dreamCloud

Btw forgot to mention that either Blender 2.49b or 3DS 8 Max settings are ok. I have access to both, but way less experience with 3DS Max.

I've hit a few snags in animating some creatures I've been making. Unless I'm missing something (and PLEASE correct me if I am) Oblivion doesn't support animations that have a beginning and end and a loop in the middle. Even walk and run cycles I've seen all just go from 0 to end frame full speed without a ramp up or slow down. So I figured I would use furnitures since I can make 3 animations; an entrance animation, a 'sitting' animation (using the furniture) of the animation I actually want to play, and an exit animation in case you hit the NPC's and 'wake them up'. However, I don't know how to make the furniture markers at all and I'm wondering if anyone does? You can see them in the screenshot here:

Just wanted to update that I did some vigorous digging through dead forums with wayback machine and I came across a working link to this project that converts .spt files into text files that you can then edit (but there's TONS of parameters...): https://github.com/anahuj/spttools

So apparently Oblivion's SpeedTree files were made with SpeedTree 4.2. They are saved in the .spt file format. No other versions of SpeedTree support this format except as an import and convert option to the modern formats and those don't save back to the old .spt format according to the SpeedTree help forums and they don't sell any old versions any more either. There's an old demo version floating around but lacks the ability to save. So... is there any other way to access those files? I have some meshes I could use to update some of these trees (better trunks and branches for sure) but without a way to access the .spt files in any meaningful way there's no point. The only other thing I can think of is maybe just making static meshes of the trees I want and finding out a way to make their leaves the same billboard style as SpeedTree did. If I could do that for the 3 specific ones I want I could live with just that in some special locations, but I have no clue on how to accomplish that. Mods here exist that have done this before, but I've no clue how they accomplished it.

I mean yeah it's present in the game and isn't showing any missing mesh symbols or purple textures for missing textures so I'm fairly positive I got that part right . This is like my 100th model or so I've put in and just started noticing this issue. For some reason it just doesn't want to receive any of those material values, and now the problem is retroactive as well as I can't get it to work on previous things it was working on. As for vertex colors I mostly do that by hand in Blender. These are all generic textures I use across several models to prevent Oblivion doing so many draw calls in any given cell. So to give the models some hutzpah I vertex color in a lot of details that would be handled by Ambient Occlusion in modern games. You can see that on the model especially well on the rocks. But I don't like having to do that for every single piece of the models so I relied on the material shader to do some of the work as well but now that's not functioning. So, guess more troubleshooting in the future :/. I'll give some of those new nifskope editions a whirl in a bit too. Thanks for those links!

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here since this was working before for other models just fine. I often do a little dabbling with models in NifSkope to do color and luminance corrections on materials after I export and link up all the textures. Before I could adjust the Ambient/Diffuse/Spec/Emissive/Glossiness just fine to dial in and get things exactly how I wanted them to show up. Now it seems the only thing I can change is the emissive color and the alpha value. When I change the ambient, diffuse, or spec colors nothing gets applied even if the changes are drastic (like going all black or pink or something). What's weird is they look fine in NifSkope but in-game nothing ever changes any more when before it would. I checked the specular (alpha channel in the normal file) to make sure it wasn't overriding like it does when it's too strong and even just went without a spec map altogether (using a DXT1) and still the colors I select in NifSkope do nothing. Aside from changing material colors I'm still kind of a dunce with NifSkope so not sure what I did wrong here. Using NifSkope 2.0 Dev 7 and exporting files from XBlender 2.49b (using NIF Scripts 2.5.9, PyFFi 2.1.11). I haven't changed anything in my setup from when I was doing things before successfully. The only thing I can think of was I had an alpha error on export for one of the meshes so I removed the alpha on that particular mesh and re-enabled it after export, but it's not even the meshes I'm having a problem with (in the screencaps you can see I darkened the rafters under the roof and the top roof element, but in-game they show up super bright still).

That worked! Thank you!!! There were very few places I need grass in this quad anyways, so this works perfectly.

Thanks for the response! Not using the CSE but after several hours of frustration I figured out there seems to be a lot of 3-layers of things in the cell. Even when a certain texture looks predominant in an area there will be a few textures underneath it. What fixed it for me in some spots was going back over it with 2 non-grass textures then applying my final texture several times. But that was just for some spots. Other spots still have grass frustratingly. I have used the land edit method (pressing I) to replace other textures before. Since I was only editing one small part of a cell quad I didn't think to replace ALL of the grass textures in that cell's quad but that makes sense. I can just go back over those places with grass where I actually need it. I'll do that now!

So I keep having grass grow where I absolutely do not want it to. I am using some landscape textures I had made myself (and did not give them any grass chance as they are brick walkways) and they mostly seem ok but I'm noticing in areas that were heavy grass texture areas before they are still growing grass there and it doesn't matter how many times I paint over it they still show up and it's kind of driving me nuts. There has to be something I am missing here. I directly painted over the grass-enabled textures with my non-grass ones with 100% opacity if that helps.

Ahh they weren't links they were just tutos I had saved on my online drive since I couldn't find them any more. Oblivion tutorials are being lost left, right, and center these days to dead internet Looks like one of them is still here on the Nexus tho, guess I couldn't find it because I was looking for the tutorial website itself not a mod page ha: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37209

Yeah I got you.

Oh? Nice! I'll download that and have a look through it over the next couple of days.

Awesome, glad one of those was the correct answer!

Sent via DM

Yeah it's all about the morph animations. You can still use your same mesh if you are committed to that, you'll just need to use option 4 and make the tri files for that. As for the neck moving like the vanilla neck, you need to parent it to the skeleton and then weight paint the neck part of the mesh to the neck bone, spine2, clavicle l, and clavicle r the same as the Vanilla head is done. One big downside of using the hair slot for your mesh is also that the hair slot defaults to only being weighted to the head bone (it's something a lot of hair modders complained about early on and their workarounds was to make helmets). I have a bunch of old tutorials I can dig up too if you really want to dive in.