KettleWitch

While topics such as 3d have plenty of crossover between the planned modding platforms, implementation tends to be fairly unique to the individual game engine so we could really use the help and experience of those of you in the FO4 community with engine specific knowledge especially. The guild is hoping to bring various communities together under the banner of freely sharing modding knowledge and information and provide a platform where anyone can access it without feeling the need to be affiliated or “owe” any individual project for that knowledge. So if any of that sounds like your thing and you have knowledge/skills to share at your own pace, please do get in contact :)

You have to go and test the shaders 1 by 1 to find the culprit mate. Few things about this error...... I think they are import errors when you import a custom mesh into a vanilla .nif. Better to use the nif plug-in for Max, export from max as nif, then copy NITrishape data from one nif to the other. I find it comes from whatever vanilla .nif you use for your custom mesh. Try using 'iron sword' nif for your base not 'steel' or something else. Rebuilding the nif from an iron sword base nif gets rid of this error 9 times out of 10 for me. Rememember that blood textures are 512*512. you dont need a UV map resolution any bigger then this on your blood meshes. If (by example) your texs/UV map are 4k and you duplicate the blade to make the blood meshes, decimate it down and re UV map to 512*512. you just want a simple low polly count 'shell' for the blood meshes', not 4k duplicates of the entire blade-otherwise your trippling the mesh size at render by having 2 high polly count meshes as your blood meshes. So... Get a copy of the vanilla iron sword from the Skyrim meshes .bsa import your mesh by replacing the NiTrishape shape block replace (not remane texture paths) the vanilla texs/cube with yours. Decimate and UV map your blood meshes to 512*512/import the same way as above. Test in game as an iron sword replacer-no errors?-then tweek the nif specular settings/cube map. Only when done replace the vanila texure paths in the nif to your mod/custom path. Do this last because that error can pop up when you change the vanilla texture paths. Anyway may be some help dude, you know where to find me if it don't ;)

Try turning off your 'lesser' video card in device manager/display adaptors in windows. Total long shot but the enb may be running on your second card in the background somehow, eating up ram? I posted up some more ideas to try in your other post for what it's worth mate.

Man that's a brutal fps loss when you turn on the ENB, there's no way it should be that bad. I'm afraid were moving into territory I don't know much about but would you have more then one set of enb binaries floating about? The numbers your giving look like there's two or three enb's runing! Try this mod from Volvaga0 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/7804/? To strip away everything to do with enb's in your Skyrim directory and then try installing Sloth's enb again (it's the fastest I've come across). Volvaga0's mod lets you use up to 5 slots for preset enb's so you could load up 2 or 3, see the fps differrence between them and then cross reference the settings to see what the 'faster' enb's are doing. Or load up one enb and one by one drop settings to zero and test for each dropped setting. Long, boring work I know but it may identify the problem enb settings on your rig at least. If that don't work try deactivating all your mods in NMM (you don't have to uninstall them) and start a new game/save with no mods and only the enb running. Just a check to make sure it's not some random mod not playing nice, long shot to be sure but worth a go. (Edit: just saw your other post with mod load out. Your using a lot of weather mods so this is well worth a try.) If still no go it may be worth editing your SkyrimPrefs.ini with a fine tooth comb. You'll have to go dig a little in the Forums for talk about settings but there's loads there. Here's an article I used when first getting into customising the .ini. http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats-new/guides/five-fast-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweaks-guaranteed-to-make-your-game-look-even-better#1 at the very least it explains what the main changes you can make are and how things like uExterior Cell Buffer has to be proportionally set to the uGrids value and stuff. Other then that I'm more or less out of ideas mate, if still no joy your best bet is to PM someone who knows a lot more about this stuff then me. Try Sloth, he's really cool, generous with his knowledge and truly knows his beans when it comes to this stuff. I'll keep an eye this thread mate, if I think of anything else I'll post it up for what it's worth. Good luck :smile:

Lowering Ugrids to 5 from 7 should make a huge difference. Use the lower Ugrids with something like enhanced distant terrain, http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1598/? to balance out any loss of detail at a distance. Imo you really don't need ugrids set above 5. I think the problem your having is down to the ENB/texture packs your using. First up drop any 4k textures your using down to 2k version. I dabble a little in textures and promise you there's no real visible difference between the two in game apart from 4k textures dragging your fps into the mud. Consider that an average texture is actually 3/4 files. Diffuse, normal/specular and environment 'maps'. Using 4k texs doesn't double the resources used, it doubles it 3 times, once for each 'map'. Enb's really enhance the specular embedded in the normals alpha channel, again post processing a 4k specular is going to take a lot more juice then then a 2k specular for no real noticeable difference to the human eye. Anyway from your description you may want to try a different ENB, dptheslothking brought out a really good ENB that has VERY low fps loss. He uses a separate mod for DoF and no SSAO and this really ups your fps. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/46320/? At the very least check out that page as he explains what ENB setting really grind down your fps. Just my 2 cents worth mate, hope it helps a little :smile:

Hey Chicky, glad my ramblings may be a little help :) I'm still a newbie myself when you get down to it so don't take anything I said as gospel, just some stuff that helped me move forward. And yeah, there's nothing in the world like seeing your all work load up in game and not cause a CTD. Makes all the tears and punching walls worth while :)

Here you go mate: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/44418/?

Hey GN, looking good already :) Consider putting shots like these up as development shots via your user profile/images/add image rather then in the forums (unless you have a specific prob). Add to mods section of latest images. You'll get a lot more views/comments/encouragement because the footfall there is way higher then the forums. Keep it up!

So, your gonna start modding eh? You fool! Run now while you can! a) Gimp is the best way to start for free I think but photoshop is worth every penny. Move onto it as as you can afford to, it's a different world. b) by coding do you mean scripting? If so notepad++ (free) is really the only thing you'll need other then CK and some tutorials and you don't even need that, it's just super handy for scripting. Skyrim school over at TESA is the best place to start for this and other topics. http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/113-esv-skyrim-school/ c) absolutely, I've animated telescopes, a dagger and I'm doing a new sword that do just that. Check them out via my profile. You use scripting and registering for animation events to swap models/texs as you draw/sheath d)I bloody hope so, I'm putting one on my new sword! Yeah you can mate. You'd register for the animation event 'blocking' while the weapon is equipped. It would be a small script attached to the player. e) Like most things modding is all about putting the hours in. None of it is impossible, there's just so freekin much to learn about everything!!! enjoy yourself and put the hours in. you'll do great :)

Only teasing you about the bumps dude, I'm rarely in the forums but hate to see new posters with zero replies. I think because there's no easy answer outside of a custom world space you didn't get swamped with replies :) Look for mods on nexus with there own custom wordspace and do a good forum search on custom worldspace also. Fort dawngard is a prime example of a fort in it's own worldspace so you could poke around there in the CK. Anyway look forward to seeing your mod, don't worry too much about the weather and remember there's always 'wizards did it'.

I think weather is constant over the cell your fort is in so to have different weather at your fort you would have to make it a separate cell/worldspace. Hit the you tube skyrim tutorials, about weather in a custom worldspace. You can play around with sw and fw (set weather and force weather) console commands to figure out your forts weather 'boundries', see what your dealing with. Key codes here. http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Console_Commands_%28Skyrim%29/Weather Use a test load you don't mind screwing with and no weather mods installed. Fw works better but you can jam the weather in the cell with it if you save while playing around. Anyway, not much help I'm afraid but can't leave you here bumping the thread forever mate :)

Don't know much about quests, only started poking around in them, but would the force greet package be waiting for control to return to the player? Force greet strikes me as getting an npc to 'hunt' down a player and greet, like a courier. Game engine may not be able to do that and/or waits if the player is under control of another package when in the force great radius? The fact you can trigger it when you take the control player package off and walk up to them and 'E' may suggest some kind of clash between the packages? Drop the player control package and move player cell start location into the Force greet radius? Oh yeah, and I read somewhere when you use force greet package you have to make the first dialogue box in the chain normal rather then top level (blue not orange i think) Just some ideas, sorry not much help :(

Those animations that are already in a .nif don't have a trigger event dude there niController animations not havok, I use them all the time in my mods. The animations are controlled by the NiController flags embedded in the nif and play when the mesh is loaded. You have a static mesh with the activator script on it. When activated the script loads/swaps the nif with the .nif that has the NiController animation in it. This loading of the mesh is the 'trigger event' that starts the animations. The animation can play once, loop, play backwards depending on the flag settings. Hands up, I don't know much about activators so none of this may be relevant or even correct in this context but you can check out my mods telescope and valdrs lucky dagger via my profile to see the method in action. Hope this helps :smile: Edit: This thread should help out aswell, more along the activator/CK method rather then the way I do it. http://www.gameskyrim.com/getting-dwerespository01-animateopen-t258082.html

Sorry if I'm raising a dead thread here but just found it and don't normally spend much time on the forums. Achieving the effect on only a part of the screen rather then the whole screen is highly problematic. I spent a lot of time on it but hit a wall with not being able to really import material properties into a .nif.(trying to get a material to have a refractive index) but I still think it's a possibility, just don't know enough about material properties in Skyrim. You don't seem keen on a FOV based solution but it's certainly a starting point I can help with for what it's worth, that's my mod that SONNYSPAK posted up :) Anyway let me know if this thread is still going and/or PM me if you fancy chewing the fat.

Well first you have to find the name of the animation event. Creation kit-Gameplay-Animations Actors\Horse\Behavior.hkx ActionIdle\HorseIdleRoot (at this point just gonna use horseidleridden as example) HorseIdleRidden\HorseIdlePet when you click on HoseIdlePet the right side of the CK fills up with the data you need. The event your registering for is the AnimEven NOT the id, so in this case idlepet (watch those capitals or lack of) is the event so in the script attatched to the bike(or player) you would have something like “when player rides horse/bike” (this is just code off the top of my head dude, probably won't compile but just to give you an idea) RegisterForAnimationEvent(Game.GetPlayer(), "idlepet") and script what should happen on event (idlepet) occuring Event OnAnimationEvent(ObjectReference akSource, string asEventName) if(akSource == self) if (asEventName == "idlepet") VROOM.Play(akSource) ; Vroom is your sound-don't forget sound descriptor/marker endif endif endEvent http://www.creationkit.com/RegisterForAnimationEvent_-_Form http://www.creationkit.com/OnAnimationEvent_-_Form Can't recommend TesAlliance highly enough for stuff like this, check out this thread, should help you out. http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/topic/5727-changing-bow-stretching-sound-with-papyrus/?hl=registerforanimationevent&do=findComment&comment=85419 I use registering for anim event a lot in my mods, check out Valdr's lucky dagger redone http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/40775//? and look at the ani script source. Anyway that should get you up and running dude, hope it helps :smile:

This is just off the top of my head dude but have a look into registering for animation events. Attach a script to your bike that registers for animation event run/sprint/idle or whatever. When it detects the event, play sound. Only guessing but I'd say what happens is there's a script on a horse doing the same thing. When it detects the horse idle playing it plays the horse sound. Maybe the sound is embedded to the idle but I doubt it. Anyway just some ideas to get the ball rolling.

I've had peeps asking why I made a mod of a snail on a stick so the fact you can see the stag is a bonus :) Seriously though dude it's a hell of a lot of work and learning but you can get there. Put in the hours and the rewards do start to come (I've quit more then once but there's some good peeps on the Nexus who have kept me going) Looking forward to seeing what you else you come up with Vatueil :)

Then it has to be a Riften Special :) Add it to vendor lists for Riften? Before you finalise the specular into the normal experiment with adding contrast to it as well. You should see an increase in fine detail. (flip the y in normal map after you have added specular) Diffuse with no alpha =DTX1 Diffuse with Alpha=DTX5 Normal with specular as alpha channel (skyrim) = DTX5 Environment map=DTX1 Normal maps are where it's at my man. The etchings and wood texture on my new axe are all just added to the normal map for that detail. Didn't texture a thing to get it :) http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/272139/? If you go the high polly bake route you get definition like my last axe. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/38636//? That one doesn't even have a cube/environment map because I didn't know what they did at the time and cheated! And yes, that was shameless advertising :)

Delighted for you mate and it don't look shabby at all, way better then the first models I did! Worst case scenario my ramblings may help out someone else :) For what it's worth really consider downloading Xnormal (Free) http://www.xnormal.net/ and using a low and high polly to generate your normal maps. Even if your high polly is just a crazy subdivided low polly your normals will come out much better. Nothing wrong with generating normals from diffuse but high polly bake is the next step up from where you are now, go for it. Remember. Specular is an alpha channel in the normal. You put it there yourself (for Skyrim) _em.dds _m.dds are environment maps. Get your diffuse, greyscale it (like I say add contrast) and use them with cube maps. I've only just kinda figured all this out so that's why I'm pushing it. anyway feel free to drop a PM if you get stuck dude, I'm usually around.

edit: make sure you press 'a' in uv editor and select all parts of UV. When you have unwrapped in blender, in the UV/Image editor window click that big 'NEW' button. If you already gave a uv a name or 'NEW' isn't there click the 'X' three to the right of 'Untitled' or what ever until it is. A pop up menu appears. You can set the UV resolution here. Don't worry about other stuff. When you click OK you should get your UV with a black background at defined resolution. Now go to object mode and export as .3ds or .obj. This last defined UV resolution is the one that gets exported with the object best as I know.

BSLightingShader property skyrimShaderProperty flags 2 delete SLSF2_double_sided for starters, shouldn't be in the iron dagger base nif and spreads your texture over both sides of the mesh as far as I know, looks like a contender? If it's not that start clean mate. Extract a vanilla iron/steel dagger from .bsa, import your model as .3ds, clean up material properties an such. leave the texture paths as they are and build a replacer mod using the new nif as a base. Rename your textures to irondagger.dds and such so you can be sure these flags behave. A new mesh and textures should be all you change along with import/export clean up to start. The resolution of your UV map should be the same as the resolution of your texture as far as I know. Make sure the UV map is 1025*1025 or what ever as well. Let me know how you get on.

Too late, i typed it so you get it :) In nifskope once your getting a uv somewhere on the grid, like you are, nifskope should just map the thing. The fact your UV 'Looks' fine from you screen shot in .nifskope just makes me suspicious. If it was a wire frame mess, then fine, didn't export or something. But it looks good so simplest answer is it's an older/different version. Not saying i'm right there, just that i've done it myself loads of times :) Before you unwrap for the last time in blender make sure you go into object mode, select your object and CTRL+A Apply Scale if you don't you'll never get a decent UV map out of blender for skyrim. Well I can't :) Also apply scale and check out the auto unwrap UV in Blender suddenly work a lot better!

Hey man, for what it's worth. Change object to tri shape not tri strip. Your environment map is in the wrong slot and they don't work unless you use a cube map with them. Slot 5 = cube map Slot 6 = environment map re-extract the vanilla steel dagger from meshes .bsa and pop them back in/compare. Can you throw up a shot of your BSLightingShaderProperty. There's a lot that can wrong in there, compare it to the vanilla dagger you just extracted at least. The UV map being above the grid happens to me all the time, do centre it. Try nifskope 1.1.0-RC7. It's the one I stick with. It's a long shot but the way the textures are being used in CK suggests that some where along the line the UV on the low polly (model in nifskope) and the UV you used to texture may have changed and are not the same. Extract the uv from your nifskope model into blender. Export UV from blender then overlay it on your diffuse just to make sure it's a perfect match. Don't just check the version you think it is :smile: re-import as .3ds the low polly model you are texturing on just in case. I don't trust nifskope nor blender, nor CK for textures. In game is the only way dude :smile: Edit: The specular actually goes into the alpha of the normal map for skyrim. Those _m.dds or _em.dds files are just a greyscale of your diffuse (probably add a little extra contrast). There not actually specular as such. Like I say, cube maps. http://wiki.polycount.com/CubeMap Unless you have an alpha channel in your diffuse you can use DTX1 compression and half the size of the .dds with no quality loss. Don't re-compress the DTX5 one, go back to your photo shop/ gimp base file. If you have created your own normal map you have to flip the y channel of the normal for skyrim. -y. do it just before you export to .dds (nvidia normal map tools/plugin) hope some of this helps!

Yeah, huge improvement since you turned back on. Nice job guys.

Heh, start with the hard stuff. Good man, you sound like myself :) So, for what it's worth..... You simply can't do better for a starting point in modding then the tutorials/workshops over at TESA. http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/113-esv-skyrim-school/ also start looking through the modders resources/tutorial section of Nexus. There are loads of good tutorials in there. Small thing, it's best to get a vanilla mesh, no matter what it is, and change/import new mesh to the nif rather then build a nif from scratch. Just change the actual trishape data to start, nifs are crazy! Use nifscope to copy/export a vanilla mesh as an .obj import to blender and do your stuff, don't forget to re UV map and all the rest if you change the mesh. Because Skyrim uses mipmaps, you can change the scale of a mesh (change the scale in nifskope, not blender it's really easy) and the textures should still be ok, it's only when you start pulling verts and stuff you need a new UV map. Anyway, when your done export from blender as a 3ds (.3ds) object so the UV map and stuff don't get messed up. Open up nifskope and import .3ds while you have the vanilla mesh selected (don't mesh with the root node) it should replace it. You'll probably have to re translate the mesh in nifskope. Check the uv map got imported to nifskope. (the current version of nifskope has busted .obj inport/export. I use a fairly old version 1.1.-rc7 because it works with blender 2.63. if you use blender 2.49 or under (i think) there are nif tools over at http://www.niftools.org/ but i pefere the newer versions of blender even if importing/exporting into nifskope takes a bit extra work. I'll PM you some other tutorial stuff I have but don't know the original links. They are for weapons but the import into nifskope stuff is well worth knowing.