Why do I get a missing mesh?

[Megatarius]

See bottom for update.

 

 

I have been playing around with Blender, Nifskope, and the CS, just tweaking other mods' clothing items into other things.

 

 

Yesterday, I did a bunch of tutorials and managed to figure out how to do things really well. I thought I was on a roll.

 

Then, I do the same things today and nonstop problems. :wallbash:

 

 

I was trying to make a particular clothing item fit Robert's Female. It has the cuirass as one piece in Blender, and there's a skirt part as a separate piece. It is not all one piece, and I don't know how to make it one piece. I have had success before with getting stuff into the game that was made of separate pieces, so I don't think that's the problem.

 

Here are my steps that worked yesterday but don't today:

 

1. Imported femaleupperbody.nif into Blender.

2. Imported the clothing nif file into Blender.

3. Edited cuirass pieces by deleting out some arms I didn't want and moving vertices around of the main piece until it fit.

4. Selected all three pieces in Blender: Cuirass, upper body, and skirt.

5. Imported skeleton.nif and chose the option "Import Skeleton Only + Parent to Selected". Everything was then parented to the skeleton.

6. Selected them all and exported as blackcuirass.nif.

7. In nifskope, I loaded (not imported) the nif file, and applied textures to the cuirass part and the skirt part. I left the upper body part alone. I have not had problems from this before.

8. In CS, I loaded the .esp I'm working with (which has a sack I'm putting my stuff in for testing - I don't know how to add my own containers yet and I'm not worried about it at the moment).

9. I chose to open up Chainmail Cuirass and make a new form from that. As the biped model, I pointed it toward the .nif file saved from Nifskope.

10. I placed that new form into the container sack and saved.

 

The item was visible in the sack. But as soon as I equipped it, my upper body disappeared in classic missing mesh fashion.

 

 

What could be the problem? The only thing I can think of is that the game can't read the .nif file for some reason. It's there. I did everything right as far as I know.

 

Please help!

 

 

 

UPDATE:

 

I was able to get the skirt part to work as a lowerbody greaves entry. So I went to work on an upperbody slot. But no matter what I do, I cannot get anything to show up in the upper body slot. I was able to create a "testcuirass" form and put that in the game. It showed up fine, but it had standard textures. I spent about two hours retexturing, only to have it not show up. It seems it's the texture that is causing a missing mesh??? :blink: Why doesn't it show the mesh, but just be purple? Or maybe that's caused by something else?

 

Also, I retextured something else that went on the foot slot and guess what? It worked fine. So it's not my retexturing job.

 

I should also mention that what does show up are the arms and truncated collar and neck piece that are also part of the .nif file. It's just the cuirass that doesn't show up.

 

Could somebody please help??? I can't do anything now with this. I've tried everything I can think of.

 

 

The upper body slot is cursed for me. That's all there is to it. What's going on????

[talion]

I had trouble with the upper body portion of an outfit that I edited once too. It was a pain to get working. Before we take that route though, let's start with some basics. Did you create a normal map for your texture? This is created by using a special filter that you can download free online for Photoshop and similar programs. You'll notice that all game textures have a normal file name version as well as an accompanying file with the same name as the normal one, only with a _n added to the end. Those files with the _n addition are the normal maps of the corresponding files. You have to have a normal map for any texture you use for it to show up in-game. This is usually the most common reason for an invisible item in the game, so I thought we should cover this first.

[Megatarius]

I had trouble with the upper body portion of an outfit that I edited once too. It was a pain to get working. Before we take that route though, let's start with some basics. Did you create a normal map for your texture? This is created by using a special filter that you can download free online for Photoshop and similar programs. You'll notice that all game textures have a normal file name version as well as an accompanying file with the same name as the normal one, only with a _n added to the end. Those files with the _n addition are the normal maps of the corresponding files. You have to have a normal map for any texture you use for it to show up in-game. This is usually the most common reason for an invisible item in the game, so I thought we should cover this first.

 

Well, I think so. Maybe not?

 

 

The cuirass is the standard female iron cuirass. The texture is nothing more than the standard texture, except that I recolored it a bit in photoshop, saved it as a tga, and then in Gimp saved that .tga out as a .dds with DTX5 compression.

 

So I figured, why not just use the regular normal map? I copied it and renamed it appropriately. This trick has worked before, with some boots I recolored, and some pauldrons. None of which use the upperbody slot, heheh. They both worked fine.

 

 

So right away you might be thinking "uh oh, he used two programs". Maybe there's a problem there. I couldn't get the nvidia dds plugin for photoshop to work. It installs, but then there's no dds option. So I've been using Gimp to save out as dds. I have CS4, which apparently isn't compatible with the dds plugin for some reason.

 

How come a missing normal map makes it invisible? Wouldn't it just make it all black?

[talion]

I also you two programs with my texturing (Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro), so there shouldn't be a problem with using multiple programs. For Photoshop, the option to use the normal map filter should be located under Filter -> NVIDIA Tools. And I can confirm that the plugin is compatible with CS4, since that's what I use ;).

 

I never saved any of my textures using DXT5 compression. I've always used DXT3, though that may not be the issue. As long as your normal map is properly created and named, that wouldn't be an issue either (just so we're clear, a normal map should be named the same as the texture it goes with, only with _n tacked onto the end).

 

The other problem you may have could concern the skeleton of the body you used. I've had issues with the skeleton not exporting properly and causing me problems. To correct this, I do the following:

 

1) Load a vanilla armor of the same equip slot as your mesh (in your case, load an upper body armor) into Nifskope.

2) In Nifskope, click File -> New Window

3) In the new window, load your custom mesh

(Note that it doesn't matter which way you do steps 1 and 3, just make sure that you do step 2 instead of opening the other file without using a new window, otherwise the following steps won't work)

4) In the vanilla armor, find and remove ONLY the node representing the armor piece. You can easily find this by right clicking on the armor. It will automatically highlight the node you want to remove. When it does, right click the node and choose Block -> Remove

5) Switch to the window that you opened your custom armor in. Do the following ONLY for the visible parts of your armor (effectively leaving the skeleton behind)

5a) Right click the node and choose Block -> Copy Branch (or press Ctrl + C on the highlighted node)

5c) Switch back to the vanilla armor window

5d) Right click on 0 NiNode (should be titled Scene Root in most cases) and choose Block -> Paste Brance (or press Ctrl + V on the highlighted 0 NiNode)

6) After making sure that all the nodes that you have pasted are linked directly to the 0 NiNode (press the - next to 0 NiNode. If all your nodes disappear, then they are linked), save the mesh using a new name (so you don't overwrite the vanilla one)

 

Try that and see if that helps. If it doesn't, then it's not a skeleton issue you're having either.

[Megatarius]

Awesome man. It worked. I wonder if it was really a "missing mesh", but more like an "incorrectly parented node mesh".

 

 

My only problem is, using the vanilla cuirass to paste into means I have vanilla upper body. Doesn't matter too much, as it's just the arms that are visible, but I tried removing the vanilla arms and pasting in the arms and neck pieces from my mesh, right under 0 ninode like the cuirass, and in the game those didn't show up but the cuirass did. I decided not to push my luck and just go with the vanilla arms, but what's going on with this process deeper down. (I admit I should just read the nifskope guides.... :whistling: )

 

 

Thanks for your help. :thanks:

[talion]

I'm not really sure. Maybe do as I suggested above, only pasting the armor meshes to the upper body mesh of your mod armor and saving that as your armor mesh? If that doesn't work, I don't really know where to go from there.

[Megatarius]

It looks like I was wrong about it working.

 

 

I tried your suggestion with a shirt that I was also having the same problems with. That worked and I posted prematurely.

 

When I tried it on the armor, nothing. It still doesn't show up!!

 

 

Maybe there's a problem with the .nif as it was saved out of blender. It's the standard iron armor mesh, with every face below the belt deleted. I do that all the time, so how could that be the problem? The texture is one I made myself by modifying the old one.

 

 

:wallbash:

[talion]

Well I'm out of ideas then. If no one else speaks up here, you may try getting your question out to some other Oblivion modding forums. The internet's a big place and someone's bound to be able to help you better than I could.