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Need Help Fixing Helmet Hair


Maverick2011

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I recently downloaded a hairstyle mod (SydneyB's K. Modified Soya Hair) which I integrated into my game successfully. However, the helmet variant of this hairstyle is messed up. The mod creator has acknowledged this and is working on a fix. While waiting on this, I decided to go ahead and give it a shot myself. I think I've made considerable progress but am now stuck.

 

First I chose a replacement hat hair mesh from the vanilla game - The Sophisticate "bun" hairstyle called HairDrLi by the game. I deleted the Hat NiTriShape block that came with the mod and used Nifskope to copy over the Hat NiTriShape block from HairDrLi.nif. I then replaced Soyamodhairhat.egm with hairdrlihat.egm. It seems to have worked partially, as you can see from the screenshot. But the upper quarter is transparent for some reason. And here I am stuck. I've tried using the conformulator to create my own egm, but this seems to make no difference, possibly because I had to use a Nifskope exported obj instead of an Oblivion compatible nif since I can't create an Oblvion compatible nif. I also tried changing some of the values in NifSkope such as the translation, rotation, center, and radius values with little success. I don't know what most of them mean.

 

Please help.

 

Screenshot key:

Top Left - The custom hairstyle without a helmet

Top Right - The custom hairstyle with a helmet

Bottom Left - My modification with a helmet but with the same (original mod) egm

Bottom Right - My modification witha helmet with the DrLi egm

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That will be a problem with the texture I guess. You have the texture with the alpha map (transparencies) of the nohat-hair, and the game uses the same for the hat-hairmesh. For the UV-Maps are made for another texture, it has weired transparencies. You can look this up in nifscope with right-clicking on the hat-mesh ->texture -> edit UV. With the texture you have assigned you should see the template like a flat net on a picture but it doesn't fit on it. I made a shot of one of my hairs with a wrong texture below.

 

 

 

Now to fix this, you could either edit the UVmap so it fits somehow so it hasn't transparencies on wrong spots, but what you can't do is using another texture. Some hair mods have textures hat include the hairbun-texture in a corner and fit the UVmap to this, I have made custom hat-hairmeshes that aren't too different to the no-hat hair and fit the UV map. Either way you will need to put in some time into this ^.^° UV-mapping isn't exactly the easiest thing...

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Thanks, it does seem to be a UV map issue.

 

I know that you can't use a different texture for the hat version, but the hat version has a field for a texture and before I edited it it pointed to a different one in my nif. Does the game just ignore this and default to the one used for the nohat version?

 

Finally, are there any articles on UV Map editing out there?

 

Thanks.

 

*Update*

Well I did it! Sort of. Looks like crap but a lot better than bald. What I wish I can do is edit the texture itself to give myself something better to work with, but I'm not sure I want to do that. I have the dds photoshop plugin but I'd have to be able to tell the difference between the normal/high/etc. maps and different channels that I know nothing about and I don't want to mess with unless someone can walk me through it.

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That's not a too big problem. the diffuse map is the actual texture. I recommend to make it in some gray tones, because the character editor will change the colour later anyway, and with a gray-toned (but not grayscale! it needs to be RGB colour) you can make the notmal map quite easy. So, paint a texture as you think it looks good; here's a VERY good photoshop tutorial for that

 

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/process/hair_...ial/hair_01.htm

 

The normalmap looks like a weird blue pic with some pink and green structure. It gives the hair more structure by telling the light how to reflect, and you simply need the nvidia normal map filter for that. You can get it here:

 

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photosh...ds_plugins.html

 

Now, you take your diffuse map, run the levels and give it some more contrast. I make my hair textures so the background is near to black after that. Run the Nvidia filter; I didn't experiment with this too much, but it will provide you with a useable normalmap. Save the file with the same name and _n behind it. Don't close this, because you'll make the Highlightmap with that right after.

For that, you reverse the normal map filter and turn on levels again. The contrast should be high enough to make some parts of the hair disappear in the black background. Copy everything, go to the alpha channel and paste. Then again, turn on levels and make it a little bit darker again.

Save it as xxx_hl.dds, and make sure you assign all textures in the nif.

Done!

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