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My Child Races Mod: Last Desperate Cry for Help


Glitchipedia

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Well, as most of you probably know by now, I've been working on creating child races for some time. I have chosen a scale of 0.7x the size of adult characters, I have found excellent meshes to give the kids their own bodies (Room207 was kind enough to finalize his Femboy body replacer for the project), finding clothes in their size will be a trivial matter, and it seems the only things left to do are rescale the head meshes and adjust the sitting/sleeping animations to prevent clipping with furniture.

 

As far as the head thing goes....I'm stumped. I've tried everything I know to scale the vanilla head mesh up to 1.3x its original size while scaling the neck back down to normal. As long as that's all I do, the head is functional, but the neck doesn't align with the body or animate like it's supposed to. Realigning the neck wouldn't necessarily be an issue, but as soon as I try ANYTHING to put the neck bones and weight paint back on, the entire mesh breaks.

 

First I tried this tutorial. The head looked perfectly normal in Nifskope, but turned invisible in-game.

 

Then, fully realizing that it's supposed to be for the Head06 mesh, I thought I'd give this one a try. The head looked perfectly normal in Blender and Nifskope, but shifted about five feet to the left in-game.

 

As far as I know, nothing I'm doing should be producing these results. Unless someone can tell me what in the name of Talos I'm doing wrong, I'm going to have to ask for a more experienced modder to fix the head for me.

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Hello, Glitchipedia!

 

I'm sorry, but I actually can't help you because I don't know EXACTLY what you did when modeling your head.

 

But the troubles you are experiencing are the reason why there are no realistic child mods other than ones that do not change the body nor head meshes, but rather use the Scaling feature of Construction Set.

 

There are some basic thing I can point you to, but most likely you already know and avoid them: first, other than fixing the -90 rotation that Blender applies to imported obj meshes (rotation that can be deactivated in the import menu), you can't move the head mesh from where it lands once imported. You can move the vertices, but not the mesh itself, it is, the center of the object must remain always where it is on start. And second, before exporting to nif, you always must ensure you apply transformations (Scale and Rotation) with the ctrl A command.

 

And just to be sure, are you also modifying the skeleton to match the body and new head proportions?

 

I assume that you're weightpainting again the head mesh because the original bone weight doesn't work with the upscaled mesh, do it?

 

I have made a quick test with Blender to see if I was able to upscale the head without scaling too the neck, and I can.

 

What I did was take all the vertices from the mesh, de-select the three lower rows of vertices that comprise the neck, and scale 1.3 the remaining ones. The new head has a horrific deformation where neck and upscaled head join, so I positioned the scaled vertices a little up and forward, and then used the Sculpt tool (smooth mode) to get rid of the deformation. The rough sketch I came with had the same bone weight properties as the original, and I have not tested it in game, nor have time to, but perhaps you could try what happens if you do.

 

Just remember to not move the center of the mesh, apply Scale and Rotation changes to ObjData, and follow all the other steps in the tutorial.

 

And do not change the bone weight!!! Once the head is finished to test, re-import the original nif file, copy bone weight from this to the new, and parent the skeleton from the old to the new. And let's see if you survive.

 

Well, besides all this most likely useless gibberish, I can provide you no further help, matey. Sorry.

 

Cheers!

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My friend, your advice proved to be the deciding factor in this venture. Thanks to you, I HAVE DONE IT! At long, long last, my dear children have perfect, working head meshes! This calls for a celebration!

 

It shouldn't be long at all now before I can release my first alpha to the public. Thank you so much, and rest assured that your critical contribution will be acknowledged in the mod's credits. :happy:

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My Goodness, Glitches, then my mad-scientist-like experiment worked indeed? A celebration is mostly due, certainly, my comrade!

 

I'll be impatiently await the arrival of your child race. And if I have the time, I'll help you in the first playtesting and bughunt.

 

Hugs and cheers!

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