Question for the modders

[ThrillKill]

Hey,

 

I just been going through some of the vanilla armor / weapons etc, one thing i wanted to know was with the armor seems the mesh is broken down in alot of pieces for example the combatarmor has about 8 separate pieces of mesh.

 

So question is when creating new armor do you have to create all of these pieces of can you create one full mesh?

[Crimson Knight]

Basic explanation

Armour is full body no parts

then 2 slots gloves and head

this is how it is separated

[SickleYield]

Mostly you'll need to have at least a couple of pieces broken up for the pipboyon/pipboyoff meshes (so that your outfit will display properly on NPCs and on the player). You can see these on the default meshes on the left arm starting at about the elbow.

 

Otherwise those breaks happen for a few different reasons, but most often to do with the UV. NIFs can't have multiple UVs on one mesh bit, so you have to either fit everything on one texture map or have multiple submeshes for different textures. Sometimes it also happens because it allows accessories to be copied and pasted between meshes to give a new look to an existing outfit (something game makers will do, if not as often as modders). Consider, for example, the difference between the regular vault suit and Dad's vault suit (it's basically the shoes).

[ThrillKill]

Thanks for the info, atleast now i know how the the mesh should be now if i can stop being lazy and fire up max would be great.

[Ghogiel]

I also split the main mesh in 2, at the arms. So I can use the naming conventions that controll whether or not things are rendered in 1st person. ie "Arms" is on and "UpperBody" is not. I do this for optimisation purposes, and so there isn't any clipping in front of the camera with mesh parts, like big pauldrons or something.