AndyDaMage

correct me if Im wrong but, wouldnt that use a lot of scripting power checking all the NPC constantly? Also, how do you assign event handlers like that to an NPC? I've never heard of such a thing

That makes sense, and the way the 3D data 'sticks' is what I starting to look into for NPCs if I got to that point. Wouldnt calling 'evp' on an actor undo that change though? The same with actors being enabled/disabled by other mods on you....i can see why that way is a little buggy. Im the same as you, I dont want to use cloneform as it can cause bloat....but for an NPC version I might have to, but just keep it under tight control and reused clones rather then just keep making more.

may i ask how this works? How can you modify the item shapes without using different meshes? and if you're not cloneforming....changing, for example, the leather cuirass...wouldnt that effect everyone that is using the leather cuirass? I looked at your mod, but it has so many scripts and I cant figure it out. EDIT: You mighten use cloneform, but you do use dummy items....which is the same as what I use.

I've recently been chasing up DragoonWraith for some functions in nifse that I've been asking for a while....namely, those that let me identify and then delete skin meshes. Basically I look for nitristrips in a mesh that have a material called 'skin' i then delete that nitristrip...EDIT: and if you're wondering, that functionality is in testing right now, so its not up on the normal download for nifse. I then do the normal thing, replace the clothing/armor item with my own item that has the same stats etc, so it looks seamless to the palyer. To try and get around the problem of my faked item not being the real thing I have been working on a script so the item is only replaced if an NPC is also using it in the same cell as the player. This means that unique items and most quest items that only the player will ever use will not be replaced, letting the script for them keep working. I plan on having this script in an .esm, then race mods can set themselves up to use it simply by added it's token item to the player (I will incorperate it so that if you need only certain slots will replace...aka only the feet for example). I havent even looked into make it NPC compatiable yet though. My system isnt flawless yet, i cant do hands in first person, but that should be fixed when I get the ability to copy branches between nifs....which will essentially allow me to script my own slots, by combine meshes together as I want to....on that note, the copy function is being tested on an example pauldrons mod.

Dunno if you guys are interested, but I've got my scripts for custom body meshes working finally, where I can put in a custom body mesh without having to have custom meshes for everything.....eg, using a skeleton mesh: Pic might be useful for those proper feet or whatever :smile:

Could those become "Named" slots - i.e, Right Pauldron, Left Pauldron, Right Glove, Left Glove, etc? I'm sure you see where I'm going with this line of thought - and many ex-Morrowind players would offer Daedric sacrifices in your name if you could pull it off... It would be more like, being able to merge items together into a single slot....okay for example: Take the ebony armor to start with, first I would have to seperate them into seperate meshes and items. Then if the cuirass has been equipped, if you then equip a pauldron (which has been set to take up no slots, something I know works) the pauldron's mesh is added to the cuirass's mesh, making it appear to the player that the pauldron has been equipped. It would not be an easy script to make it work bewteen armors (so you can have the pauldrons of orchish on leather armor etc), but as long as copychild works like it should (and if it doesnt I'll do some more bugtesting for Dragoonwraith to find the problems) then that sort of thing is possible. Would be a fiar bit of work as for each mesh you'd have to seperate it into the seperate parts.

My script is only built to work on one NPC (or the player) at a time at the moment, so i'd have to work on it more to deveolp it to be NPC ready aswell as the player......would need to include some arrays to store stuff in. My script will work on any mesh, its not operational at the moment (since DragoonWraith needs to fix nifse, which i think he is doing this weekend), but as soon as that works i can keep working on it to make it better.

Okay, Ive been working on my my scripts to seperate body meshes from items, after some bugtesting it seems completely possible. Dragoonwraith has to iron out a small bug (an array size not being set in nifse corrupting the irgged meshes) but once that done my script will be able to strip body mesh parts from any mesh. On top of that, I can add stencil properties to the other nodes to fix up any gaps. Basically, by using NifSE and OBSE functions in my script whenever the player is using a race that has a custom mesh, it will look whenever an item is changed, if it finds 'skin' on the item then it creates a new one. Here's where it get tricky. If nobody else in the cell has that item equipped (Im going to have to find a way to search small worldspaces too i think) then the mesh nifse temporary replaces the mesh on the original item, if there is then it turns a set 'dummy' item into the object to make it appear the same (this is then used until the NPC wearing the same item is no longer in the same cell). Of course it would have extra checks to run a search again when the player moves cell etc, in theory it should work. By doing it this way it aviods changing the item ID (so scripts/quests still work with it) and should restrict the incompatibilities with it. For you guys this might not be the best solution, as to fit within the item's current meshes you would need to have a roughly human shape, but it would let other modders really define different body types for each race more then through textures. EDIT: I also think I'd just mention, if the copychild function works like it should on a rigged mesh, then this may also lead to being able ot have infinate slots. In brain wave, using this nifscripts technique, you do false equipping like I have on the centaurs, aka when an item (such as boots) wont fit the body mesh, you just go in and replace the boot mesh with the body mesh and pow, the item appears to the game ot be equipped, but it doesnt overlap the mesh. If this copychild works this really opens up so much more!

Looks like I really need to get back to working on my scripts that seperate the body data from armor/clothing meshes.....which I nearly had working till i hit a knowledge roadblock with nifse (i couldnt understand how to use it). luckly the programming course I did this semester has fixed that problem. The way my method worked was that when the palyer was one of these races, it would check if that item had a ninode with a material called 'skin'. If it did it set that node to have an alpha of 0 (hence hide it from view....though i think now I can just delete the node instead, inifse has had a lot of updates since then). The race's body mesh was all handled in the tail slot. It was all pretty complicated (as you didnt want certain body parts to appear underneath clothing/armor that didnt have skin to aviod clipping) but from what I had it seemed like a nearly functional solution. Now that nifse also has the great NiNodeCopyChild function I should be able ot make it completely functional, as I can copy and swap much easier withpout using as many slots.

Ah cool...they appear to have updated since i last looked into them. though, my second point is still valid.

A couple of things you need to know about morphs. 1. Blender cant do them, the nifscript we use to export cannot export mroph animations.....so you'd need to use 3DS Max. 2. As with all non biped animations you cannot apply them to a biped object, that means if you want to morph a rigged object something, it can only be connected to a single bone.This is the same reason you cant do texture animations on armor.

Well over the weekend I finally got all the lost data off my broken external harddrive, which includes the working version of my centaurs. This is the version with the skeleton I use for animations, 3 armours for the horse part, a better running animation and different colours. I'll upload it later so you can have a look at it Semtex.

I dont know what semtex is using his for, but the aim of mine is to make 'playable' centaurs, just forcing the player to wear something is not under my defition of playable. I think I'm to end up going with Semtex's first solution, an over lapped bit added on that covers the seam. Seems like the best and most compatiable.

considering that the armor is already gender changing? is it really too important that it could also be beast/human changing?

part of the problem with only adjusting the torso texture is that then the skin colour modifiers effect it and it goes a slightly different colour to the rest of the horse. The only way that I think you could fix it is to thne make the horse texture part of the race data so that the horse part is skin adjusted too. Its not my ideal plan, as then I need to create a new race for each colour of centaur. What I would love is if there was some way to harness the power of these shaders, would be very cool if I could apply the hair shader to something like the tail, without having to have the tail use the hair texture. But from what I've seen this isnt possible.

Sorry for my dissapearances guys.....been busy doing university assignments. Anyway, Semtex! your textures for the centaur are brillant! However I really dont want to use the exsact same technique you did as you have merged the torso with the horse, making a lot more clipping issues when apperal is added. I do however like that way you've fixed it (adding an addition part of mesh onto the top that overlaps with an transparent texture) and if you dont mind, I will properbly end up using a similar technique to solve my seam. Animations.....such an annoying system in oblivion. To note, you can indeed, draw and arrow and run while its drawn.....however the problem is that the game forces you to run very slowly. In the case of animations, the distance you specificy in the animation does not relate to the speed yo umove at, it rather effects the speed at which the animation plays. The only way to speed up the player, or anything, it to assign them a high speed stat. I am planning to look into stuff to see if there are any gamesettings I can potentially modify for this. In my head there are so many animation ideas I would love ot be able to implement, but the basic way oblivion does animations just doesnt allow it.

What exsactly am I looking for in it?

No, no, no :).....I wasnt saying you were stealing anything. What you're doing is exsactly what I intended people to do with it, that is use mine as a base to make better versions. I was talking about those idividuals that take a mod, make a couple of changes and release the complete thing as their own. Sorry for that misunderstanding.

Some pointers when using my mesh....because im using dummy bones to scale it (at least in the case for blender, and also it seems gmax) the skeleton wont work for it. I lost my working copy a few weeks (its stuck on a damaged external, Im still waiting for it to get recovered), so I'm unable to send you my in-work skeleton/meshes (which are much more updated then the ones in the alpha). Bascially though, you need to remove the scaling from the skeleton, there is one called TotalScaler which is located above bip01. Then there is also ScalerBone located at the join. Set the scale on both of these bones to 1 and then try it again. I had a skeleton i used in-game, and one that i used for blender (when i was making meshes or animations). This is the one reason Im not afriad anyone will ever steal my work, I have a lot of really complex processes I go thorugh to get things working.

I asked scruggs to look into a function for it again, and he siad he'd try again for the next OBSE BETA, if there is no mention of it when the next BETA is started I'll remind him again about it.

That's caused by not having the correct bone weights in that area. I dont know about yours, but I have had to specifically not modify the human torso, so the top line of the horse's neck (where the join is) actaully get rigged to the pelvis rather then a horse bone. Of course for yours you wouldnt have to do that, but you might wana to match up weight for the huamn and horse parts in the area around the join.

Trust me when I say this, creating all the animations again to adjust for the skeleton change is not fun nor easy, plus using dummy bones lets you make adjusts much later on without needing to them redo all the animations again. I use a dummy bone on my centaurs so that at any time I can modify the scale of the two half (for example, I recently upped the horse size to a scale of 0.9 after getting many requests for it to be larger), and it also meant that when I was asked to move the human half forward a bit on the horse, it only meant a quick value change rather then what would have been impossible value change for the 60 odd animatinos I have. Just so you know, if you want it to be fully functional, there are around 300+ animations that the game uses for the palyer, not to mention then all the idle anims that arent changed with the player skeleton. I would suggest a combination of the two, make your scale/rotation changes with the dummies so that they can use exsisting animations and look fine, but then you can go back and change just the specific animations that you want to, and it can be more ongoing....instead of missing animations that you having finished yet, it will just use the default. It also means that if later on you arent happy with one of the skeleton changes, you can quickly modify it without having to edi every animation to update it. The biggest problem with scaling bones like that in nifskope, is that blender will get very very confused about it.....seems that in blender bones cant have a scale, expect in animations (which i think is where you had a problem). Dunno if that'll get fixed in a later update of nifscripts, but they do know about it. Just means you need to keep a non-scaled skeleton around to create animations from.

This can not work properly - when you edit the skeleton, you must change the length and the angles between bones. This requires simultaneous change in many animations files. Otherwise, the result is "unusual". And the second thing - such an outcome is usually the result of "incorrect" matched skin to bones. Hence why i used dummy bones. The way dummy bones work in a skeleton is that you place these between two bones, make rotations, translations and scalers and it wont be effected by the animations. I attached the skeletonbeast.nif I created. You can have a look at the structure of it.....even look at it in-game, it was the only file i edited to make that video. Otherwise thats a completely vanilla install). EDIT: To your edit. Yes, the problem with that though is that as soon as you make a custom leg mesh....oh no, now you cant wear boots/shoes. Having a skeleton only edit aviods this. To be fair, its not going to be a perfect solution for this problem. But also note that my skeleton edit is only about an hour or so work.....its just an example of what skeleton editing can do. For example, you notice the toe part on te ground is a bit long, you could adjust the scaler for the toe to shorten that. The Skeletal Variation by TheTalkieToaster uses the same method, dummy bones inbetween the actual bones in order to change the look. Thats who a learnt the method from, at the same time showing him how to modify the player's skeleton (which he made this mod with: http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31821). As far as these methods go, that have been in use for over a year now (this time last year I was already changing the player's skeleton via OBSE), it just many modders arent realising what they could do with them. I've had to explain this so many time when dealing with people in my centaur threads. I could do a nice upperbody mesh that molds nicely into the horse half....but I never will, because the moment I do that I break any possibility of compatability with other mods. I dont know if you guys feel the same way, but in my opinion if the solution isnt going to work with at least 90% of the mods out there, then it isnt a solution. Might be nice to have a khajiit with proper legs, but if you only have a couple of pants/shoes that would work for it, would many people really want to play like that?

Well I have to say you guys got me a little intrigued with the beast race legs. So this is what I did this morning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoXla9m8wLQ I decided as a test that I would try maknig the proper looking beast race legs only editing the skeletonbeast.nif. As you can see it sort of worked. Some parts look alright...others are just plain silly looking. I wont be taking this any further, but it does show off how powerful editing the skeleton can be. Plus its good to laugh at.....oversized leather boots :D

The thing is, most people are after the traditional centaur look, Im afriad that sizing and shape would most likely not appeal to many of the people following the mod. Placing the hamun half in front of the horse has already been suggested, and is to be implemented in the next version. Anyway, I seem to have derailled this thread a bit...sorry about that.