Ragicka

I had a look at creating custom poses and animations, it really is a difficult and convoluted process that I hope to crack some day. If someone can create a mod to custom pose a character on the fly in game, that would be awesome. But I think we're still a long way off. But the game has only been out for almost a year, so who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky. :biggrin: In the meantime, there are a few mods with pre-made poses like Fores New Idles in Skyrim - FNIS, Pinup Poser and Puppeteer Master.

Sounds like you're near my neck of the woods. We had some fallen trees and power lines here in Toronto. And one casualty, unfortunately. Best wishes to all our American friends and family who took the worst of it.

There's a trick to it. will walk you through.

There's also Extensible Follower Framework.

Sounds like an interesting approach. I'd be interested in hearing how that works out.

I get those warnings too, using 3ds max 2012 64 bit. Clicking No will allow 3ds to load but my imports have no textures. I'm wondering if that has something to do with maxniftools.ini, which in my case, is found in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2012 - 64bit\enu\plugcfg folder. According to the readme file, there are edits to be made to maxniftools.ini but I'm still not sure what I'm doing. Tried playing around with it a bit but no luck.

I don't like 373 much either, the way it displays the bones makes it hard to work with. Currently using version 372 which seems to be okay, I still need to do texture edits in nifskope but that doesn't take long. There is a maxtool plugin being worked on, still in experimental stage with some kinks to work out.

He could be one of those couriers and just happened to stumble into your bedroll. Those guys get around. I use Live Another Life too. Never had anything like this happen, now I'm jealous. One of the things I love about this game is the random weirdness. :biggrin:

Skinning is basically just setting up the vertices weights. You can do a skin wrap and apply a new skin but I find that a simple copy/paste from a clone or another armor file works much better. This is something you only need to do once. Weight painting is basically tweaking the vertices weights to fix clipping and other mesh problems. You may need to do this multiple times. It takes me days to get everything just so. Only when I'm absolutely satisfied that I'm finished with weight painting do I consider starting the weight slider process. It sounds like you have a good handle on things but modding is not easy, there's always mistakes. I've restarted my project so often I'm sick of looking at it sometimes. But patience and determination go a long way. :thumbsup: I referred to the link in my first reply. last line. It's nightasy's tutorials, videos 13 and 14 cover weight sliders. I highly recommend it.

As far as weight sliders are concerned, moving vertices is fine. Everything else, not so much. Whether you start with the _1 or _0 file, make sure all your skinning and weight painting is finished. Good idea to finish off with a new bsdismember modifier just to be on the safe side and then export. Reload that exported file back into 3ds and follow videos 13 and 14 from the link I gave you. He starts with the _0 file and scales up to the _1, so substitute files accordingly. As long as you follow each step, I would be very surprised if that doesn't work for you. Cheers

You're getting exploding vertices in game? That means that there is a difference between the _1 and the _0 files. That can be caused by adding/deleting vertices, changing skin data or nifskope edits on one file and not the other, applying a smooth modifier to one body and not the other, phases of the moon...it's not easy to pin down. Unless you did weight painting or otherwise change the vertex weights on the _0 file, the skin data should be the same as the _1 file. You mentioned doing nifskope edits on the _0 file, did you do the same on the _1 file? Do you have copies of _0 and _1 without nifskope edits? Does the weight slider work with those files? Whenever this happens to me, I review my notes, take a deep breath and do the weight slider process all over again. It's a pain but I've done it so many times it doesn't take long. I also found this to be very helpful.

Whatever you do to the _1 file, you should do the same to the _0 file. Just move vertices, don't change anything else. As long as the vertices count, skin data and file sizes are the same, I see no reason why it shouldn't weight slide properly. I tried something similar for the UNP skinny body, only I wanted to flatten the nipples to make it easier to fit armor and clothing. All I did was push some vertices and exported. Didn't see any problems in game but then I only changed the body for one armor file, I didn't replace the body universally. Even though I only pushed vertices, the files still lost 10 kb compared to the originals. I suspect something was lost in the niftools import/export. No doubt there's additional nifskope tweaks to make them upload ready. I asked about modding the body in the UNP dl forum but didn't get any answers. So that little project is on temporary hold til I find time to figure it out.

Thanks chaospearl. I was thinking beer gut but now that you mention it, it does look like something's trying to get out. :laugh:

What didn't work? Can you describe the problem exactly and the steps you took to get there and the steps to fix it? Which body and armor files are you using? Can you upload a close-up picture in better lighting? How does it look in 3ds and nifskope? Have you tried using nifskope to copy the armor nitrishape onto a new body? The more information, the better. :smile: If the problem is a deformed body mesh, it should be fixed by replacing the body. Whatever the problem is, it is fixable one way or another.

That's something that I'm also interested in doing eventually. Have you seen this?

My current character, Carli, is a wide eyed country girl just coming to grips with her place in the world and has no idea of the perils and hardships she will face. She's currently chilling in Whiterun and serving as my lovely and talented assistant while I mod armor and clothing befitting a Dovakhin.

It's good to see that niftools is getting some attention again. I appreciate the updates and your hard work. Kudos. Cheers.

Kind of hard to see from the picture, my eyes aren't what they used to be, but did your character gain some weight? It looks like you altered the body as you were working on the armor. The only thing I can think of is to go back into 3ds, delete and re-import the body. Select editable mesh and apply a smooth modifier to the body. Then delete and recreate a new bsdismember modifier. Export and see if that helps. Whenever you make changes to the armor or weight painting, try getting into the habit of freezing the body and hiding the skeleton. This will help prevent unwanted changes. Edit: Another thing to watch out for when weight painting. Be sure to hit x to toggle off the move gizmo. Otherwise you might end up knocking the bones around.

After step 5 for 3ds max, what I would do is attach the two together. In editable mesh, select the saviour armor. Under Edit Geometry, click the Attach button and click on the pants. You'll see a pop-up window, select the third option. The two nifs are now combined and hopefully should make things a little bit simpler. :smile: edit: edited for clarity.

The short story on weight sliders, whether you start from _0 or _1, is that both versions have to be exactly the same in terms of vertex count and vertex weighting. Before you prep for weight sliders, you have to be absolutely sure that you're finished adding/deleting mesh and that your skinning job is satisfactory. Do not apply a new skin or bsdismember, that'll just mess it up. The only thing you can do from now on, is move/scale vertices. Since I'm using 3ds max, I got my recipe for weight sliders from . I'll try to summarize the steps and hope it's easy to follow. I don't know how to use blender but I'm guessing the basics still apply so I'll try and boil it down to the main ingredients. Hopefully a blender user will post their easy steps. Part 1: Import your _0 (or _1) armor. Delete and reimport your body mesh. This ensures that you have an unaltered body. Apply a smooth group 2 on it and then deselect it. Select the armor. In Editable Mesh/Vertex, select all vertices. At this point we want to weld the vertices. In 3ds that is done under Edit Geometry/Weld, click the Selected button until you get a pop-up window informing you that there are no vertices within weld threshold, click ok. While the armor vertices are still selected, apply a smooth group 2. Export your armor. This is your final -0 (or _1) version. Part 2: With your original armor still on screen, deselect the vertices. Delete the body mesh and import the new body. If you started with the _0 body, import the _1 body. Apply a smooth group 2. At this point I like to hide the skeleton and freeze the body to prevent making alterations to them. Use the scale and move tools to shape the armor around the new body. Unhide the skeleton and unfreeze the body and export the armor and test in game. When you adjust the weight slider, the armor should scale up or down with the body as you move the slider. Test in game. If there's clipping, go back and move the vertices out a bit more. Hopefully your armor scaled perfectly. All that needs to be done now is some work with nifskope to fix the textures and what not and you're done. :smile:

Even enabling nvidia AO will drag things down but that's probably due to some of the other enb goodies enabled. When I have some time to tinker with it I'll be sure to end up dragging my game into the 21st century, kicking and screaming. :laugh: Unbleak looks nice.

Nifskope or niftools? Just to clarify, I meant to see if it looks normal when you set your body weight to 0 (or 100). Like Perraine said, it looks like a weight slider problem. For example, when I convert vanilla armor, I start with the _0 version of the armor. When testing in game, it should look normal as long as my characters weight is at 0. But if I move the slider, the verts will blow up if I don't have a matched _1 version. If it were me, and it was still doing that even at 0 weight. I'd delete and reimport the body, smooth it group 2, and create a new bsdismember modifier for the armor. Check your niftool settings here.

Any time you swap armor or clothing, you're also swapping the body mesh. If you load up an armor/clothing nif in 3ds max or nifskope, you'll see the armor and the body it fits around. If you install UNP, you'll also notice that clothing and armor are still all using vanilla bodies because that's how they were created. In that case you can install something like UNP Female Armors by exeter. If you wanted to create your own clothing for UNP, I wouldn't smoosh anything. Just import the femalbody_0.nif into your 3d program and fit the mesh around the body. Or if you want, under the UNP miscellaneous download section, there's a pushup version of the body that may be easier to work with. I recommend having a look at nightasy's tutorials, he covers custom armor in video 17.

So I'm having a grand 'ol time converting vanilla armor to the UNP skinny body replacer. Everything goes great until I do the finishing work in nifskope. I noticed that when I copy my test armor nitrishape to the original body nif, the Translation Y and Z coordinates for all the bones get altered. This causes the skirt to look all mussed up. I can fix that by editing those coordinates to match my test armor and everything is back in shape. But I was wondering, is this a normal part of the workflow? Can I expect to do this for every armor I work on or is there an alternate solution?

Another possibility would be to convert some of the magic casting animations to .kf and importing one of them into 3ds. You'll get some finger movement but you'll be limited to the animation. I've never worked on gloves yet but if pressed, I think I would import a vanilla pair and copy/paste the skin data onto mine.