CaptainFool123

I can confirm that after some work in nifskope it functions fine in the game after doing this

after a bit of messing about in outfit studio I have got myself a weighted bow mesh in nifskope (though whether it will work in game is yet to be established) this was achieved by using a forsworn bow (with no collision mesh) as the reference mesh/skeleton in outfit studio, then importing the forworn bow nif file again, but edited so that the nitrishape data has my bow mesh instead of the forsworn bow. I then copied bone weights from forsworn bow mesh to my bow mesh in editor, and exported it to nif. I then opened the exported nif and deleted the existing NiSkinPartition node in the NiSkinInstance node, within the nitrishape node of the bow mesh I then right clicked on the nitrishape node: mesh->make skin partition. skin partition options being the standard for a bow, Number of bones per vertex: 4, & number of bones per partition, 7 (as there's only one partition). Not sure about the rest of the options but i kept them off. I did this and the mess of triangles in the mesh formed into a bow.

tell me about it, i'm using a dev version of the plugin and had to tamper with the source code to get the thing to even export. correct me if i'm wrong but i'm fairly sure the 3ds format is similar to obj, in that it can't export armatures, which have proven to be necessary for the bow's bones and vertex weights. looking to see if I can use that outfit studio program as some kind of workaround in the mean time

Hi, funnily enough i'm currently having the same problem. I'm thinking it has something to do with the exporter. have you found a solution yet?

Hi, and thanks for the suggestions, though none of them proved to be the problem it did give me more ideas (by ideas I mean clicking on nifskope options until something changes XD) and I have found the issue. As it turns out it was an option in nifskope in the mesh section called "smooth normals". You would have thought with such an obvious name I would have already tried this a while ago, and I thought I did, but I guess not. Regardless, This worked, and the mesh looks much nicer. as an amateur doing this for a minor hobby I'm not well versed enough in 3d modelling to know why "smoothing normals" would be needed to prevent this issue, but oh well.

When texturing sword blade meshes (made in blender exported to 3ds file), I was unhappy with the detail I could apply when the uv map stored the sword blade as a single shape (the entire blade projected from view on to the map as a single shape). So naturally I split the blade's UV Map net into 4 different pieces (as this allowed for more space effeciency in the texture dds file (2048x2048pxls)), which had the desired effect. However, it also added an undesired effect in which the blade appeared segmented when looked at from a certain angle, or with some shaders applied. At first I assumed this was one of those common seam problems where the applied texture does not go far enough out of the UV texture mesh net in the UV file, resulting in lines appearing. But i'm not sure about this now, as this problem apparently occurs with or without textures (which are aligned pixel to pixel) as the lighting wierdness occurs in nif skope as well with textures disabled. Strangely, increasing the number of vertices in the mesh in blender via subdivision surface helped reduce this issue by a margin, though it is still somewhat visible. I noticed that the vanilla dwarvern greatsword, which also splits its blade mesh into two, also suffers this problem though to a much lesser degree, only ever showing presence when some type of enchant shader effect is applied to the weapon, and not showing at all in nifskope. (something possibly of note is that it uses an obj file format, unlike the 3ds file format I used) Which brings me to my question, is this an inherent flaw with the skyrim engine in general regarding lighting, or is there some super secret technique of avoiding this i'm not aware of which helps to prevent this problem?

maybe have a look at this? http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/37440/?tab=3&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fskyrim%2Fajax%2Fmodimages%2F%3Fid%3D37440%26user%3D1&pUp=1