How do I make the Hooded Rags Hoodless?

[JakR4t]

I am trying to remove the hood from the Hooded Rags outfit. My end goal is to make a standalone outfit using a texture replacer for this outfit, with the hood part removed. But that part comes later.

I tried loading the Hooded Rags in Outfit studio and deleting the hood part, which seemed like it was going to work, but didn't.

I then remembered doing something a couple of years ago with making certain parts of a texture transparent, so that they were not visible. However, I do not remember how that worked. Also, this time I want to make the whole hood texture transparent/invisible. It has its own dedicated texture file, so I should just be able to make the whole texture for it invisible. 

Is anyone able to help me with this? Thanks for looking.

Edited 4 hours ago by JakR4t
incorrect terms

[robotized]

If the hood is a separate mesh, check what material it uses. If it's the same as the rest of the outfit, then assign new material. For the new material try with Alpha set to 0. I'm not sure if it's required to have alpha property for the tri mesh in the nif.

If the hood is part of the outfit, there are two things you can do. First, just delete the hood from the mesh. In Outfit Studio use masking on the hood, then invert mask and delete vertices. Or second, add alpha property for the tri shape(mesh) of the outfit. Open material and enable Alpha Test. Edit the texture and delete the part with the hood. Make sure the texture has alpha channel, I think when you delete something, the background should be transparent. Save the texture with BC3/DXT5 compression and enabled mipmaps. Setting for Alpha Test Reference in the material could have influence on the transparency.

Note: Some operations are done in NifSkope, like adding alpha property to a mesh.

[JakR4t]

Thank you for the reply. First, let me backtrack and clarify something I misstated previously. The retexture I am going to be using for this has its own dedicated hood texture file. Separate from the body texture file. So, two .dds files. One for the body and one for the head. It's been a good while since I messed with this stuff but I remember using gimp to do stuff with transparency so that only certain parts of a mesh were visible, and others were invisible. 

And I had someone helping me along the way. I do not remember what exactly I did. I am hoping it is possible to just use the .dds file and just make it (the hood) invisible. But I will try to follow along what you said and see how far I can get. Thanks again.

[robotized]

You are welcome. If the hood has separate mesh and its own texture, then it has its own material too. Open the material(BGSM) with Material Editor and reduce Alpha from 1 to 0. This will definitely make the mesh invisible. I did a quick test, it's working and is not required to add alpha property.

[JakR4t]

I apologize, I should have looked at everything carefully beforehand, but I'm going to mention this here for clarification. After loading the body nif and the cap nif I think I have determined the below.

The Hooded rags have:

a body nif for M and F which seems to be the body and the actual hood.

a cap nif for M and F which appears to be the knitted cap under the actual hood.

a cap face bones nif for M and F which I don't imagine will be needed since I am getting rid of the cap and hood.

and 1st person body nifs for M and F.

I have:

a retexture .dds file for the body (which seems to include the actual hood part of the outfit) and one for the cap.

So, I think I am correct in my understanding now, that I WILL need to change the mesh and/or material to get rid of the hood. I need to go watch some tutorials for Outfit Studio. It has been too long and I don't remember how anything works. Like using the mask tool and so forth. I am functionally using it for the first time. I will go through and try these different things. See what I can manage. Thanks again.

 

[robotized]

No problem. Btw you were referring to this outfit, right?

If yes, the hood is actually a separate mesh inside the nif(body_cloth:1). You can select it and press Delete and it will be gone without too much hassle. Then export the nif. Well, unless you are editing a CBBE version of the female outfit, it's a bit different there. You should watch some videos then, on how to open, edit and save body slide files.

If you want the cap gone as well, this job is done in a plugin with an override of the Hooded Rags armor - remove the AAClothesResident6Hat [ARMA:0019DB8E] armor addon from the Models and disable Hair Top and Hair Long biped slots.

[JakR4t]

That's the one.

I've watched a few tutorials and figured out why my first try using Outfit Studio didn't work. I just deleted the body_cloth:1 at the bottom of the list in the picture you posted above. However, after watching a few tutorials, I could not get the little red circle that is supposed to pop up when you select the mask tool. The videos did mention that you will be deleting the vertices after selecting what you want to mask etc, so I just right clicked on the body_cloth:1 and instead of clicking  delete, I clicked Delete Vertices and exported to nif. I then replaced the vanilla body nif (for male ) and loaded up the game. 

The cap was still there. I used FO4edit to make a rough version of a standalone outfit and removed the cap references in the ArmorAddon section and saved. Loaded up the game and there sure enough, I had a hoodless, capless set of Rags. The physics were janky though. For both the Vanilla Hooded Rags that I replaced the nif of as well as the new standalone. Gotta figure out what to do there.

Once I figure that out, I have to figure out how to make the standalone outfit point to it's own nifs and textures, so i can revert the vanilla Hooded Rags back to original. I can point the outfit to its own nif, but I run into trouble when I try to change the file path for the texture. It doesn't just let me change the file path like the nif. It opens a text field like you would get to change the file path but it's just a string of numbers. 

At any rate, Thank You again for the help. Seems like I've almost got this figured out.

[robotized]

You are welcome and best of luck.