Skree000

good samples there selty, irish is notoriously tricky, yours is pretty good! been doing VO scratch at my work attempting to set the tone and pace of a scene for animators to get rough ideas of timing down til the actual voice actors can get recorded, it IS a lot of fun :) you'll find a lot of prospective mods on the go around here im sure :)

as long as such a mod had some kind of slider or parameter to control the 'population density' it would be cool, ie. for lower end computers they might not want a hundred people, but maybe only 10 or 20 extra in each town :) This sounds cool though, i like the name of the thread too, really hits the nail on the head lmao. heres an easy fix for bedding... replace stock beds with bunkbeds, especially in military locations this would be commonplace anyways, and youve instantly setup the necessary requirements for atleast twice as many guards ;) I can picture the streets of solitude bustling with children actually, which would be easy to make lots of bunkbeds for.. many of them can just be street urchins like in Fable, up all night and day, or you can even use a lot of the empty space around town and put little cots around there or somin.

a gui that does the console commands skipping the middle man looks nice and would likely take work to hook up, the rest is just flavor. nice integration

Assuming you have a duplicate pair for body_0 and body_1, the only thing I can think of is there are a couple of verts maybe not getting some weight info. Only ctd's I've been getting with meshes have been due to that (or some phantom export glitch). HAHA Great!!! Ok some things ive discovered: Mesh_0 and Mesh_1 can be the same mesh, that is the easiest way to test if your export worked atleast and there is no problem with morphing, to determine this i simply replaced both femalebody_0 and femalebody_1 with femalebodyastrid_1 exported as either from nifskope and it worked. NOTE* You probably dont want to leave it like this, but this was just for testing, since if at this point you modify the weight slider, gaps rip open in the neck, hands and ankles where the 'skinny mesh' is supposed to be thinner here but its not. However, now that that was proved it made my life a lot easier because rather than making a skinny version right now I can focus on the export pipeline problems I was having. Here was my extended workflow with all steps: Have custom mesh open in MaxImport matching Vanilla mesh with partial skeleton (remove unused bones)Skin wrap from vanilla to my ownremove vanilla meshin skin modifier on my own, remove-zero-weights, just to be safe (this seemed to stop the CTDs)export to nifskopeopen second copy of nifskope with vanilladelete material block in modifiedpaste branch of the material shader branch from vanilla to modifiedset HasNormals to none in modifiedset HasVertexColors to yes in modifiedrClick'd 'Center/Radius', Mesh>Update Center and RadiusBSDismemberSkinInstance > Partitions > BSDismemberBodyPartType set to the numbers to match vanilla, rather than whatever Max spits outIgnore BSPartFlag entries, did not seem to matter (?)Nifskope>View>Block List> Show Blocks in ListOpen the "Header">Strings arraymodify entry 0 (root node), rename it the mesh you are saving as. ie in this case, FemaleBody_0.nif, save, then change name to FemaleBody_1.nif and save as that one. I used caps to match vanilla, not sure if importantit just works!!! :) now to refine the skinning and make the skinny version 8-)... oh and unwrap it lol

posted on niftools forums the minute you responded actually :) Would also be nice if the Scene Root (NifNode) would take the name of the nif file you export it as, or if there was a box where we could name it right in the export window, i might see if we could feat req that... pain in the butt to open the strings array and manually do that every time... ive hit an impass now, i made a custom body mesh from scratch with double the polys as vanilla, skinned it, dismember modifier on with partitions setup properly, material block copied from vanilla (original removed), has normals = no, renamed the root node to match the mesh name... vert colors yes (tried no also), CTDs on loading game now.... i had it half working atleast before, i copied and pasted over the Nitrishapedata block from mine into a vanillas and also the Skindata and skinpartitiondata from the dismemberment block from mine to orig, worked but some entries were rearranged i believe, no biggy, but cant seem to make that magic happen again now it just ctds, tried about 18-20 different versions, messing around with all the checkboxes, fields and arrays... so far ive found a few things.. one is that the BS UV sets field can be left as 4097 or 1 or anything it doesnt seem to care.. also good piece of advice for people is to rename the mesh in Max what it will show up as in nifskope, ie BodyFemaleBigCompleteBody or IronHelmet or whatever (will appear as the name of the NiTriShape block in the vanilla mesh you are emulating)

attached WinDBG to TESV.exe to watch what happens when it CTDs upon an invalid body nif mesh being loaded in, for what it's worth, this is what comes out initially (1fe8.1a8c): Access violation - code c0000005 (first chance) First chance exceptions are reported before any exception handling. This exception may be expected and handled. eax=00000000 ebx=00000000 ecx=20728500 edx=00000000 esi=20728500 edi=00000000 eip=00eaa9cd esp=3554fc78 ebp=2430ba20 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz na po nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00010202 TESV+0xaaa9cd: 00eaa9cd 8b08 mov ecx,dword ptr [eax] ds:0023:00000000=???????? keeps spamming that and about another 4 other exceptions indefinitely til it is killed. doesnt really help anyone cause we dont have the source but.. ehhh bored

Great stuff Joe. Thanks!

In the Partitions array in the BSDismemberSkinInstance there are two flags for Part Flag, PF_EDITOR_VISIBLE and PF_START_NET_BONESET now, vanilla femalebodyastrid has the first one both flagged, and the next two just the first one flagged, so it looks like this PF_EDITOR_VISIBLE | PF_START_NET_BONESET PF_EDITOR_VISIBLE PF_EDITOR_VISIBLE now when I export from max, every Part Flag is set to BOTH* being checked off. Okay im thinking, thats an easy fix, lets just have a look at the checkboxes, or worst case, copy pasta the exact words where they need to go except these checkboxes in this array seem to be broken... clicking the field then the little dropdown arrow reveals two checkboxes (the checking of each box does coincide with either flag, when i click the dropdown on a field that has either (or both) enabled for example) the problem is, when i release the mouse it changes the entry to 0 worse still, the field does not respond to alphanumerical input of any kind, nor does Paste, right click paste or anything work in there even worse still, checking one of the boxes or unchecking them also does nothing, the action does not commit and it wipes out the fields back to zero (0) So, I can change the Body Part entries just fine, but the Part Flag entries are fubared im guessing its this transitionary phase while the Nif.xml gets more lovins.. so the question is, does this Part Flag field matter? Im not able to get my custom mesh to show up in game anyways either way, so im trying to make everything match up

Its edge case, but i am curious to see the specifics of what would entail IP infringement in regards to modders (actually) making lookalike assets from scratch and having them removed as IP-theft, Ie. really talented artists being punished for making near-original facsimiles. Dont expect suits to have copies of max or maya handy to do 1-1 content analysis... would take up too much time and money, easier to just ban... Im really crossing my fingers it will be awesome but I cant help but shake my head and doubt heh.

not exactly what i meant.... i apologize and let me explain... the modding community has been going strong and has been blessed by all of the great tools Bethesda has released to us over the years, before Steamworks... However, with Skyrim and its use of Steam as a distributor and a platform, we are left to ask, whether or not this new move to push for Steamworks Integration was decided upon simply for the generation of profit, which would otherwise go uncollected as modders have been free to tinker, develop and trade mods between eachother and the world at will. From a business perspective, it is common sense to pursue a possible avenue for massive profits, seeing as how modders will mod whether or not their releases are regulated by official channels or underground websites. But from the a mod community members perspective, it looks to be a simple cash grab, and anytime suits step into the picture, the spirits of creativity, communal cooperation and friendly competition are very often stifled if not extinguished, replaced by greed. So the question remains, what will they do with sites like this one that share mods for free, if those mods are also being distributed for cash through Steamworks? Would that not then be grounds for the big companies to try to shut down free-mod communities like the nexus? Any intelligent businessman would try to choke free distribution of goods if those goods are now being sold for cash... so again, It is only my prediction and opinion, but unless more details are given on the upcoming Steamworks integration, I see it as a literal doomsday clock for free mod distribution on that platform. I am a huge supporter of the mod community. I am anxious about business suits trying to wiggle in and figure out ways to cash in on everyones hard work. But who knows, hopefully everything I fear will be completely wrong and it will be totally awesome rainbows and blue skies with buckets of money for you and me and everyone.... but I am cautiously doubtful. Additionally, the 'fail' aspect was in reference to what appears to be a straight forward mod distro system, assuming all mods are created entirely from scratch and not with use of assets or IP from other franchises or games. Unless there is some form of regulation or inspection of mod assets that are being loaded into the Steamworks system, that alone looks like a prime target for legal action. (ie. this looks like it could be a big pandoras box, once you start charging money for peoples work, and they arent guaranteed to have NOT ripped it from other games)

cant wait to see this fail horribly once people start trying to sell crap they ripped from other games and make a profit, ie. Crysis or Halo armor etc lol

Realtime shadowing lights are *extremely* taxing on systems, so they appear to be limiting them to one in each major area of a cell, the idea being (i would assume) that players never be standing in more than one at a time for performance reasons. so we can have a pretty slideshow or an ugly smooth experience, or something in the middle, which im sure they tried to target :)

Fixed http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/1087/creeperp.jpg

That is likely the snowmap blend mask or a detail map for shrubs/grasses/plants. re snow: afaik Snow on objects in Skyrim is a procedural shader that blends a tiling texture (snow) based on A) the polygons normal + the normal map (and/or Parallax (Occlusion) map). For objects i believe it is not masked in any way, merely controlled by normals. (ie. so snow always 'faces upwards', no matter what angle the meshes are rotated on, the snow is not 'baked in' it is calculated and added afterwards (Speculating here based on how other engines do it) For large stretches of terrain, grass and shrubs can be a laborious chore to place, so most modern terrain editing tools in various engines employ a 'Detail map' which masks off areas where predetermined meshes are automatically placed. The detail mesh distribution depends on a few additional variables such as density, rotation, and mesh name. Again, speculating here, but thats how almost everyone else does it.

CK is what you need. we are all playing the waiting game, and in the meantime seeing who can make the best face and nude mods lol

its a mysterious stranger :)

Big Kudos to you Vannus, this worked perfectly. thanks! Going to make some uber meshes now lol

One thing im doing while I wait for the CK is making a huge list of all the things I plan on modding. Getting the ObjectID numbers of the objects, spells, npcs etc you want to modify will be a big help, so you can do that now while you are waiting :)

Be sure that if you are hiding mesh by turning the materials transparent that there is no geometry holes below it. Often times mesh components will have the polygons underneath deleted entirely because they would never be seen. Not sure if that is the case here I have not examined the mesh in great detail but, just a word of caution

be the little kid at the beginning who is 'told to go back inside', and then witnesses a dragon attack. start in the wreckage of your parents home

lol great tutorial, I always wanted to make Elisif nekkid.... what... dont look at me like that.. hate it when you cant steal certain npcs clothings, even though i have the talent lol

Matth85 has a point, but ill give you a bit of a tip on how i resize armors to fit err... larger women... select the verts of the armor or shirt you want to expand. Enable soft selection start moving them observe as, when soft selection is enabled, it also drags out the local verts nearby (depending on your soft selection parameters).

Should ask in the Mod Troubleshooting section http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/forum/421-skyrim-mod-troubleshooting/

you should save em out with mipmaps, those are automatically embedded alternate-resolution versions of the textures that the renderer swaps in at different distances. This is done to combat artifacting that could occur when sampling very large or detailed textures at long distance when they may not occupy a lot of screen space (ie. if someone is holding the weapon and they are tiny on your screen, it will be sampling the entire full size texture to determine what pixels to show on your screen. Also for memory reasons mimaps are encouraged, depending on the tech.

can you post an example of one of the 'rivers' exhibiting the phenomena you are describing? im guessing you mean water textures scrolling through objects instead of around them, or into the land, etc. The animated textures on streams or other objects with panning textures (as far as the accuracy of the panning texture is concerned) depend entirely on the geometry of the river mesh, if the mesh contours the land smoothly, with a healthy amount of polygons, the water will flow along it smoothly. The less polygons you have, the more jagged or rough it will look. In regards to the larger bodies of water such as the big rivers, i am guessing due to the sheer size of the rivers there are no custom mesh alterations around pieces of land such as islands and rocks, and no panning additive blended texture to interact with in these areas