Need Help Making a New Race! (First time)

[Barlas]

No, it needs to be a horse tail...

 

;/

[oblivionpilgrim]

there are horse tails in the standard oblivion data files.

 

data\meshes\creatures\horses & data\textures\creatures\horses

[Barlas]

I understand that, and have unpacked the files I need and have even recolored the texture. However, I have no clue how to make the mesh work on an actor. I link it and it doesn't work, so I am guessing I must change it somehow. How would I?

[Barlas]

Friendly Bump.

[Barlas]

bump

[DrakeTheDragon]

Basically you'll need to position the mesh at the proper location and rotation so it connects to the spine visually correctly. Then you need to "rig" the mesh to the tail bones so it will stick to them and move along with them in animations.

This is not really one of the easiest tasks and hard to explain. It's using "weight painting" to for each vertex set the amount of attraction to each bone. You could simplify the task by copying the bone weights of existing tails, if they closely fit in shape enough for this to work out, or maybe by just renaming the "vertex groups" the horse tail's vertices are rigged to from the horse bones' to the human bones' names.

 

I hope this is giving you some pointers towards what to read up. I'll try to get into detail some more later when I have more time to write.

[Barlas]

Thanks for the tip, but that is just all gibberish to me, for all I know how to do in Nifscope is show a mesh and give it a texture. I hope you can write down a guide.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Alright, this "gibberish" word is something I often get to read when I tried to explain something to someone. Guess I'm not that good in explaining.

 

Well, first off, NifSkope likely won't be enough for the task. You'll need a modeling app like Blender for these things.

I had to do it myself first so I got an idea what can be done and what can't. You can already scrap that idea with keeping the weights and renaming the vertex groups. These things got lost on import already for me. The solution I chose was copying the bone weights of an existing tail over to the horse tail, after I resized and moved and rotated it into position to connect to a human body and go along with the tail bones. Let's see if I can explain this step by step.

 

For the basics, in Oblivion meshes to be used on actors, like clothing or bodyparts, need to have all their vertices "rigged" (as in connected) to bones of skeletons. Therefore every vertex has a "weight" (0.0-1.0) telling how much it sticks to a certain bone in movements. If for example a vertex has a weight of 1.0 to bone A and 1.0 to bone B, it will move along likewise with both of them, while if it only has a weight of 0.5 to bone B, it will stick with bone A more, of course, and is only influenced half as much by bone B.

Now a common comfortable way to assign these weights is by "weight painting", where colors represent the amounts (blue = 0.0, lightblue = 0.25, green = 0.5, yellow = 0.75, red = 1.0) and between the vertices the colors blend into each other. It's somewhat like a heat diagram, with the heat representing the weights to a certain bone. Vertices not rigged to at least 1 bone don't know what to stick to and shoot away into infinity ingame, causing massively distorted meshes.

 

Now, but that's just technical background so you might get an idea what's going on and why. I recommend searching for a few nice tutorials about weight painting and rigging, if you're interested, though sadly the one I used to learn this stuff, Cute Unit's Rigging Tutorial, seems to be nowhere to be found anymore nowadays.

 

Well then, back to business. For reference I'm exclusively using Blender myself, but other modeling apps should be similar.

First thing I always do when starting from scratch is importing a fresh skeleton, or better yet only the armature as I don't need any controllers, collision or other fancy stuff for only modeling and rigging meshes. For this I import "skeletonbeast.nif" (I want the tail bones) with the option "skeleton only - parent selected".

After this was done and I could see a nice and clean armature ready to get meshes rigged to, I selected this armature and imported the horse tail from the NIF I previously extracted from the BSA. This time I was using the option "geometry only - parent to selected armature", but of course it didn't work and I had to parent this mesh to the armature myself first. This is done by first selecting the horse tail, then shift-selecting the armature in Object Mode and then clicking "Object > Parent > Make Parent..." in the menu and choosing "to Armature" and "don't create groups" from the dialogs coming up. I'm going to create the vertex groups myself, as Blender's automatic ways to do this usually only create a useless mess.

After this was done I moved, rotated and scaled the tail mesh in Edit Mode until it fitted onto the tail bone chain nicely and was at a place where it should connect to the body appropriately. Always do this in Edit Mode or things will be broken after export. Every object in Blender has a little node which is its origin. If this node is not at the center of the scene, where the Scene Root node is located, it's useless after export. The bones don't have to be "inside" the meshes rigged to them or even close to them, but as the vertices will stick to the bones at constant relative distance and fixed position and move along with them that way, things can become quite distorted when the bones are too far away and moving too much.

Now the tail was at the proper place and orientation, ready to be rigged. Next I imported an Argonian tail mesh the same way I did for the horse tail previously. This one was going to be the source for my bone weight copying. And as last preparation I deleted all existing vertex groups from the horse tail mesh in Object Mode. After this was done I selected the horse tail mesh in Object Mode, then shift-selected the Argonian tail and then clicked "Object > Scripts > Bone Weight Copy" in the menu. I selected quality level 4 for this simple mesh and watched the weight copy process run by.

Now I had a nice horse tail properly rigged to the human tail bones, deleted the Argonian tail, selected everything by pressing "a" once and exported it into a new NIF file. (You can most likely keep the default settings for this.)

 

I know this looks rather complex, especially if you don't know Blender at all, but once you got a hang of Blender and importing/exporting from/to NIFs for Oblivion, things like this become an easy task actually. There are a lot of very helpful tutorials easy to understand, especially found on the NifTools website (http://niftools.org) for the Blender NIF Scripts (which is what you need to open NIFs in Blender to begin with) and the famous CS wiki (http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page). I'm sorry I can't provide any images or further detailed instructions, but this is beyond what I can currently do without my laptop or a pc and with my limited amount of free time.

 

For what it's worth, here's the NIF file, ready to be used as tail for a race and tested:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=N1V86ZQZ

I hope this somewhat compensates for the horrible instructions I wrote down.

Edited April 27, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon

[Barlas]

thank you. Do you want me to add you to the credits and a link to your site as a thank you?

 

Now all I need to do is fix the whole problem with the abilities and greater powers i made not appearing even though i added them to the race menu like the default races have.

 

PS At school now, will come back after i have tested the tail. You saved me a lot of work and keyboards (of me throwing it out of anger)

[DrakeTheDragon]

thank you. Do you want me to add you to the credits and a link to your site as a thank you?

 

Now all I need to do is fix the whole problem with the abilities and greater powers i made not appearing even though i added them to the race menu like the default races have.

 

PS At school now, will come back after i have tested the tail. You saved me a lot of work and keyboards (of me throwing it out of anger)

 

If you want to credit me, feel free to do so, but it's not necessary. I didn't create this tail after all, it's Bethesda's.

 

Are you "changing" your race ingame through "showracemenu" or are you really starting a new game to test your race? The first one will not give you any of the abilities or spells the race has, so maybe that's the cause.