Tallcastle

Did you modify your "Skyrim - Textures.bsa" or "Skyrim - Meshes.bsa" Files at all?

Well I managed to fix it ... But if someone out there can tell me WHY this fixed it, I would love to know. For others having this problem in the future this may do the trick for you ... and if anyone who understands why this works reads this, please chime in because i still don't know what went wrong in the first place and its driving me crazy. tried the fallowing methods of getting it to work without any effect 1. Re-Exported NIF from Blender 2. Removed all materials and reloaded by hand (reassigning all Vertex groups along the way) 3. Deleted Old Skeleton and imported new one from a different NIF 4. In Nifskope, Imported Branches from other working NIF's to replace portions of my Power Pack NIF. 5. Created a new clean file in blender and imported the Power Pack NIF, disassembled the Power Pack 1 piece at a time and joining it to the new body. You get the picture, suffice to say my attempts get crazier and more desperate from there ... after a wile I started adding other (unattached) objects to the NIF and attaching them to unused bones in the skeleton, just to see if i could get anything to react to player movement. Converted in Nifskope, assigned with the Creation Kit and BOOM 1: suddenly the Power Pack Works PERFECT! and 2: The Object I added (a disembodied Arm of a Dwarven Spider Centurion) is now floating Motionless about 2 Feet behind me, following along behind but not responding to player movements in any other way. Ive recreated this effect 2wice and it seems to work each time so for a fix; 1. create a new object in blender (for my final draft its a tiny cube floating inside the main chases of the pack) 2. assign vertex groups to it (may not be necessary but I'm not willing to take chances fooling around with it until i actually understand whats going on) 3. Export and open and edit with Nifskope In the end you should end up with 2 NiTriShape blocks, each containing there own BSDismemberSkinInstance, NiTriShapeData, and BSLightingShaderProperty Blocks. One for your Mesh, the other for the extra object, i don't know how the game decides what object works with you skeleton and what one doesn't ... like I said, I don't know why this works, only that it does.

easy way to find out ... turn off all of your mods and run skyrim. if they are still black and pink, than there is something wrong with the base skyrim files (may need to reinstall to fix that) if not, than start turning your mods on 1 at a time (starting with the ones you where fiddling with and those you most recently downloaded) untill you get the Black/Pink effect once you pin down where the problem is you can sus out what happened. I can think of several reasons a mesh may turn pink or black ... could be a bad setting in Nifskope, or you may have accidentally changed one of the textures names and now the Meshes cant find the texture it needs to render properly. It will be worlds easier to fix once you know where the problem started. It is kind of time consuming but unfortunately its one of the only ways to figure out a problem when a mod is gunking up your game.

hmmm ... did you edit these textures yourself or is this a problem with some other mods you are using?

Have you tried importing and Exporting the armor into and out of blender in NIF format? (Just a guess) but I think the translation to and from OBJ format may be twisting your mesh up a bit. keep in mind that modding tools like blender and Nifskope haven't been completely adapted to Skyrim yet, and as a result a lot of data gets unintentionally twisted around by the software during modding. In your case this problem its having a detrimental effect as the "NiTriShapeData" is a significant part of what shapes your mesh and as you say, its not importing correctly. check what version of blender you are using and see if the Blender Nif scripts on the NIF Tools Wiki are compatible. ATM they don't really support skyrim, but they should allow you to import NIF's directly into blender.

could you post a screen shot of this? ... It would give a more tangible example of whats going on.

***UPDATE*** - I Solved This Problem By Accident Just A Few Hours After Posting It. However I Still Don't Understand Why It Happened In The First Place, Any Information About It Is Appreciated ... However As I Believe I Can Recreate The Fix, It Is No Longer Critical (See 2nd Post For Details) - Finishing up an armor set and I'm having a strange problem with the last item. The armor is a "Steam Punk" Dwarven Power Armor where the set would be complete with a "Power Pack" that takes the place of a Backpack like in Tupii's Leather Backpack Mod. Ive created boots, gloves, helmet, and torso ... they look great so far (a little more editing before release is needed but they imported just fine) but I'm having problems with the Power Pack. The problem is this ... it loads up into the game just fine but for some reason when applied to the body it floats in the air behind the Player. {SEE PIC's BELOW} Player not moving (when you move around it faithfully travels around behind you and rotates with you when you turn) Player strafing (moving to one side but view direction facing forward) Player jumping The NIF has bone assignments In Nifskope and Blender. And the vertices are weighted down properly Nifskope example Blender Example showing vertices assignments for vertex group "Spine 1 [spn 1]" as an example I have no idea what I'm doing wrong here and have been at this problem for 6 hours now with no progress. I could really use some advice on how to resolve this because I'm batting a 0 on my own.

managed to figure that ... it seems to have something to do with the Alpha Channel of the .dds files, I'm also getting the impression that the 'Glow Map' I added to make the Gem in the Torso and the Helmet Eyes glow is also having an adverse effect on the rest of the armor ... either way I can't seem to get the shine to go away ... for the sake of my sanity I'm Just going to go back into blender and rework the armor, removing all cloth textures and replace them with leather and metal. and as to your 'Power Armor' observation. you are right on the mark. this is my 1st draft of a "Dwarven Clockwork Power Armor" when I feel up to it I'm going to try adding jets of steam from vents in the torso and a clockwork backpack as a power pack. Gods only knows how long it will take me to figure THAT out, let alone figure out how to implement those changes in the creation kit. Like i said its just a 1st draft so if you have any suggestions feel free to fire them my way and ill see about implementing them. +1 Kudos to you by the way

next question. The questions you asked led me to a fix for the other problems but now my cloth textures are shiny (i thaught that had to do with the _m texture but even blacked out they are still reflective) Picture 1 Fixed Armor (Thank you for the help) http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh103/Tallcastle/ScreenShot7.jpg Picture 2 shiny cloth http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh103/Tallcastle/ScreenShot8-1.jpg

well i did some more fiddling with Nifskope. this time i left, Number UV Sets and Has Normals alone. (the tutorial i was looking at told me to change them) and both problems got fixed (sort of, now some things are reflecting light that the _m texture doesn't have highlighted) i think i can address that with a little tweaking. Exporting from blender always gives 4097 UV Sets. Yet vanilla meshes will very on this number. Does it need to be adjusted at all?

The following settings are for the Torso part of the armor (likely the worst offender of the 4) Number UV Sets = 1 (NIF exported from blender with 4097) Has Normals = NO (Exported from Blender as YES) Has Vertex Colors = YES (not sure what this does) Shader Flag 1 = specular, skinned, environment Mapping, recieve shadows, cast shadows, own emit, remappable textures, ZBuffer test Shader Flag 2 = ZBuffer write, double sided, Glow Map, envmap light fade (gauntlets and boots don't have 'Glow Map') Thank you for your help

for some reason the armor I created is 1. displaying too dark, and 2. not reflecting light. Ive fiddled with the base texture and the _m and _n versions, making them lighter or messing with contrast. I've also tried a large number of settings in Nifskope, nothing seems to make a difference. First picture is standard for armor, the next two shows the armor in darkness and standard ebony armor for contrast to show how light is not refracting. My Armor In Daylight http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh103/Tallcastle/ScreenShot3.jpg Light Reflection picture 1 (my armor not reflecting) http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh103/Tallcastle/ScreenShot6.jpg Light Reflection picture 2 (Standard Ebony reflecting normal) http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh103/Tallcastle/ScreenShot5.jpg

of coarse now that i reread your post i found that you already know and stated as much ... just ignore me sorry bout that

Figured it out ... sort of. I'm not sure how to add new type keywords, however you can change existing keywords to something else In Creation Kit from the Top Menu, Go to (Gameplay) -> (Settings...) you will get a long list of game settings do a filter search (for example, type in sStudded) you should only get one option with the same name. in the string value block type in whatever you want it to read (like for example FACTION) save your mod, load it, enter the game, and head to the smithy. in your smithing recipes where STUDDED was you will find FACTION in its place i hope this helps out ... there are a bunch of others you could experiment with (there is one for FALMER and DRAUGR for example) it may be possible to key into those strings to make new smithing categories but I'm not sure what changing them would do. good luck and happy modding :)

Thanks for the help! yes. i checked tutorials in a few places ... the big problem with me is i have no traditional programing experience so i don't really understand code in any programing language .... i have done some work with XML files modding Civilization 4 but even then "Python" was little more than sand script to me its odd how those 6 lines of code can make me feel like such a Luddite. :laugh: you are a lifesaver thanks again :)