Anyone have experience with making new trees?

[Cancerous1]

Okay, I'm working in Fallout 4, but things aren't too much different than Skyrim so I thought I'd post in here rather than the Fo4 section. I'm trying to add leaf animation and make these trees harvestable too. Tried a few approaches including making separate models and connecting them with a connect point and I'm finally seeing some progress in that my trees are animating now and still "growing" fruit I can harvest, but I'd really like some feedback from someone that has made trees or flora with animation before.

 

What controls how much the animation is applied? Vertex colors? looking at the trees already in the game they are exported as a single mesh but the animation doesn't apply to their trunks and I'm kind of at a loss because my trees are looking like something summoned from the necronomicon or possibly came through an oblivion portal.

 

[ThreeTen]

I could easily see those trees in a dark souls level :D

The best I can do is perhaps show you this mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32723/? which heavily modifies the tree's shakiness, perhaps you can take a look at the nifs inside there.

 

Edit: link didnt show up

[Cancerous1]

Well the trees that are animated go in a different record type than the harvestable plants, you can turn down the effect in a record on those but it applies across the whole tree, the leaves would stop animating too if i turned that down there. Thanks tho, hoping maybe someone that has done Flora before bight see and comment.

[TrickyVein]

Right, vertex alpha directly determines how much sway is applied to mesh geometry, just like grass (theoretically, since creating new grass is broken in the CK at the moment).

 

If the root node is a BSLeafAnimNode and your BSTriShape has a BSShaderLightingProperty with FSF2_Tree_Anim flags then it will move.

Edited May 2, 2016 by TrickyVein

[Cancerous1]

Right, vertex alpha directly determines how much sway is applied to mesh geometry, just like grass (theoretically, since creating new grass is broken in the CK at the moment).

 

If the root node is a BSLeafAnimNode and your BSTriShape has a BSShaderLightingProperty with FSF2_Tree_Anim flags then it will move.

 

Thank you! You're awesome. I wouldn't have guessed vertex alpha for my next few guesses at it and I couldn't find any threads discussing it.

 

edit: the 3dstudio plugin for Fallout 4 doesn't seem to be retaining the alpha on the color though :/

[TrickyVein]

Yeah, it stinks. I'm struggling with the same issue where NifTools doesn't export accurate vertex rgba colors.

 

I'm currently hunting down a solution, since it's pretty important in cases like this.

[Cancerous1]

I found if you set color, alpha, and luminescence all zero you can get the verts RGBA to 80808080 which brings it a little closer to behaving, it seems like the only other way I've found to control it is detach the elements into separate meshes. I popped in the niftools IRC channel to try to let them know / ask if I was doing something wrong but it was pretty late and no one seemed to be awake at the time.

 

the thought of setting them all manually to zero is kind of daunting

[TrickyVein]

Manually setting vertex colors in an array is something I've done before many times, I'm afraid, as any NifTools I've used have never exported vertex colors accurately from a scene in max with any complex geometry, i.e. anything with lots of faces.

[Cancerous1]

I actually got slightly different (and usable) results when I exported with the vertex paint modifier on, still kind of unsure which layer it should be applied to but when I applied it to all layers with just the verts selected I was trying to zero out, it seemed like it darkened the texture in game for some reason if that wasn't my imagination but the verts were weighted right at least as far as the animation. I would love to understand what is happening with this lol.

 

The verts in nifscope still listed the color as 80808080 but the animation behavior was different. :/ so confusing.

[TrickyVein]

Niftools for exporting meshes with vertex colors from max are messed up. They just don't work. I'm dealing with the same issues.

 

0% alpha is consistently exported as 50.2% alpha, or 0.502, whether or not a vertex paint modifier is applied or not.

Edited May 4, 2016 by TrickyVein