Helm Problems

[talion]

Hello everyone. As I said in the topic description, I am modding my first helm. It's a very simple one that I made by duplicating the top portion of a head mesh and expanding it a little. I then created lenses to cover the eyes and imported the Argonian spines mesh so it would look like my character's spines would poke through the top and back of it. All in all, it looks like a nice cowl to go with the armor I modified for him. After getting everything together and exporting to nif, I downloaded The Conformulator and followed the directions provided there to make the .egm file and assumed that I was all set to try it out in-game. So I loaded up my game and picked up the helmet where I dropped it in the CS. I equipped it only for my character to go bald and the helmet floating in the air some 10 feet to his left. Naturally, I figured something had to be wrong, so I exited the game and checked everything over. Everything seemed to be in order, so I assumed I must have messed something up when making the .egm file, since that's the only thing I hadn't done before up to this point. I ran The Conformulator again, making sure I picked the correct reference mesh and had my .tri file loaded and tried again with the same result. I then started tweaking with the settings to try to find something that would work. So far, everything I've tried has met with one of two results: 1) The same scenario that I mentioned before with the floating helm or 2) The game crashes on equip. Can anyone give me some idea as to what I may be doing wrong? It would be greatly appreciated.

 

I should also note that I also tried the option to use the .nif file in The Conformulator rather than an exported .tri file. When I do that, I get an error saying that it can't make the .egm file because the .nif has more than one NiTriStrip or NiTriStripe in it and it suggests that I merge them in order to solve the problem, but I haven't figured out how to do that either.

[talion]

An update on my problem. I followed the tutorial "Blender Tutorial - Custom Helmets" (http://www.tesnexus.com/articles/article.php?id=113) using my helm mesh rather than creating a new one again from scratch. After following the tutorial and trying again, instead of my helm appearing far to the left side of my character, it just doesn't show up at all but my character still goes bald. I understand the bald thing, but I can't figure out why my helm still won't appear in the game. I made sure the texture paths were all correct.

[jaysus]

invisbility: make sure your opacity is at 100% in the nifs materialproperty

 

helmet sideways: click on characters-> "update facegen data" on the CS (nif and egm name must be the same)

otherwise make sure your helmetmodel is located where other helmets are located (usually around 0,0,0) or skin/rig the helmet to the headbone if its not rigid

[talion]

invisbility: make sure your opacity is at 100% in the nifs materialproperty

 

helmet sideways: click on characters-> "update facegen data" on the CS (nif and egm name must be the same)

otherwise make sure your helmetmodel is located where other helmets are located (usually around 0,0,0) or skin/rig the helmet to the headbone if its not rigid

 

Ok, another progress update. After altering the position of the model in Blender as per the above advice, the helm finally appears in the game, but now it sits on his shoulder and all the pieces are jumbled up. I provided a screenshot to show what I mean:

 

http://i400.photobucket.com/albums/pp83/Argonianiac/MaskAttempt.jpg

 

Thanks for the advice so far. Have you seen anything like this happen before where you may know what I'm still doing wrong?

 

Edit: Also, under Character in the CS, I don't appear to have an "Update Facegen Data" option. Is it an option added with OBSE? I don't have that installed.

[talion]

Ok another update. I found a tutorial on making .egm files at http://www.squidoo.com/egmcreation and used those setting to create my .egm file this time. First off, I couldn't use the helm's .nif file because I would keep getting the error "The Nif has more than 1 NiTriShape/NiTriStrip. Please merge all meshes into a single mesh." So I merged everything into a single object and exported again, but got the same error message when trying to make the .egm. So instead I exported a .obj from Nifskope and used that to successfully create the .egm (according to the program). What happens now in game is much like the above screenshot, only worse.

 

http://i400.photobucket.com/albums/pp83/Argonianiac/MaskAttempt2.jpg

 

As you can see, not only is everything jumbled up to the side of my character's head, but they all look ripped up too. This is really starting to get frustrating. Are all helmets this difficult to make or is there something wrong with the way I made mine?

[talion]

Would it be more helpful if I attached my nif file here for someone to take a look at? I've been wrestling with this mesh for a few days now trying to get it to work right in the game and I would really appreciate any help I could get.

[talion]

New update: I tried adding the head mesh to the helm and setting it in the construction set to replace the head (I figured, I've tried everything else I could think of, why not?). Now I'm back to the game crashing on equip so that obviously wasn't the answer either..

[talion]

Ok I finally got the mesh to appear where it needs to on the character, so that's a huge step in the right direction! Now I'm just having trouble making the egm file so the helm will fit to the character's head. I tried making the egm file from the nif and got the following errors: "Warning mesh is rigged. This may cause an incorrect conformulation." and "The nif file has more than 1 NiTriShape/NiTriStrip. Please merge all meshes into a single mesh.

 

I went back into Blender and merged all parts of the mesh into a single object, exported, and tried again, only to get the same error. Can someone please tell me what I can do to get this to work?