodySlide, make sure you have "Copy reference shape into output" at the bottom of the window unchecked. 3. While my BodySlide generated the UUNP boots without errors, trying to load them in the game leads to an immediate CTD. Whether this is due to the superfluous body mesh or another problem I'm not sure and didn't examine further.

As you know, Skyrim has a body weight slider for characters. For this to work, all armor and body meshes supposed to be affected by the slider have to have two files. The _0 file is the "thinnest" possible version of the model and the _1 file is the "biggest" possible version. Slider positions between the two extremes are then interpolated from the difference between the two models. So if the game expects two model files with the _0 and _1 suffixes for the helmet you are trying to replace, you have to give it those two files. However, the game does not care if there's actually any difference between the two models. If you're fine with your replacement helmet being unaffected by the weight slider, you can just use two copies of the same file.

Exactly! You model around the completely "neutral" body shape, then use Bodyslide to generate the deformation information that, for example, shapes the "UNP high" body. Scroll to the very bottom bottom of the \ShapeData\Unified UNP\ folder, there you'll find a handful of NIFs for body, hands and feet. You can't use any of the BSDs as they are no 3d models at all. They're the files that tell Bodyslide how to move the polygons of the base body (inside those NIFs I specified) when you move its various sliders. Which one of the NIF sets in that folder you want to use doesn't make too much of a difference at this stage as the actual body shape is the same for all three. UUNPHDT and UUNPSpecial just have some additional features that become only relevant when you start weighting your armor meshes ("HDT" uses some of XP32's extra bones for "bouncy" breasts, etc, "Special" adds more detailed genitals on top for those that use Skyrim as aporn simulator.) And about those transparent imported models: Extremely difficult to diagnose from afar, as I - agian - don't know the import / export procedures for Blender, how it handles the meshes, how its UI works... Can't say much about it.

That's what Skyrim's normal maps' alpha channel is used for, provided it's not a "model space" normal map. That's the one case where specular information goes into a separate file instead, as I said above. The specular map itself is a special greyscale (therefore it only needs one channel) texture where pure black (value 0) means no glossiness at all and pure white pixel (value 255) means maximal glossiness. Skyrim's engine then multiplies this value by the value of the "Specular Strength" flag found in the BSLightingShaderProperties node(s) in the object's NIF file to compute the final glossiness of any given pixel. (And ENB, should you use it, modifies the glossiness value yet again.) So in conclusion, if you want that leather grip to not be shiny anymore, just paint it plack in its normal map's alpha channel.

i don't know how gimp processes DDS files, so it might truely be lacking in this regard. What you describe however sounds, to be perfectly frank, more like user error based in a lack of knowledge. Compression artifacts are unavoidable to a degree, as you've got to save data somewhere. That's why it's extremely important you use the right compression algorithms for the task at hand. For Skyrim diffuse maps that would be DXT1, or if they contain an (not too finely detailed) alpha DXT5. For envrionment masks and cube maps you also use DXT1. Compression artifacts in normal maps are extremly noticable, so the best way of operation is to not compress them at all by using 8.8.8.8. If file size is a concern, it's usually better to use an uncompressed lower resolution normal map than a compressed high res one. A 1K "8.8.8.8" normal map has the same filze size as a 2K "DXT3" one, but the result will most probably be better. Lastly, normal maps have nothing to do with glossiness per se. Glossiness is dictated by specular maps (and in Skyrim's case, certain material information included in a model's NIF file). The reason for why normal maps seem to influence glossiness of most Skyrim models is that this specular information is included in their normal map's data (to save file space and therefore video RAM). More specificly, the specular map sits in the normal map's "alpha" channel and if you're dealing with extremly shiny objects, chances are this alpha channel either doesn't exist at all in your normal texture file or is filled with pure white. Change that and you'll get rid of the problem. (There is an exception to this in that a few Skyrim models do actually NOT include specular information in the normal map. Characters' naked bodies are an example for this. These models have their specular map in a separate texture file, designated with an "_s" at the end of their file name.) I hope this information will help you with your texture problems. Best of luck!

You're welcome! Concerning skeletons: Since you mentioned "animations" I feel I have to make something clear (at the risk of repeating what maybe you already know): The process of creating new armor has nothing to do with animations. Animations, in Skyrim, have a special file type and their purpose is to tell the game how to move an actor's skeleton. The skeleton then dictates the movement of the meshes attached to it. So what you're actually concered with is giving your armor mesh this informaton of how to deform when relevant parts of the skeleton beneath it are moving. This process is called "weighting" or "skinning" (or another dozen terms). Now it's difficult for me to give you more specific information about this, as I have no idea how Blender and it's NIF-import/export tools handle this weight information. However it works though, if you want to weight your armor in Blender, you'll need a skeleton in the scene to work with. And as per my recommendation that would, indeed, be skeleton_female.nif from the XP32 mod. (There is one alternative to this in that you can actually use tools BodySlide provides to do the weighting. In that case you wouldn't have to have a skeleton in your Blender scene. I can't tell you how and how well Bodyslide works for this however, since I do all of this in 3dsmax.) Concerning BodySlide BodySlide comes into play at the very end of the armor creation process. You create your armor mesh in Blender, you create your texture UVs for the mesh (probably also in Blender), you weight the mesh (and here's, as I said, the one exception where you might want to use BodySlide early). Then, as you're new to the whole process, I recommend you get your armor into the game and test it extensively (by using the same mesh for both the "_0" and the "_1" body weight). And only when you're satisfied with the meshes you have, then you get them into BodySlide and generate the files BodySlide needs to conform your armor to different body shapes and weights. (And just to be sure I'll add that this obviously only works for your female / UUNP armor, as there are no male BodySlide bodies atm) Concerning UUNP Something else I have to make clear, since you talked about using "UNP high" as a base: You do NOT want to model your armor around any body shape generated by BodySlide as that'll get you into all kinds of trouble (odd looking shapes, mesh collisions, etc) You DO want to model around the very body meshes BodySlide uses to generate those shapes in the first place. You can find the relevant NIFs in .../Skyrim/Data/Caliente Tools/BodySlide/ShapeData/Unified UNP/ (on a mac currently, no backslash on my keyboard) Concerning modeling techniques The proper way to model armor is the one that works for you. Unsatisfying answer but maybe the best one I can give. As you've seen there are many ways to get to the desired destination and all have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on the circumstances. 3d sculpting, for example, is great for creating organic and / or irregular shapes, but making a (relatively) low poly mesh fit for a game out of a sculpt is not a trivial task most of the time. The concrete situation is this: You are a beginner in the modeling game and you want to create meshes for use in Skyrim. Which means they have to fit certain criteria (most importantly poly count). So my recommendation is: Forget about complex tools like 3d sculpts and cloth simulations for the moment and start by learning to do the basics properly, namely good ol' poly-modeling. That's the process where you take a basic geometric shape (or the simple "square" you mentioned) and manipulate it directly on polygon level to get to the shape you want. It's probably the most common 3d modeling technique, so you'll find a lot of information about it. It's sometimes laborious but extremely versatile. It gives you good control over your polygon count. And most important of all, it's the base everything else build upon. If you learn how to poly-model properly, if you learn how to make complex shapes out of quads (that's the term for four sides polygons, which you want to make your model out of primarly), if you learn what good mesh topology is (another term that describes certain qualities of your mesh, whether the polygons are evenly spaced, how your polygons flow" around the shape you create, etc.), then you'll understand how other tools and techniques fit into the puzzle and when it might benefit you to learn and use them. Experience is key in this. And if you want to know what I use: Yup, it's poly-modeling, I take that one square, in some cases a cylinder or torus, and cut, push and pull it into the shape I need. I model one side of my armor (left trouser leg, left shoe, etc.) then mirror it to the other side to save time. And only in the end, when the whole mesh is finished, I very seldomly use 3d sculpting to enhance the model further. Most of the time though, I only use it to create or enhance my normal maps (which is an entire topic in itself). So don't worry too much about not going the most efficient route possible atm, don't worry about having to scrap a mesh, as it's still experience you've got under your belt. Learn, experiment, have fun and you'll find what's the best way for you automatically! Not a bad idea, though I'm unsure I'd want to go the step by step route (at least not in the "click this then click that then throw your mouse against the wall" kind of way). I'd want people to learn the concepts that allow them to find their way themselves instead of just following the exact footsteps I lay down for them. In any case, time is indeed the deciding factor here. But I'll think about it.