Custom mesh crashes GECK

[kungfubellydancer]

Alright, well, here we go again.

 

I exported a mask mesh to .nif. Thing is, there were some problems both in blender and GECK. As for Blender, everything that I imported, whether it was the skeleton or another object with which I wanted to steal the bone from, appeared to load but did not show up in the 3d window. Hiding/unhiding did not reveal the stuff that was loaded.

 

So, I assumed the skeleton I imported was attached to the mask, so I exported as .nif. I changed some things around in nifskope to make it compatible with the game, because it was crashing GECK. After the crashes stopped, instead GECK would load the mask but it would be invisible in the Mesh Data window. Only the texture showed up, and tiled on the ground.

 

I've had this error before, many times before, but the way I fixed it was always a different method. This time, my tried methods aren't working. I can't copy and paste the Nitristrips into another, working mask mesh for some reason, because the dragon mask would appear way over top the head, as if the working mask's Bip01 Head was the dragon mask's scene root (or whatever you call it, the floor base point.)

 

Here's the mesh now, altered so that it does NOT crash GECK but does appear invisible. There's the bone down there that's causing all the problems, I think. I just can't figure out how to get rid of it, because Blender isn't importing things properly.

 

http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/jj27/kungfubellydancer/234322423.jpg

[Fumofumo]

Hmm, double click on the NiNode part of Bip01 Head. Rename it to NiStringExtraData and save it. NiNodes generally aren't supposed to be under a NiNode or GECK and Fallout will crash. You might be better off just deleting it, importing the thing into Blender, then reattaching a fresh skeleton and exporting though.

[baduk]

Hi!

 

Node hierarchy is fine. ur bip01 head bone thingy is supposed to be a child ninode of scene root.

 

I think maybe its a conformulation thing. ok so when you have an egm for a headwear item you name it the same way as the nif except for the file extension.

 

But your nif has 2 nitristrips blocks in it, so 2 separate meshes. I know that hair meshes have 2 in em but they also have special block names and there are 2 egm files per nif with names incorporating filename and hat and nohat in em

 

So you cn try joining the objects into one before exporting it so that there is only one nitristrips block and then conformulate the mesh.

 

Maybe the one node that is positioned on -y is the center of the horns object. you can set the center of objects using the 3d cursor, hit shift s to bring up snapping menu and you can position cursor on what is selected. then there is a button for centuring an object on the cursor in button window edit panel mesh tab.

[kungfubellydancer]

The hat I made looks similar, but works fine in-game. It has the bip01 head node, and then both the feather and the hat (two separate Nitristrips) are attached to some weird extra node, just like this mask. But it works in-game. I just don't get it.

 

I'll try joining them, but I don't think that's the problem. I'll also try to move the node back to center and see what that does.

[baduk]

Ok it must be something different, Just remember tho if you are needing to have a conformulated hat at some point, with the egm file on it then u gotta generate the egm file with the obj of the nitristripsdata with the same vertex order as in the nif or it wont work. One thing about conformulation tho is that u dont have to rig it to the skeleton at all to get it to position correctly cause facegen takes care of it, or so i thought. I guess tho that the game really just parents the headgear to the bip01 head when u put it on tho, and the facegen just adds morphing to that.

 

I dont know if its bad to have it both rigged and conformulated. i guess its redundant.

 

 

Ok so. try making it a conformulated one, join the objects into one mesh in blender and then position the center of the object where it should be on the head. Then go into pose mode and select bip01 head bone and shift s to snap cursor to it.

 

Object mode and select mask and center the mask on the cursor. Now the center of the mask is positioned right at the head bone. Then u hit n to open the transform properties window and set the loc xyz to 0 for the mask.

 

Now the new center of the mask is positioned at xyz000 and the mask is down near the ground. U can delete all the other stuff like skeleton and everything cause u just export the mask mesh and exporter will assign an scene root ninode to it.

 

Now if you get the conformulator: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=9360

Then you can export an obj of the mask from nifskope and use that and the tri file of the headmeshes from the meshes bsa to generate an egm file for the headgear and name it as the nif and put it with the nif and you can set the using facegen flags for the equipment reference in fnvedit.

 

The thing that confuses me tho is there are lots of headgear mods released on nexus without including egm files, maybe it really depends on how tight a fit the headgear has if u want to use an egm file or not.

 

I have one headgear that is rigged but its rigged cause i want it to deform slightly when the head rotates.

[kungfubellydancer]

No success...

 

This is what I did. I opened up Blender and loaded my saved file of the mask. All the stuff I had previously imported but said was missing or invisible was there again, so I deleted everything except the mask, including the bones/skeleton. I imported another mask so that I can take the strap off of it and use it on my mesh, and use its bone too. So I press Alt+P to clear the parent of everything, then Ctrl+P and selected Armature. I then select the armature ONLY and export.

 

In nifskope, everything seems to be okay. When I loaded it in GECK, however, I get an instant crash. Not sure why. I open up another mask mesh that works in-game, and duplicate its nodes, and copy+paste the NiTriStripsData from my mask over to that mask. They appear way up somewhere, so I use the Transform > Edit on mask parts to get them to the correct level, then I press Transform > Apply. I get a message warning me it might not look the way I want it in-game, but I continue anyway. This is when I noticed that the mask has some missing vertices for some reason. This is after the Copy+paste. I save as a new file, just in case it was just a visual error in Nifskope.

 

So I load this mesh into GECK, and it turns out that none of my transformations worked. The strap was in the correct place, but the mask was hovering high in the air somewhere. Not only that, but it looked as if it had been shattered into a hundred pieces. All the faces were scattered or missing.

 

But at least I didn't get a CTD.

 

NOTE: in the image below, I simply left the textures from the original mask I had copy+pasted over. You can see the strap in the bottom corner, where it's supposed to be, but the thing in the foreground is the dragon mask, all in a hundred pieces.

 

http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/jj27/kungfubellydancer/mask.png

[baduk]

Yeah,. headgears are confusing cause theres the different types of em.

 

I am suggesting that you try the static object way, and not have any armature, just position the object as i explained before and export with no armature.