Mirroring a piece of clothing and having it work

[puddlepond]

i'm trying to improve my merc grunt tank top for men mod. i duplicated the good half (the right half, making a new left half, the left half being the half receiving no light when the right half is fully lit and being fully lit when the right half is in shadow), mirrored it, made the mesh double sided, joined up the vertices, and tweaked the uv map so it displayed the right side of the texture. it looks good in the render, but in game the mirrored section is being pulled to the wrong side and moves with the wrong bones. i think i know the cause of that (something to do with bone weights?) but not how to fix it. the lighting is also all messed up, which i don't know the cause of nor how to fix it. i'd expect this kind of lighting glitch if i forwent merging the two halves before testing it in game, but it's all one object so that's not it. another idea is that it might be something to do with the fact that the new half is double sided and flipped inside out, which might mess something up with the normal maps or something like that.

 

update: yeah it was the normal maps. i just had to select all of the vertices on the mirrored half and hit "flip normal" and it works totally fine. i think i've figured out how to fix the bone weighting too. i think it's just opening the transform menu and changing the vertex deform groups.

 

update 2: instead of going through the tedious process of manually changing every vertex's deform groups i used blender 3.1.2 with maurizio memoli's mesh data transfer addon to copy the shape of the new symmetrical version with the bad weighting over to the old asymmetrical version with the good weighting. it's not perfect and it needs a little manual tweaking to look right but it's a hell of a lot less effort than the alternative. by the way, why do we use such an old version of blender? i totally thought that .nifs exported from anything newer just wouldn't work but this works fine.

Edited May 19, 2022 by arsthetiu