NifSkope attaching bones onto Armors

[SirSquidly]

I have been creating an interesting little mod for New Vegas to Revamp the Viper Gang, to make them more like Tribals, like they actually are meant to be.

 

Currently, I've been trying to create armors for them but attacking bones (taken from skeletons) onto Honest Hearts White Leg Outfit. While I can position the bones correctly, I am having issues getting the bones to appear in game, as in the GECK, it shows the bones when I import it in, yet, nothing in-game.

 

If anyone has has a way to get these bones to display properly, I would greatly appreciate it!

[weijiesen]

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Rigging_skinning_and_dismemberment

[madmongo]

Yeah, I don't think you can do that just using NifSkope.

 

Import the outfit along with its armature (which confusingly here is also called a skeleton), and import the skeleton bone meshes (which may already be a part of your nif depending on how you did it), all into Blender. Then parent the skeleton bones (the armor pieces) to the armature. Then adjust all of the bone weights (armature bone weights, so you are adjusting the bones of your bones - how is that for some confusing terminology) because Blender seems to always to a horrible job with automatically setting the bone weights. Then export that to a nif and fix all of the shader flags because Blender never seems to set those properly and if you don't fix them your outfits tend to be invisible in-game.

 

It's actually not difficult to do if you know how to do it, but if you are unfamiliar with Blender there's a bit of a learning curve involved.

[SirSquidly]

Thanks for the responses, It was confusing on how I was messing up this at all (even though I learned both NifSkope and the Geck by scrambling with stuff I don't understand at first).

 

The Vipers shall finally be restored to their former glory! (even though they were cut from Fallout 1... then made generic in New Vegas...)

 

EDIT: Can you possible give me a link or tutorial on how to get the shader flags working?

Edited April 1, 2016 by SirSquidly

[SirSquidly]

Anyone got a tutorial for fixing an armor's shader flags? It seems to be working now, just invisible.

[madmongo]

This is off the top of my head and I'm not on my home computer to check it, so I hope this is right.

 

For regular armor parts, the type needs to be set to SHADER_DEFAULT and make sure SF_SHADOW_MAP and SF_REMAPABLE_TEXTURES are both checked.

 

For the any visible human skin body parts (arms, legs, etc) the type needs to be set to SHADER_SKIN and make sure SF_SHADOW_MAP and SF_FACEGEN are both checked.

 

Blender usually sets the rest of the flags correctly.

 

You can always load up a nif from the game and see what flags it has checked.

[SirSquidly]

Sorry for the VERY late response, but after shader flags weren't fixing my problem, I decided to do a little research. Aparently, I was rigging the skeleton wrong (weijiesen you psyker...). Now, I learned to how to PROPERLY rig the skeleton in Blender, but now I can't export it at all!

 

Every time I attempt to export this armor, It gives me a warning about unweighted vertices before highlighting a few on the chest, three under each arm, one on the back, and the right heel. Yet, in Weight Paint, these ARE weighted! I even tried moving the skeleton around, and the whole model moves just fine!

 

Honestly, this is... less tedious than I expected it to be, more just time consuming.

 

Thank you for the continued support madmongo!

[madmongo]

Select the mesh that Blender is complaining about, go into weight paint, set the bone part and weight value you want etc, press F to select faces, A to select all, then shift-K to assign that weight value to every vertex in that mesh.

 

That makes sure that every vertex is weighted, no matter what. Of course, is also assigns the same weight value to every single vertex in that mesh, which often isn't what you want, so then you have to go back and manually paint the weights that you want. But this gets rid of that unweighted vertex error.

Edited April 4, 2016 by madmongo

[SirSquidly]

Thanks, gonna try it now!

[SirSquidly]

Sorry, got busy with other things, I just tried what you said, yet the same parts seem to be selected for unweighted oddly enough. I'm going to check out other tutorials to try and see if I can find anything, but I'm not sure if those will work.

 

EDIT: OR is there a video in case I missed something.

Edited April 5, 2016 by SirSquidly