Creating a new helmet: appears upside down in game

[Nephelus]

I just wanted to start small by getting a pre-created helmet into the game (ripped from another game using UE viewer). Here's the process I followed.

 

Outfit studio: Load reference helmet (in my case, Synth Field Helmet). Then export as OBJ.

Blender: Import the Synth helmet and position the new helmet to roughly the same location and scale. Export my helmet as OBJ

Outfit studio: Create new project using BaseMaleHead as reference. Import porting helmet OBJ. Weight paint everything to the HEAD bone. Export helmet as a NIF.

NifSkope: Link the mesh to the correct textures:

Creation kit: Create a new armor based on Army Helmet. The new helmet shows up upside-down in the preview window and in the game itself. Aside from that, textures and movement works fine. I get the feeling there's some little value I need to set in my NIF file which is causing the problem.

So, I really have no idea what I have done wrong and could really use some help.

[xgamer468]

I have a similar problem, my chest piece is rotated about 90 degree the wrong way, ill let you know if i find a way to fix it

[xgamer468]

I found the problem, for me it was the pivot point that was causing the rotation. I dont know how it works in blender but you just need to make sure that the pivot point is rotated the exact same way as the one of your reference vanilla file, that fixed it for me.

[seekingthesun]

paste it over a vanilla helmet and then delete the mesh, but not the infrastructure.

[c303c]

Ya its the axis orientation I believe CK uses Y as the horizontal plane (most games do) while blender uses Z axis as the horizontal. Using the Y plane as height has stemmed from the long tradition of viewing art on the 2D plane where Y is height and X width and Z is depth. As xgamer468 found out changing the objects pivot point changes its axis. In the end it doesn't matter what axis you use for what, but it's just industry standard to use Y as height in games right now.

Edited May 16, 2016 by c303c

[Nephelus]

The closest thing Blender has to what might be called a pivot point is the Origin, which is a point around which an object is rotated in blender. But the origin itself doesn't have any rotation since it's just a point. I experimented by moving the origin to several different locations before exporting the OBJ but none had any effect.

 

 

paste it over a vanilla helmet and then delete the mesh, but not the infrastructure.

I'm assuming you mean to do this in nifSkope. I have tried to do this, but upon loading the mesh in the Creation Kit, the program instantly crashes.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Nephelus

[Nephelus]

Accidental double post. Ignore.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Nephelus

[Tankiki]

Blender uses different axis orientations for different goals. By default Blender is set to "Global" orientation but that wont give you that actual orientation of the object. In the picture below you can see highlighted in YELLOW the different types of transform views (it's set to global currently) what you want to set it to is "Local" to show the objects actual orientation. Highlighted in RED is the axis planes that change depending on the transform view. Boxed in GREEN is a check box that will always show the local orientation of the object that you have selected.

 

http://i.imgur.com/HmcXB72.png

 

TLDR: In the image I rotated the box 90‎° on its x axis, as you can see its y axis is now facing up but the blue, green, and red axis marker is saying that the z axis is facing up this is because it's still in global view switching it to local view will correct the marker.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Tankiki

[Nephelus]

Okay. I follow your logic and I do indeed see that my helmets local orientation is not the same as the global. But what do I do? I rotated everything until both local and global were exactly the same but the helmet still turns out upside down. Does my helmet have to have a specific local orientation to work correctly?

[Nephelus]

@Tankiki Any additional help?