DrakeTheDragon
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Posts posted by DrakeTheDragon
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It is not "sharing" being forbidden what makes them hard to find. In fact "using" ripped or ported materials in your game already is breaking the EULA. Granted, Beth likely won't find out, but still it's not allowed to do that.
If one would create the meshes and textures from scratch, just using those copyrighted materials as reference, that'd be totally fine. But I don't know many modders who create custom creature meshes from scratch.
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In my case I'm perfectly fine with redoing really "all" animations for my dragons. One might call me crazy or a fool for always choosing the most tedious of solutions, but in case of my dragons it can't be helped. What little anatomy changes I did so far is nothing compared to what's still to come. I was thinking it through forth and back several times and there's no way I could re-use even a single existing animation once I'm done with it. This is not due to the approach with skeletal changes but the intended difference in shape and anatomy I'm aiming at. I might come back to this dummy bones idea (I don't like the name, they're far more than just dummies after all) at some point, but the animations I'm redoing don't have this unnecessary dirty data in them (almost exclusively rotational data) and can still be used, even if I alter the anatomy further, as long as it doesn't differ far too much all of a sudden. But such a dramatic change in design is unlikely after I started redoing animations already.
First of all I have to investigate this "specialIdle" or "idleanims" mechanism though. If they aren't also redirected to an "idleanims" subfolder in my new skeleton&animations folder, this might indeed become a little troublesome and cause heavy incompatibility to other mods, which I was hoping to prevent with this approach in the first place. But I'll see about this when it's time for it. There's far more different things to be done first. This and I still need a scripted solution for 1st person before this can move close to release ever. But I don't get much free time anyways lately, so this will all take its time.
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You don't need to get them out of the BSAs. The game uses the files directly from inside the BSAs so they don't need to clutter your drive and take less space. All you need to do is get those BSAs loading. I don't know the specifics, but OOO and MMM should have proper installation instructions telling exactly what you need to do. For reference, if you tell me the exact filenames of your OOO and/or MMM BSAs and the ESPs of these mods (only the main ones, not the additional stuff), I might be able to tell ou what to do to get them loading automatically without alterations to your Oblivion.ini. But let me repeat I advise following the steps given in the respective readmes, as I'm in no way inflicted with those mods and don't know any of the specifics which might be crucial here.
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You said it was mainly chests and such showing the "missing mesh" marker? Did you by chance install one of the big overhauls or something related and didn't also download and install their resources? I've read there were some issues with people missing these for FCOM, MMM, or OOO. What's also not unlikely is the mods altering those chests work with files from inside their own BSA archives. Those now don't load because either they weren't properly registered in your Oblivion.ini or the steps to get them to auto-register as documented in the readmes were not taken. In Oblivion BSA files starting with the same name as one of your loaded plugins are automatically loaded without registration in your ini, but certain overhauls had a change in their plugins' names and now the BSAs have to be renamed as well first. A BSA file missing or not loading is just like missing a disc. There will be missing meshes or textures aplenty.
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Also it's a great reference for "believable" anthropomorphic anatomy and proportions.
I was immediately remembered of my own very first attempts when I saw the hilariously frog-like Argonian in the video above.
The first version of my dragon feet meshes was far too big!
http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/5106/newfeetwalking1lg3.jpg
And it looked horrible when walking:
http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/226/newfeetwalking2hj1.jpghttp://img209.imageshack.us/img209/6408/newfeetwalking3fb7.jpg
As shown in my latest progress reports I'm now going the "skeletal alteration" approach myself as well.
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/497/referenceposeold.jpg ==> http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/1741/referencepose.jpg
I was very pleased realizing clothes and armor automatically deform according to the "scale" of the underlying bones, which is all that was altered in the above comparison.
http://tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/461894-1296262246.jpghttp://tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/461894-1296635285.jpg
However, so far I was unable to get this "size" information to stay on exported skeletons' bones. I can use an idle animation to set the size of the bones though at any time.
The only real trouble is with existing animations. They can basically "undo" every skeletal changes you did, as well as they can introduce them in the first place. There's obviously not much use in including translational or scale data for bones which are part of the skeletal structure (when does one's arm grow in thickness or one's neck elongate ever in any natural motion??), but still most existing animations seem to have been done by just selecting all bones each frame and inserting a keyframe for just about everything there is every time. This of course makes it impossible to make real use of an altered skeleton anatomy, unless you're introducing said "inbetween" bones, which are not affected by existing animations. But as my dragons will not be moving like any other species and most likely no existing animation will look right on them, I'm going the route to give them their very own unique set of animations already anyways, so there will be no animations undoing my skeletal alterations ever as a side bonus.
Using this approach many alterations to equipment will be done by the underlying bones for me and there's only the really different body meshes (feet mainly) which need adapted meshes for items to be wearable anymore. And my scripting approach can proficiently take care of this for me already. I'm getting rid of more and more flaws with every new OBSE release. There's no "item becomes fully repaired during exchange" issues anymore already and the "no OnEquip blocks trigger when equipped through scripts"-issue is non-existent now either. I only need to take care of cloneFormed items to be recognized as their originals by GetEquipped, GetEquippedObject, GetEquipmentSlotMask or "GetItemCount" checks in other mods, for quests to still recognize the items they check for although it's actually an adapted counterpart. But I was talking with Scruggs about a solution similar to the "race alias" already and last time I heard from him things were looking positive.
edit: Isn't there a way to get those images to display smaller in this forum?! Had to spoiler them because of their size, but it's just getting worse.
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This sounds like the legs aren't showing at all but only the tights.
From the NIF tree the structure seems to be totally fine, apart from the texture paths starting at your "c:"-drive and not at "textures" as they should be, but maybe this is only relevant when you're going to share your work with others not using the exact same location for their game as you. I'd fix it regardless though, as with Oblivion you never know and it's quite picky with files' locations.
I see no obvious cause for the legs to not show up though. Name's right, material's right, texture's right, and no wrong nodes in it or anything. I take it your body replacer "does" work with your race? As in when you unequipp the tights your legs show up fine?
If that's the case, maybe try and "copy branch"-"paste branch" the legs from your "meshes/characters/_male/femalelowerbody.nif" from another NifSkope into this. Then they should at least not be the cause anymore.
If you happen to not yet know how this is done, keep the NifSkope with your tights opened, open another one with the NIF you want to copy from, browse the NIF tree or do it directly in the render screen and right-click the legs or their NiTriShapes/Strips node, in the popup menu then click on "block -> copy branch". Now switch to your other NifSkope instance with your tights open and on the "0 NiNode Scene Root" right-click and in the popup menu click "block -> paste branch". Now a copy of the whole legs NiTriShapes/Strips branch, complete with rigging, texture, material etc., is inserted into your tree. You can then delete the old legs and save.
But by all means, make backups of your file, as I don't know where those legs were coming from to begin with and if default legs of your body replacer will even fit into them!
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Hmm, I've seen this before, but I don't really know what exactly is going on there.
I've seen you're using a NiStencil property though, which will make both sides of the mesh visible while there's not much possibility to see the inner side anyways. Additionally the inner polygones might be earlier or later in polygon ordering than some outside polygones and this in combination with transparency, and the horrible flaws Oblivion's approach to this has, could cause exactly this result. I'd say give it a try and see if they go away when you remove this NiStencil property (right-click it -> block -> remove).
As for why you get invisible legs ingame, if the tights wouldn't show up, they'd miss their normalmap texture ("..._n.dds") going along with your new texture, but the body mesh itself also not showing up is unusual. What's the name of the "0 NiNode Scene Root" at the top of the tree? Is it really "Scene Root" or perhaps "Scene Root.00" or something? It has to be "Scene Root" or Oblivion won't use what's inside of it. Also we can't see the whole NIF tree here, so there could be something else wrong outside of our scope. A NIF file's contents not showing up at all usually means the NIF structure is malformed. NIF and NifSkope are far more forgiving and tolerant than the game engine. What shows up fine in there and doesn't cause any errors about is not necessarily a valid file for the game already.
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As far as I remember there's a Khajiit Fix for HGEC. Should be part of the famous EVE project even.
The fact that Vanilla Oblivion uses the male foot texture for both genders for Khajiit really causes some trouble when a body replacer doesn't come with an ESP rectifying this. But then there are also "male" body mods which took this into account by redirecting male Khajiit textures to a different filename. It's vital to know which of these settings survive the load order in the end and which texture files will really be used for which gender.
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Next time there's no need to copy an existing NiAlpha property. All you need to do is right-click the NiNode you want to insert one into and select "add property -> NiAlpha property" or something along that line.
The alpha channel of the texture directly defines how translucent it is and at which points. The alpha channel of the normalmaps ("..._n.dds") defines how reflective it will be at which points depending on the material type selected and the glossiness.
DXT3 is with alpha channel but direct values, a little hard transistions, while DXT5 is interpolated alpha with very smooth transitions. 8:8:8:8 or something similar is without any compression, probably a little large in file size, but it won't have any distortions or compression artifacts like the others have.
From there on it's just playing around to get a feeling for it. You will be able to create the exact effect you want after some time.
Take care that Oblivion has a horrible way of creating transparency effects. If you have several transparent layers one over the other, even if the actual section overlapping doesn't have any transparent part in the texture, the order in which the polygones are rendered determines which ones will be in the front, and only the front layer is rendered at all. A transparent layer over another usually makes the underlying layer disappear (heads getting bold when looked at through waterfalls etc.) Especially make sure any body meshes don't get a NiAlpha property by accident and their material always stays "skin" without any additional characters.
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Does the mesh in NifSkope have a NiAlpha property? It should be same level as NiMaterial and NiTexture (or what it's called). It will need this to make transparency of textures work on meshes.
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What body was the original armor done for? Is this a custom race?
If this was only imported into a modeling app, split in parts and exported again, this shouldn't have affected the UV map (defining which point of the mesh is where on the texture when unwrapped). However, modeling apps tend to rename blocks on import or export, and with body meshes you have to take special precautions the material is always "skin" (case doesn't matter) or it will not behave like real skin, not use the textures of the race but the ones set in NifSkope (Imperial skin on an Orc, yepp) and not react to the color tone settings done in CharGen. Not rarely it becomes something like "skin.00" on export and will not be recognized as skin anymore. And the NiTriShapes or -Strips have to be named accordingly to include a keyword telling which texture slot of the race it should use, "upperbody"/"arms", "lowerbody", "hand", "foot", "tail". ":" works as a remark and everything after it won't confuse the keyword, but of course for something like "upperbody.00" the game engine doesn't know which texture to use for and either uses the one assigned in NifSkope or does really weird and unpredictable things not even I know all of, yet.
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Ok, thank you very much. I thought the mesh was just the virtual shape of the item and the texture was the skin over that. Glad I asked, I was pretty wrong, lol.
Basically it is like that. But the textures a mesh uses are assigned in the NIF. So if you changed what NIF an item uses (or replaced the one its item record in the CS is pointing to), it automatically uses the right textures from this NIF.
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It could also be using equipment for Robert's Male Body (maybe any body mod even) on Vanilla bodies, or vice versa.
I couldn't yet figure out why, but this is also known to cause bodyparts along with armor or clothing to disappear, for some.
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If this is somehow the only mod you installed so far, everything should be fine as it is. By default there are no files in the meshes or textures folders, I think even the folders themselves don't exist, before you installed a mod with its own resource files.
However, if you know for certain there were other mods' resource files in your meshes and textures folders before which are now gone, then it might actually be saying "replace" instead of "merge" (don't know exactly what it's called in an english OS) when asked killed them.
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Ok, added the tail to my race, its fine. However, there is a single problem: The end of the tail is ever so slightly jutting out of the butt of the race.
Can I fix that in 3DSMax or Nifscope?
Yes, 3DSMax can be used for modeling for Oblivion. The NIF Tools website I linked also holds import/export scripts for this app along with a whole bunch of tutorials.
I was expecting this to happen. I didn't have a lowerbody imported into Blender when I reshaped it to fit, so I didn't have a reference if it will align to the body mesh or not. And even if I did, it would not necessarily fit all different body mods likewise. You can easily fix these minor things just by moving around a few vertices without risking to break the rigging or having to re-weight them.
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thank you. Do you want me to add you to the credits and a link to your site as a thank you?
Now all I need to do is fix the whole problem with the abilities and greater powers i made not appearing even though i added them to the race menu like the default races have.
PS At school now, will come back after i have tested the tail. You saved me a lot of work and keyboards (of me throwing it out of anger)
If you want to credit me, feel free to do so, but it's not necessary. I didn't create this tail after all, it's Bethesda's.
Are you "changing" your race ingame through "showracemenu" or are you really starting a new game to test your race? The first one will not give you any of the abilities or spells the race has, so maybe that's the cause.
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It's the BSA timestamps from what I've read (or heard rather). Load order, date of ESP or such things can't help. For some people it works, for some it doesn't, but Steam giving the BSA files a date far more recent than most replacer-type mods makes the game stick to the BSA files' contents.
Have you tried installing Oblivion somewhere outside of the steam apps folder, which of course also is inside the troublesome "program files" folder, already now? Shouldn't it be sufficient to only move Oblivion, not the whole steam apps folder? (Is this even possible with Steam?)
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Alright, this "gibberish" word is something I often get to read when I tried to explain something to someone. Guess I'm not that good in explaining.
Well, first off, NifSkope likely won't be enough for the task. You'll need a modeling app like Blender for these things.
I had to do it myself first so I got an idea what can be done and what can't. You can already scrap that idea with keeping the weights and renaming the vertex groups. These things got lost on import already for me. The solution I chose was copying the bone weights of an existing tail over to the horse tail, after I resized and moved and rotated it into position to connect to a human body and go along with the tail bones. Let's see if I can explain this step by step.
For the basics, in Oblivion meshes to be used on actors, like clothing or bodyparts, need to have all their vertices "rigged" (as in connected) to bones of skeletons. Therefore every vertex has a "weight" (0.0-1.0) telling how much it sticks to a certain bone in movements. If for example a vertex has a weight of 1.0 to bone A and 1.0 to bone B, it will move along likewise with both of them, while if it only has a weight of 0.5 to bone B, it will stick with bone A more, of course, and is only influenced half as much by bone B.
Now a common comfortable way to assign these weights is by "weight painting", where colors represent the amounts (blue = 0.0, lightblue = 0.25, green = 0.5, yellow = 0.75, red = 1.0) and between the vertices the colors blend into each other. It's somewhat like a heat diagram, with the heat representing the weights to a certain bone. Vertices not rigged to at least 1 bone don't know what to stick to and shoot away into infinity ingame, causing massively distorted meshes.
Now, but that's just technical background so you might get an idea what's going on and why. I recommend searching for a few nice tutorials about weight painting and rigging, if you're interested, though sadly the one I used to learn this stuff, Cute Unit's Rigging Tutorial, seems to be nowhere to be found anymore nowadays.
Well then, back to business. For reference I'm exclusively using Blender myself, but other modeling apps should be similar.
First thing I always do when starting from scratch is importing a fresh skeleton, or better yet only the armature as I don't need any controllers, collision or other fancy stuff for only modeling and rigging meshes. For this I import "skeletonbeast.nif" (I want the tail bones) with the option "skeleton only - parent selected".
After this was done and I could see a nice and clean armature ready to get meshes rigged to, I selected this armature and imported the horse tail from the NIF I previously extracted from the BSA. This time I was using the option "geometry only - parent to selected armature", but of course it didn't work and I had to parent this mesh to the armature myself first. This is done by first selecting the horse tail, then shift-selecting the armature in Object Mode and then clicking "Object > Parent > Make Parent..." in the menu and choosing "to Armature" and "don't create groups" from the dialogs coming up. I'm going to create the vertex groups myself, as Blender's automatic ways to do this usually only create a useless mess.
After this was done I moved, rotated and scaled the tail mesh in Edit Mode until it fitted onto the tail bone chain nicely and was at a place where it should connect to the body appropriately. Always do this in Edit Mode or things will be broken after export. Every object in Blender has a little node which is its origin. If this node is not at the center of the scene, where the Scene Root node is located, it's useless after export. The bones don't have to be "inside" the meshes rigged to them or even close to them, but as the vertices will stick to the bones at constant relative distance and fixed position and move along with them that way, things can become quite distorted when the bones are too far away and moving too much.
Now the tail was at the proper place and orientation, ready to be rigged. Next I imported an Argonian tail mesh the same way I did for the horse tail previously. This one was going to be the source for my bone weight copying. And as last preparation I deleted all existing vertex groups from the horse tail mesh in Object Mode. After this was done I selected the horse tail mesh in Object Mode, then shift-selected the Argonian tail and then clicked "Object > Scripts > Bone Weight Copy" in the menu. I selected quality level 4 for this simple mesh and watched the weight copy process run by.
Now I had a nice horse tail properly rigged to the human tail bones, deleted the Argonian tail, selected everything by pressing "a" once and exported it into a new NIF file. (You can most likely keep the default settings for this.)
I know this looks rather complex, especially if you don't know Blender at all, but once you got a hang of Blender and importing/exporting from/to NIFs for Oblivion, things like this become an easy task actually. There are a lot of very helpful tutorials easy to understand, especially found on the NifTools website (http://niftools.org) for the Blender NIF Scripts (which is what you need to open NIFs in Blender to begin with) and the famous CS wiki (http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page). I'm sorry I can't provide any images or further detailed instructions, but this is beyond what I can currently do without my laptop or a pc and with my limited amount of free time.
For what it's worth, here's the NIF file, ready to be used as tail for a race and tested:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=N1V86ZQZ
I hope this somewhat compensates for the horrible instructions I wrote down.
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Basically you'll need to position the mesh at the proper location and rotation so it connects to the spine visually correctly. Then you need to "rig" the mesh to the tail bones so it will stick to them and move along with them in animations.
This is not really one of the easiest tasks and hard to explain. It's using "weight painting" to for each vertex set the amount of attraction to each bone. You could simplify the task by copying the bone weights of existing tails, if they closely fit in shape enough for this to work out, or maybe by just renaming the "vertex groups" the horse tail's vertices are rigged to from the horse bones' to the human bones' names.
I hope this is giving you some pointers towards what to read up. I'll try to get into detail some more later when I have more time to write.
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First make sure the blend type in the NiTexture property is Modulate and not one of the environment mapping types.
Then the glossyness of the NiMaterial property can make things quite shiny, but most important is the translucency (alpha channel) of the normalmap texture file ("..._n.dds"). This one controls the reflectivity for just about every blend type. The more translucent your normalmap texture is the less it will shine. Some people save their normalmaps in a format without alpha channel, making it 100% reflective, without knowing it.
As a rule of thumb, if you can "see" your normalmap when looking at it in a drawing app, then it will shine like hell ingame.
Last but not least a NiSpecular property can make things shiny as well, so get rid of these when unwanted.
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What object is it those script is running on? Some item types NPCs won't equip on their own, like jewellery or any tail slot items for example. This script literally depending on an OnEquip block will never trigger when the thing is never equipped. Apart from this the code's perfectly valid.
Additionally, if it's a script equipping this item in the first place, an EquipItem call will "not" trigger the OnEquip block. The latest OBSE specifically incorporated EquipItem2 due to this.
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Rings work the same as shields and weapons in that they don't have any vertex weighting, so that's probably your problem. They have a single string with the name of a bone, and it basically glues them onto that bone. In the case of rings, it needs to switch between L and R, which it can't do if it isn't using that format.
For arbitrary items just "worn" in the ring slot according to my observations this is not true. They were simply rigged to the skeleton bones as usual and just set up to occupy the ring slot in the CS. But what I stumbled across when messing around with it was that you need to make those ring slot items "armor", as for some reason as "clothing" they were not rendered at all. This could be due to a different mistake on my end though, but I always specify them as armor since then.
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The Vampire race is not a "race" per say. I don't have much insight into this hardcoded game behavior myself, but the race "vampire" is only used to somehow "blend" into the actual race the actor is of once turned into a vampire. You can turn everybody in the game into a vampire, but this is not a change of race. Take a look at the head mesh of the vampire race. Now this shape and the shape of the non-vampire actor get blended over according to the level of vampirism the actor currently has. The eye textures get completely changed out to the vampire ones, so even beasts like Khajiit and Argonians get "human" vampire eyes. And I already told you about the fangs. Those come from a vampire shape key in the TRI file of the human teeth. Khajiit and Argonians don't even get fangs when turning into vampires.
I did it once previously but can't remember that well anymore now, but I think you need to add a certain vampire "ability" (via AddSpell) to the actor and it immediately becomes "vamped". It might have been something along the lines of "vampirism", but I think it was the "vampire sun damage" ability rather. Just play around with adding these spells (you'll need to retrieve their FormIDs) to random actors ingame via console and you will quickly find out which one makes them look like vampires. Or you could analyze the scripts related to vampirism and find out how they do it. They weren't that hard to find either.
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To sum things up, spell scripts use the reference they're running on as implicit default. So function calls like "ref.doSomething" can just be used as "doSomething" and will use the reference the script is running on by default. If you need the reference as an actual parameter though, like with a function "doSomethingTo ref", you can use "getSelf" to obtain the reference the script is running on, as was done with "set Target to getSelf" here. However, in the underlying spell script this won't even be necessary, as no such function requiring an explicit reference parameter was used. Instead of "Target.GetVampire", "Target.IsSpellTarget" and "Target.AddSpell" you can just use "GetVampire", "IsSpellTarget" and "AddSpell" directly and it will implicitly affect the target of the spell by default.
Lineage 2 dragons
in Mod Ideas
Posted
I know of a few which were being worked on last time I checked, but haven't yet seen a release so far.
The chinese modding comm has a lot of such meshes, if I'm not mistaken, even some which aren't rips I think. But it's hard to find them due to the language troubles.