My modified armor has gaps in the wrists and I don't know why

[Nephelus]

I've been making some adjustments to some vanilla armors and everything has been going pretty well so far. That is, until I looked at the armor in first person:

 

http://i.imgur.com/h5HIfpT.jpg

 

I thought that maybe I had accidentally changed the "bare skin" part of the armor but, as an experiment, I imported the base armor into Blender then immediately exported it and the exact same things happens. Plus, when I import the base hand meshes everything looks fine.

 

http://i.imgur.com/DxSnyL2.png

 

Any ideas as to what I could be missing? The base armor the the Courier Duster if anyone wants to try for themselves.

Edited May 11, 2015 by Nephelus

[nivea]

Are you using the skeleton.nif when you import a new skeleton or are you using the upperbody.nif? You should be using the upperbody.

[Nephelus]

I'm using Skeleton.nif but I've always been told to use that. Why should I be using UpperBody exactly?

 

Also, if I import UpperBody, won't I need to delete all the body parts that I dont need which is extra work?

[nivea]

Because it will not line up with hands/heads, which seems to be what your problem is. I do not know what program your using but you should be importing the skeleton only using something like "Import Skeleton Only + Parent Selected" thats for Blender, you should not be importing a skeleton and body or just the skeleton.nif.

 

Dunno who told you to use that, but I have never been able to get it to line up with vanilla meshes unless they have been remade with the skeleton.nif.

[Nephelus]

But the bare skin parts of the armor are already part of the courier duster. Like, if I import the courier duster nif they are already there. Are you saying I should delete those parts then make my own after importing the upperbody.nif?

[nivea]

No, I think you are not doing this in the right way. Once you have all your armor done normally you delete the old skeleton (or you just do that right away anyways), once you deleted the old skeleton you then import a fresh new skeleton and assign your armor to that. If you keep the old one it can mess up/corrupt, so you should always import a fresh one.

 

The skeleton is not the body parts, its the bones and movements/rigging/skinning that tells a body how to move in game with the animations.

 

Perhaps taking a look at this might help:

http://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php?title=Creating_an_armour_for_Fallout._Part_2

[Nephelus]

I understand that I need to import a fresh skeleton after deleting the old one. That's what I have been doing all this time. And yet the wrists still don't line up. You are telling me that I need to be using UpperBody.nif instead of Skeleton.nif but the tutorial you linked says to use skeleton.nif:

 

Select the menu option File -> Import -> NetImmerse/Gamebyro and select the skeleton.nif file (it is in the folder \Data\Meshes\characters\_male\).

 

I don't think I'm being clear about what I'm doing. Let me describe exactly what my steps are.

 

1. Open Blender

2. Import the courier duster .nif file (ulysses_21.nif) which has been extracted from the game

3. Delete the skeleton that came with the armor during the import

4. Select all parts of the armor

5. Import Skeleton.nif (choosing the Import Skeleton Only + Parent Selected)

6. Select the imported skeleton

7. Export as .nif file

8. Move .nif file into data/meshes/whatever

9. Create armor mod in the GECK using this .nif file

 

Do you see any flaws in my steps?

[nivea]

Ah that is where that comes from, I learned a lot of this before FO and through my own learning with my mods (kinda stupid self teaching). So please try this, I know its not whats been taught to you or the tutorial.

 

5. Import the skeleton from the Upperbody.nif (choosing the Import Skeleton Only + Parent Selected)

 

If your mesh is correctly lined up in Blender, but not lined up in game that should without a doubt fix it. It looks like your using either Vanilla or Breeze (Since Breeze IS vanilla mesh) then you just need to use the vanilla upperbody If its Roberts then you need to use the Robert upperbody. MAKE SURE YOUR DOING THIS TO A MESH YOU NEVER USED SKELETON.NIF ON BEFORE, it will not work if the mesh is already messed up the only way to fix it then is to edit the body to fit the hands yourself.

 

This is how I have always fixed my issues with gaping, and how I know some body mods have screwed themselves by using skeleton.nif (see Type 6 or 6M).

Edited May 13, 2015 by nivea

[Nephelus]

Thanks for your help Nivea! You're suggestion was right on the money. No more gaps! I tried this on both newly imported meshes and ones I've edited before and they both worked fine which suits me just fine because I would have lost a bunch of of work.

 

This also answers a little question I always wondered about which was, why is the skeleton you see when importing vanilla meshes never the same as the one you see in Skeleton.nif? The answer is that they are using the UpperBody skeleton. This does make me wonder what the purpose of Skeleton.nif is and why the gaps are there in the wrists where everything else seems to work fine.

 

Whatever. I'm just happy to be able to continue my work. Thanks again!

[nivea]

Glad it worked, I get alot of questions about this PMed to me pretty often. The main issue comes from when you export the mesh with the skeleton.nif it can become a irreversible change sadly, some body mod suffer from it and would need to be fully redone to fix, its why alot of female body mods do not line up with hands or have slight neck gaping.

 

I think the difference is that the skeleton.nif and the upperbody skeleton are used in different ways by the game, after all weapons do not have skeletons attached to them.

 

Either way glad it worked for you too. :)