How do you edit a face/hair?

[XunAmarox]

Well, I'm curious how you successfully edit a face and/or hair mesh for F3NV. I've tried editing both in Blender, but when I export... it looks exactly the same as the old one in NifSkope and there was no change whatsoever in-game. Except, well... the hair mesh loses its coloring, probably a vertex coloring flag or something.

 

But... how do I get the changes to stick? What's the process?

 

I'm guessing it must have something to do with conformulating or some such?

 

If anyone could give me a rundown, that'd be great... I'm trying to fix a really bad clipping issue my shojo has with most hairstyles, one in particular (as a priority, I should say). It's quite frustrating that even editing the meshes won't work, as you can imagine lol...

[Quetzlsacatanango]

You have to enable vertex colors,untick shadow_map, and tick shadow_frustrum and non_projective_shadows. You can look at an existing hair in nifskope to see all the shader flags you should and shouldn't have ticked. Export as a static (unrigged). At this point you can use it as is (may have to move around in blender to get it to match up with head position), but it won't change shape depending on your headshape. So depending on the hair, this might be ok or might not.

If not, then you need to conformulate. I was recently informed that egm files don't work outside of a bsa, so for testing you will have to pack it up first.

[XunAmarox]

Well, about conformulating... How do I even do that? I need to edit the head first, right? Or would it fix the hair to conformulate to an already existing head?

 

Here's how retarded it is... I've deformed the mesh THIS much, just for kicks and giggles, and even DELETED the egm/tri/egt files...

http://i.min.us/iej8Ea.jpg

 

And yet... it looks like this in NifSkope:

http://i.min.us/ienX06.jpg

(exactly as it did before)

 

What the...

 

So, obviously my export isn't working, or something... my hair changes aren't sticking either (the hair not sticking might very well be because of what you mentioned above).

 

Oh and if relevant... The head is the headchildfemale from the Shojo Race, and the hair is the CUTE Amy Hair from Lings (I imagine if the hair is conformulated to vanilla heads and not Shojo, then that could be the problem...).

[Quetzlsacatanango]

The conformulator has pretty specific instructions, it is pretty easy if somewhat tedious.

Something like - Make your mesh for the head you want. Convert it to an obj. Run the conformulator on the obj version to create your egm etc... files. Delete the obj.

As I recall you don't edit the head at all. Not sure why you would want to do that. I have never had any success with it, but obviously it is possible because some people like Geonox and people porting TES reaces are doing it. The main thing is you don't need to edit the head to make the hair.

[XunAmarox]

Hm, well... I didn't have non_projective_shadows at all. So, here are the settings I used: http://i.min.us/ibSDrw.jpg

 

When I export, the nif ends up really... odd. Basically, there are 4 blocks, like copies of what the hair was before, or something. So, I delete the hair that isn't the result of what I edited, and then I delete the BSShader..whatever, then copy that branch (just the shader) from the original hair and paste the branch into that new hair mesh, then I right click, transform, edit, and change the name to NoHat because it was NoHat.001, or sometimes it's Hat or Hat.001 (which is just beyond odd), and since the output nif actually had the wrong scene root name and doesn't even have the Bip01 Head, I decided it'd be most efficient to just delete the NoHat branch from the original and copy/paste branch from the new mesh into the original so that it takes its place, then I do Spells>Update All Tangent Spaces, because if I don't then I get weird artifacts from turned down UV maps. You know, sqiggly lines of light. And so anyways, then I save.

 

That's the process I went through to do it. Hope it helps someone, maybe.

 

edit: Wait, what the... I'm still getting the lighting glitches on the hair. grr.

 

Okay... I've ran just about every spell NifSkope has and I can't fix the lighting artifacts. Any clue how I fix it?

Edited July 26, 2011 by XunAmarox

[Quetzlsacatanango]

You probably want to use bsfadenoderoot, I'm guessing that's what vanilla hairs use. Dismemberment probably doesn't matter. Any shader flags you don't have in blender you can set in nifskope.

 

the .001 gets added by blender when you have another object with the same name. So that's no problem if you name it back.

 

Not sure about the artifacts you are seeing. A screen might help. You might also check if it has an alpha property. Maybe it is supposed to and got lost somewhere along the way.

[XunAmarox]

Well, here it is specifically:

http://i.min.us/iej6Mu.jpg

 

See the sqiggly white-ish line? That shouldn't be there. If you need some more examples of the light artifacts on different things, see here.

 

And also, a description of and *generally* how to fix it:

This "diamond effect" results from turned- down UVmaps (i.e. only the half of body is texturend, the other half gets his texture from a mirrored UVmap). In the midline the UVnormals from first half are directed outwards, from the mirrored half inwards.

NIFskope (and the engine too) seems to have problems in correct rendering at this position.

 

Try SPELLS > BATCH > UPDATE ALL TANGENT SPACES in NIFskope and save.

 

Unfortunately, updating tangent spaces doesn't work on this one.

 

edit: Here's the nifs, if that helps: http://www.mediafire.com/?mpiojwyuvzq0476

Edited July 26, 2011 by XunAmarox

[Quetzlsacatanango]

what mod has the textures for those?

 

nm, I found one that worked. But does this problem not show up in nifskope?

If it was the thing that updating tangent spaces would fix, I think it would. I see it often on armors.

Edited July 26, 2011 by Quetzlsacatanango

[XunAmarox]

It's either Mikoto or Lings. I think it's Mikoto, cause I'm pretty sure I had to manually add it to my Lings since there were quite a few hairstyles Lings doesn't have that Mikoto does.

 

But here, I uploaded its specific ones for you: http://www.mediafire.com/?m99oddwe3d5xdoo

 

__

 

No, it just shows up in-game. Looks perfectly fine in NifSkope.

 

The thing is though, I've come across armors that updating tangent spaces (as well as every single other spell in NifSkope) doesn't fix. I still haven't found a solution for those. I imagine the two problems are likely connected and a fix for one will likely fix both.

Edited July 26, 2011 by XunAmarox

[Quetzlsacatanango]

I can't play the game at the moment so I guess I am spent.

 

I remember seeing something very similar on maybe the bittercup companion for fo3? Including how to fix it. But for the life of me I can't find it now. Hopefully someone useful comes along soon.