Mesh Distortion

[Trandoshan]

Lately, I have been having problems with exporting meshes from Blender. Despite following the steps provided at this link:

 

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index..._Blender_Part_2

 

I have been unable to export a working mesh into Oblivion. Of course, the mesh looks fine in Nifskope, but when rendered in-game the mesh appears purple, and spikey/distorted. The thing is, the body mesh I had imported from blender does not distort and works perfectly, the clothing that was supposed to cover the body mesh does not. Secondly, and most oddly, the mesh that is distorted is from another working mesh. When I imported them all, I removed the original skeleton of each piece and imported the complete non-beast skeleton. I parented each mesh to the armatures of the skeleton, and imported after making adjustments to the meshes.

 

After optimizing the NIF with Nifskope, I tested it IN-Game. Mesh Distortion. I then imported the mesh back into blender, and took some extra steps. I applied Scale and Rotation to Ob Data, and re-parented each mesh to the armatures. After exporting it a second time, I opened it up once again in Nifskope and used the optimization tools. Still no effect.

 

I plan to try and optimize the meshes with PyFFI, and see if that works. sadly, that has never really worked before.

 

Are there any steps in Blender, or NIfskope that I may have missed?

[razorpony]

I never have good results when exporting an entire skeleton, so this is what I do. You mentioned clothing so let's say you're working on a shirt. Import the body you want to use, import the shirt you want to modify, delete all armatures. At this point I'll arrange the clothing pieces or modify the shape of the clothing until it looks how I want it, then I'll select all with the 'A' key and import the complete skeleton with Import skeleton only and parent to selected checked. I do and scale and rotating that needs to be done, make sure everything is weighted to the skeleton properly, then I delete the skeleton again. I make sure everything is selected with 'A' once more, and this time I import something like upperbody.nif, or perhaps a cuirass.nif, skeleton only, parent to selected. This only imports the bones you need for the upperbody.

Another possibility is when you're parenting an item to a complete skeleton (I assume using bone heat?) you may be picking up heat from bones that you don't want to use, such as a weapon slot bone. I've had that issue with tail armors wanting to parent to pelvic bones or back weapons instead of tail bones.

 

-Razorpony

[Trandoshan]

I'm not fully partial to the bone heat concept, but I will take a deeper look into the method. It will certainly save me a trip to the forums when I begin creating completely custom armors/races.

 

As for bone heat being the problem, in this case it would be a no. Both meshes that I worked with were already weighted. I did have that problem once, as I was using a modified skeleton for a race mod. Now I know that was the specific problem. Kudos.

 

... and thanks for another alternate way of importing the skeleton. I have ruled out the problem as being skeletal through trial of elimination. The origin of this problem has to be in nifskope.

 

Cheers,

TD

 

Edit:

Ho, I see what I did wrong.

 

http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showtopic=185800

 

I thought I had everything solid in the texture department, but it appears that I had made a simple error in the naming of a texture that made the engine not recognize the _n.dds that was supposed to attach to it.

 

It was this:

 

GreenObjctRobeTexture01.DDS

GreenObjectRobeTexture01_n.DDS

 

one letter threw everything into disarray. Nifskope never picks things like that up.... Thanks for the help Raz.

[razorpony]

No problem, glad you figured it out. Those normals can cause massive headaches if they're not exactly right.

 

-Razorpony