throttlekitty

Even then, they'll (probably) be using the same texture anyway, I doubt the game will blend between textures for the body weight morph.

I know you said the issue goes away when not using those hairstyles.. but that looks more like bad vertex lighting on the head than shadow issues to me. Prometheus had a similar issue when crafting his new female body, something to do with broken bone weights. If those are shadows coming from the hair, they don't follow the shape of the hair very well, but sky's the limit when it comes to broken/semibroken nifs.

Instead of deleting all mods, I would go through the readmes for the mods you have installed. Figure out which mods require ScriptDragon, and only remove those.

That message comes from mods. Either Script Dragon or SKSE, i'm not sure which. You'll need to either update those to work with the new Skyrim patch.

Awesome! I know documenting sucks, but info like this is a big help for everyone. Can we get this on a wiki somewhere so it's a bit more visible, readable and permament?

Actually Sidecar was a term I picked up from a tech support job years ago. That and I like to sound fancy now and again. Yes freeze-frame is a good way to put it, you may want to read up on morph/morph target/blend shape -same function, different names depending on the app. The whole tri file is always loaded, there's a 0 to 1 slider to move between the base shape and a given morph(s). Shapes for character generation work the same way. I'm in the CK beta group, so I'm restricted from answering that until the NDA is lifted when the beta period is over.

dr throttle here. Facial animations are stored in .tri files, sidecars to the nifs. I keep linking to this, despite it's probably the worst tutorial i've written, but it's got info, and more importantly the tools you'll need. It was written for Oblivion, but the concepts are mostly the same, the big difference is that the 'mod' morphs aren't used. Children use them, but we'll disregard that, cos they're little ragamuffins anyway, and modverts are a HUGE PAIN. So, for non-ragamuffins, things like blink/look/squint are just regular morphs now. Basic idea is that you just reshape your mesh for each morph/animation, export as obj, and inject into the tri file.

Basically this is down to the actual construction of a hair model, usually not an easy fix to make. Considering most the hair mods are ported content from elsewhere, I would assume people doing the porting don't have the source files, making it a trickier thing to fix.

Ah, I wasn't very clear, sorry. Each of those textures in that folder are a face texture for an NPC introduced by skyrim.esm. So if you're modifying one of those mannequin npc faces to reflect the race change, that's where you'd need to look.

in the bsa: textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\ is a collection of baked textures npcs use, named by actors' formid. Maybe SkyEdit or somesuch can help you find the formids for the mannequins in your house? I'm not sure what to suggest for actually editing this texture. Maybe the NPC Editor tool would help here?

Glad to help. Sometimes it's hard to help on some of the complex-ish topics, been a bit busy. :) By "UV Stacking" i mean this: Generally when duplicating a model, particularly when the intention is to reverse the face direction (as it is in this case), or mirroring for symmetry, it's common not to touch the UV coordinates - the part of the model that defines what area of the texture to use. Many times in these cases, the triangle data tends to get split, or to say that the vertices in the duplicated/mirrored section become unwelded. So each triangle is detached from its neighbors. But one can't simply select the affected region and merge the vertices, as that would also merge with the set of polygons facing the other way. This is bad.

Does every thread have to devolve into this?

In the shader properties, there's a flag for rendering meshes double-sided, if you're going that route. But it doesn't look as grand, a 'backwards' polygon would get the lighting of the front side of the face, so the lighting won't look quite right most of the time. I think a better option for these feathers is to use a backlight map. I've a feeling these were supposed to use that to begin with. Assuming the normals aren't totally buggered for the vanilla feathers, just dropping the effect/mask in should suffice. Meshes\clutter\hagraven\hagravenfence01.nif to see how it's set up. When a polygon is facing the camera, but away from a light, the backlight effect kicks in, as seen in the image. It uses a mask to control how much light is passed through. This one also includes veins and darkened edges to nice effect. edit: deleting one layer can be a bit of a chore. In maya's attributes for the model > render settings > single/double sided toggle will help here. Select a triangle and move it to see which half you've picked up. You can grow the selection to the entire shell from there, assuming it's not welded to the half facing the other way at any point. (most of the time, objects with stacked UVs tend to get many many splits in the triangles, which is where the chore part comes in...)

Just to disperse a little confusion with the language, alpha channel is an attribute of the texture, and alpha property is an attribute of a .nif. You mention you know how to add an alpha channel in photoshop, so I'll assume the texture you're using/modding has one now and it should work for transparency. First, check that when you added the AlphaProperty to the mesh, it's actually attached to a TriShape, and not floating freely in the nif structure. -Click on a Trishape, and look to the details view. -Expand the Properties list at the bottom, A ShaderProperty and the AlphaProperty should be listed here. *If not, enter the index number for the AlphaProperty here, it's the number that prefixes all node names in the tree view.

hot damn.

Check out meshes\weapons\volendrung for an example of how a lightingshaderproperty should be configured for glow. Probably best to copy/paste that block, but you don't need the controllers, unless you'd like to keep the pulsing effect. You'll probably need to adjust the emissive color to suit your needs.

Looks like issues with triangle sorting / alpha blend mode. This is more or less fixable in a 3d editor, but a major pain. Without going into much detail, the 'strips' of hair need to be combined in a back-to-front order, so the mesh renders properly. However, in Skyrim, alpha blending on hair models won't render shadows, instead, use alpha testing only. Which also avoids the triangle sorting issue, and renders faster. (at the cost of losing the smoothly blended alpha)

Looks like the specular map is all-white, so the highlighting is at it's fullest everywhere. At least I assume that's what you're wanting to point out, as you didn't mention it. In the alpha chanel of the normal map, you'll need to create some kind of texture there, check out some of the vanilla textures to get a feel for what it should look like. For the most part, with hair you can desaturate and run levels or somesuch from your diffuse texture and get a decent result.

derp, you had mentioned that, sorry. (my reading skills have really taken a plunge lately!) Looking at Meshes\armor\daedric\daedriccuirassgo.nif , things look fairly straightforward, check the BSXFlags as a start.

I can't speak much on the plugin records, but have you tried using your gnd meshes as a vanilla replacer to rule that out?

Hells yes.

Rings use 36, and amulets use 35.

Yes. It's one thing to make something that looks like, but it's another to use the actual content.

Aha! I have a feeling that will solve a lot of the skinning issues you've been running in to.

it's cool, i tried to write that right before i went to bed, was having trouble finding the right words. :)