3ds max export error

[ThetianSoldier]

Well, after a long time lurking, I figured it was time to finally make a topic. But lets get down to brass tacks.

I took the pre-war businesswear and added some armor, then got the .nif tools exporter so that I could export it. Everything worked fine up until getting it into GECK. When I tried to put it into the Armor Addon subcategory, the armor was invisible. I didn't bother to put it ingame (if it's invisible in GECK, it must be ingame as well.) Is there something I'm doing wrong?

Edit: ack, I put this in the mod talk section instead of the troubleshooting section, my bad :s

Edited March 13, 2011 by ThetianSoldier

[Tefnacht]

Well, you ARE modding, so the mod talk section isn't exactly the wrong place :)

 

That your mesh isn't visible in the GECK is a problem. Before I get to that, I want to tackle something else. Why do you add your new armor as a “Armor Addon” item?

Armor addon items are “special” items, purely visual cosmetic, that get loaded and rendered along with a regular armor item. For example: The gloves of power armor are armor addon items. If the power armor (the real armor) is equipped, the gloves (the armor addon items) replace whatever other item is currently equipped in the hand slots. But they do so only in a “cosmetic” way. They are now rendered INSTEAD of what is really equipped.

 

A armored business suit would be a “real” armor item on its own. At least in my book.

 

Anyway ... lets get to business. No phun intended. ;)

 

I have absolutely no knowledge of 3DS Max or the respective export tools. I am a freeloader, I use Blender and NIFScripts. However, I ran into the “invisible in the GECK” problem myself a couple of times.

If you export a mesh as armor from Blender with NIFScripts, you have to select the right settings. I assume the same is true for 3DS Max. We're talking about simple bitflags here. The mesh is good. The UV mapping is good. The bone weighting is good. Everything is good ... except the shader type and flags.

 

Personally, if I failed to set the right export settings, I usually use NifSkope to correct the error. Exporting meshes from Blender sometimes takes a lot of time. Exporting a really complex mesh might take 10 minutes or more.

 

Therefore my advise is: Check your exported NIF file with NifSkope to make sure all the bitflags and options are set up correctly. The primary cause for “invisible” meshes, from my experience, are incorrect or missing shader flags.

 

Using NifSkope, in your NiTriStrips blocks, find the BSShaderPPLightingProperty block. Unless the block describes a “naked skin” part of your armor, the selected shader should be “SHADER_DEFAULT” and the shader flags should be: “SF_ZBUFFER_TEST | SF_SHADOW_MAP | SF_SHADOW_FRUSTUM | SF_EMPTY | SF_UNKNOWN_31”.

 

Check your exported files if they match those settings. If they don't, correct it and try again. It that helps, consult the documentation of your exporter tool to learn how to set these settings on export, so you don't have to use NifSkope every time you export something.

 

If it doesn't help ... well ... I am no expert myself. I just trial&error my way through to my goal. Usually I get there sooner or later ... sometimes I give up.

 

Good luck. And keep us posted if it does or doesn't work.

[ThetianSoldier]

I put it in the armor addon section because I assumed that it meant that it wasn't part of the fallout 3 master file, my bad :s

 

I checked the model in nifskope, and everything seemed to be set up right. I think I might know what the problem is however: I keep getting error messages about the texture files (.dds). I might have set them up wrong. I'm going to try to move the textures to the data\textures subfolder and see if that helps.