Assistance with mesh problem in SCK

[wilwhitt56]

I'm having a mesh issue in SCK and could use a bit of help. I had just made a body mesh for my race mod, but it doesn't seem to be working. You see, when I add it to the ArmorAddon (SkinNaked) It looks fine. When I set it all up and add it to the race, the body is there, but not the extra things, notably the feathers i added to the body. Also, when I test it in-game, the moment I take off the armor to look, the game crashes instantly. When I go back to look, there's an error block where her body should be. Anyone know what could be the cause?

[Hanaisse]

Clearly an issue with the body nif itself.

Assuming you added the feathers directly to the body do the feathers have the correct body slot? (32_body) Are they correctly rigged and weight painted? Do you have both a _0 and _1 nif for the body? (you can fool the game by just making a copy of the _1 and renaming it _0 if you only have one size).

(without being able to see the nif file it's just a guessing  game)

[wilwhitt56]

3 hours ago, Hanaisse said:

Clearly an issue with the body nif itself.

Assuming you added the feathers directly to the body do the feathers have the correct body slot? (32_body) Are they correctly rigged and weight painted? Do you have both a _0 and _1 nif for the body? (you can fool the game by just making a copy of the _1 and renaming it _0 if you only have one size).

(without being able to see the nif file it's just a guessing  game)

The site won't let post the file cause it's too big. In truth i'm still new to attempting this. Where can I see the rigging and weight painting? Is that in OutfitStudio or Nifskope? Also, yeah I made a 0 and 1, but there testers for now. I'm also trying to make them compatible with bodyslide, is that what the weight painting is about?

[scorrp10]

If you are making a custom race, you need to assign a skeleton.  What skeleton are you using?   If it is a hunanoid skeleton, is the body generally humanoid?

Each vertex of the body must be weighted to one or more skeleton bones.   Probably best done in Outfit Studio.   

Remember, a naked body is just another 'armor' that a character can wear, and there's a fair amount of instruction material about using Outfit Studio to adapt an outfit mesh into Skyrim.

[wilwhitt56]

1 hour ago, scorrp10 said:

If you are making a custom race, you need to assign a skeleton.  What skeleton are you using?   If it is a hunanoid skeleton, is the body generally humanoid?

Each vertex of the body must be weighted to one or more skeleton bones.   Probably best done in Outfit Studio.   

Remember, a naked body is just another 'armor' that a character can wear, and there's a fair amount of instruction material about using Outfit Studio to adapt an outfit mesh into Skyrim.

The body itself is just the human body with a feather Outfit connected to it.

https://mega.nz/file/15R2hQBB#O8_frqYIVjCL1CcMi-u_BqOmBF46NKctZK6Nolilm1c

Here, I put it in Mega. Have a look.

It's just the bodies, If you need more let me know.

Edited May 8 by wilwhitt56

[Hanaisse]

I've taken a look at the meshes and I can tell you that the feathers are incorrectly attached. They seem to have their own skeleton that they are rigged to when they need to be rigged directly to the same skeleton the body has. They also cannot use unique body slots, they need the same as the body itself. It's going to take some work to clean it up but it can be salvaged.

Start with importing the mesh into Outfit Studio and deleting all the bones from the 3 feather shapes. Double click on each shape to open it's properties box, go to the Geometry tab and untick the Skinned box. Export the mesh (give it a different name for now).

Open the mesh in Nifskope. Here you'll need to unlink the 3 feather trishapes from it's NiNode by setting the NiNode # of children to 0 and refreshing the children list. Add those 3 trishapes as children to 0 Ninode then delete the NiNode named Fahrbod. Save the nif.

Re-import the cleaned mesh into Outfit Studio, set the CBBE Body shape as the reference. Select all 3 feather trishapes, right click and select Copy Bone Weights. Fix any clipping of the feather shapes (I see some around the groin area). Set the partitions of the feather shapes to 32_body, deleting any other partition it may have.

Retest your new cleaned meshes.

[scorrp10]

Ok, so what I am doing...

Open Outfit Studio.   File - Import - from NIF - your 'femalebody_1.nif.    Delete the CBBE  mesh.  Go into properties of the other 3 meshes and on Geometry tab, uncheck the 'Skinned' property.     Cause you kinda easier that way at this point.    

File- Save Project As.     


To actually get it to be a project in BodySlide.    

Next,  go File - Load Reference - Choose CBBE Body Physics.   Now I have a reference CBBE mesh (in green) loaded with all of its sliders.   For now, click the eye icon next to arm and arm01 meshes to hide them. Double-click on the torsofeathers mesh name, go into Geomentry, check Skinned.    If you click Partitions tab, torsofeathers should already be partition 32.    Right-click torsofeathers, and choose 'Copy Bone Weights'.     Now you need to see how the bone weights got painted.   Best to hit T to turn off the textures, and go into Bones tab.     Bones in green are the ones that were applied to torsofeathers mesh.    Now this process is rather intuitive, you have to develop a feel for it.    When you click a bone, it shows what parts of body move when that bone moves.     Blue means loosely affected, red means almost rigidly tied.   

Copying bone weights from Reference is usually a good start, but then you need to go through bones to see how it  looks.    For example the feathers that attach to the arms have some vertices close to the body, and end up getting weights from Pelvis and Spine bones.     This will cause some real weird stretching when the character moves their arms.    So Spine and Pelvis weights need to be removed from arm meshes.    However, some vertices in the arm feathers are a bit too far from the arms, and don't get the weights.    You can always see what got weighted and what did not by using 'Mask Weighted Vertices' menu option.    Also, both arm meshes had a weird outlying vertex not attached to anything - which I deleted.    In the torsofeathers mesh, a lot of feathers around the shoulders needed tweaking.     Sometimes what you can do is Copy Bone Weights,  then Mask Weighted Vertices,  then again Copy Bone Weights, but with a larger distance.

Then, there's the 'tail' which is quite far from any bones defined for CBBE.    However,  if you right-click in the Bones list, and choose Add - From Skeleton, if you expand Pelvis,  there is a 'skirt'  section.    So I arre rear skirt bones to the project from skeleton, and I weighted the tail feathers to those bones.   

I  also chose the 3 feather meshes and  did Slider - Conform Selected  in order to conform them to Sliders.    I played with sliders afterwards, and the results seems to be fine - but in some cases you need to manually edit how some of the sliders affect some of the shapes.

Finally, I used File - Save As -  and made sure that 'Copy reference shape' was checked this time.     

 

More in the next post.

  

 

 

 

 

[scorrp10]

Now when I launch BodySlide, there is a 'FahrNymph Body' outfit there, and I can build it, whcih produces  'femalebody_0.nif' and 'femalebody_1.nif' in Data/meshes/actors/character/FahrNymph

Here is the result: 

And how it looks on a character:   (Corset is slot 56 so it does not obscure the body underneath)

But yeah, the summary of things done:

• Imported .nif into Outfit Studio, saved it as a BodySlide project.
• Went into the .nif, ripped out all the bogus bones, moved the feather  BSTriShapes  to root level.
• Deleted the CBBE mesh, replaced with reference physics CBBE.
• Copied bone weights from reference to the feather meshes, then did some manual adjustment of the weights.
• Brought in rear skirt bones from skeleton, weighted the tail feathers to them
• Conformed feather meshes to reference CBBE sliders.

One thing I noticed but did not address - it looks like lower part of the feather outfit is a bit more forward than needed, so it clips in the back and sticks out a bit in front.    Usually, I would handle something like that in Blender to make it better conform to reference body.

 

[wilwhitt56]

On 5/8/2024 at 10:33 PM, scorrp10 said:

Now when I launch BodySlide, there is a 'FahrNymph Body' outfit there, and I can build it, whcih produces  'femalebody_0.nif' and 'femalebody_1.nif' in Data/meshes/actors/character/FahrNymph

Here is the result: 

And how it looks on a character:   (Corset is slot 56 so it does not obscure the body underneath)

But yeah, the summary of things done:

• Imported .nif into Outfit Studio, saved it as a BodySlide project.
• Went into the .nif, ripped out all the bogus bones, moved the feather  BSTriShapes  to root level.
• Deleted the CBBE mesh, replaced with reference physics CBBE.
• Copied bone weights from reference to the feather meshes, then did some manual adjustment of the weights.
• Brought in rear skirt bones from skeleton, weighted the tail feathers to them
• Conformed feather meshes to reference CBBE sliders.

One thing I noticed but did not address - it looks like lower part of the feather outfit is a bit more forward than needed, so it clips in the back and sticks out a bit in front.    Usually, I would handle something like that in Blender to make it better conform to reference body.

 

Thank you so much for the help, but i've run into another problem (they never end). The mesh works, but for some reason any armor or clothing turns invisible when I wear it.

[scorrp10]

It is likely because none of the clothes/armor are flagged to work with your race.   As you can't really expect all vanilla and modded clothing to be flagged for your race specifically, it means your custom race needs to present itself as one of vanilla races when it comes to armor wearing.

In your race record in CK, on the 'General Data' tab, it has 'Copied Data' section.   Be sure to set 'Armor Race' to 'DefaultRace' for both Male and Female.