Problem loading meshes and textures in Nifskope

[TBot Alpha]

I have been trying to export an armour model from Blender into Nifskope, but every time I try the textures never appear. All I get is a grey version of my model with the skeleton rig sticking out of it.

 

http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/aa73/TBot_Alpha/nifskope1.jpg

 

I was working from the "Making a Custom Cuirass" tutorial on the Construction Set wiki, but it wasn't very clear how exporting textures worked. Can anyone clarify?

[rinoaff33]

Are you using a texture from vanilla Oblivion? If the texture file is packed into a BSA archive, NifSkope won't load it (at least in my experience). You'll need to extract it using a tool, like OBMM. Edited July 8, 2011 by rinoaff33

[DrakeTheDragon]

What did you do in Blender to get your texture to show up inside there? The texture you selected in the UV window, the one that's displayed in the 3D View then, is "not" the one the scripts will write into the texture properties of the exported NIF.

The tutorial goes in detail through assigning the right textures "post" export in NifSkope, so I guess it was never intended to have the right ones exported right away.

 

Nevertheless, when in "Object Mode" there is a group of 6 little icons in the menu bar above the "Buttons Window" panel: "Logic", "Script", "Shading", "Object", "Editing" and "Scene".

Select your mesh, go to the 3rd, "Shading", and you will be presented with 5 more to the right of it: "Lamp buttons", "Material buttons", "Texture buttons", "Radiosity buttons" and "World buttons".

The 2nd defines the material in all detail, but not every material Blender knows can be exported by the NifScripts. I had them error-out on me after playing around with these settings too much. "Can't export this material type" or something it said.

The 3rd one, "Texture buttons", is what interests us here. On the far right of the "Buttons Window" panel there's now a block titled "Images" and there you find the exact path and filename of the texture the "NiTextureSource" property will be pointing to after export.

 

From your screenshot I can't see what the texture path for your textures is currently, so I don't know if there isn't something else wrong with it as well.

 

But what I can see is a bogus "Scene Root.00" inside "Scene Root". Meaning this NIF file is unusable for the game. This usually happens when you mix different armatures, ending up with more than one, or you miss renaming the last remaining, provided you deleted the others, armature to "Scene Root" by all means, but it can also happen when an object keeps its "Armature" "Modifier" although the armature it was parented to was deleted before, ending up having 2 armatures to follow along, one of them missing.

 

This is usually easily fixed by right-clicking the bogus "Scene Root.00" and selecting "Block > Crop Branch" from the context menu, making it so everything "above" the selected branch will vanish and the selected branch will be the new root node. Then you only have to rename it to "Scene Root" and the game should be able to use the file again. Take care though that there are situations in which your geometry's parts are "split" over those "Scene Root"s. If you then simply use the "Crop Branch" trick, you will loose half of your meshes! In such case a proper export rather than complex post-export fixing is advisable.

Edited July 8, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon

[TBot Alpha]

@rinoaff33: No, I'm using custom textures.

 

@DraketheDragon: I had the images loaded in the UV window, but not applied to the mesh. I've since changed that, and it shows up perfectly now. I also did the Scene Root thing you mentioned, though I'll have take your word on whether it worked or not. Thank you very much for the detailed advice.

 

One additional problem has cropped up in-game, though: when a character puts on the boots, they appear black and the whole mesh only moves with the left foot, instead of seperately on either foot. Before that the model wasn't showing up at all, and I tried re-importing the skeleton, re-parenting it to the mesh, then exporting again, which gave me my current results. What could have caused this?

 

(sorry, first time custom modeller, and I really want to get this working)

Edited July 8, 2011 by TBot Alpha

[DrakeTheDragon]

One additional problem has cropped up in-game, though: when a character puts on the boots, they appear black and the whole mesh only moves with the left foot, instead of seperately on either foot. Before that the model wasn't showing up at all, and I tried re-importing the skeleton, re-parenting it to the mesh, then exporting again, which gave me my current results. What could have caused this?

 

I actually have a similar issue to this still left unattended in a test-release of mine. I'm mostly working in my own development folders until something is "done" and I'm finishing files and folders up for release. For example I got a folder named "dragon" inside both "meshes" and "textures", where all my dragon-related in-development files reside. Releasing a mod with such a generic foldername is totally out of the question and would just be asking for conflicts, so I made up new folders and placed all files into them respectively and changed any file paths in the NIF files. Due to their number though it seemed I missed one or two of those paths and they're still pointing into my development folder, which of course isn't on anybody else's drive. Thus the NIF files are missing their textures and, pretty misteriously but not too much surprising either, the missing normalmaps (pitch black or invisible meshes) somehow supercede the missing textures (purple meshes) in this case and to make things even worse also the rigging of some of those meshes gets lost. All due to the missing textures only, as weird as it may sound.

 

In your case I bet it's missing normalmaps (the files ending on "..._n.dds" going along with your regular "xyz.dds" texture files, telling the game how much bumpyness your texture should have and how much light to reflect in which area of it, that's why it's pitch black or invisible when it's not present, as no light at all gets reflected then) or something similar as well now. I can't imagine "how" this would cause the issues we described (a missing texture destroys the rigging? yeah, sure... can't be serious), but I know for certain it "does", in my case at least.

Edited July 8, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon