Invisible clothing

[DrakeTheDragon]

Could you provide a screenshot of the NIF's structure in NifSkope after export, or link to the file uploaded somewhere?

 

It doesn't sound like a texture issue to me but like the common case of messed up NIF structure after export. You didn't alter or exchange textures at all after all, just import => move some vertices around => export, if I got it right.

It is very easy to mess up the NIF structure by just a little inconsistency in export options or a single wrong box checked off, so this is always the first thing to check for me.

 

If for example you imported 2 items, you likely ended up with 2 armatures as well. This will most likely lead to a NIF tree like "0 NiNode Scene Root -> 1 NiNode Scene Root.00 -> some NiTriShapes/Strips and other NiNodes" and there you have 2 scene roots and the whole NIF is useless to the game. And this is only 1 of the many things which could have gone wrong messing up the NIF's structure.

 

If it's only those 2 armatures, this can easily be fixed by deleting both armatures, selecting all meshes and importing only the armature from skeleton.nif or something (a "complete" armature's important here, that's why you usually import it from the skeleton files) parenting selected meshes in the process (it's an import option). Last but not least it can't hurt checking the name of this one-and-only armature actually is "Scene Root" and nothing else, before exporting it again and this time hopefully not ending up with an invalid NIF structure again.

 

However, in case it's something more complex, hard to spot or completely different, an image of the NIF tree should quickly tell the knowledgeable ones around here what's wrong with it.

[NaomeShade]

Greetings travelers.

Finally! I followed Mahtawa's instuctions and now the NIF shows its texture in NIFSkope. But not in the game!

Greetings Dragon! Your 'legs' work now and that is great achievement for me. Thank you.

I've uploaded the nif file, but don't know whether your connection supports this site. But here it is.

eraamanviimeinen2.nif

Edited November 18, 2011 by NaomeShade

[Nephenee13]

Greetings travelers.

Finally! I followed Mahtawa's instuctions and now the NIF shows its texture in NIFSkope. But not in the game!

Greetings Dragon! Your 'legs' work now and that is great achievement for me. Thank you.

I've uploaded the nif file, but don't know whether your connection supports this site. But here it is.

eraamanviimeinen2.nif

 

I think Drake is right that you are messing up an import/export option somewhere along the line.

 

Download Saaya's BBB Weighting Tutorial (yes, I know you probably aren't doing BBB, but hang with me). Follow her (his?) steps on importing, skip the BBB stuff, and then when it gets to the part about importing the skeleton, pick it up again.

 

The issue is definitely that the game isn't finding the NIF file where it expects to, and due to how the game loads clothes/armor, that results in an "empty" space, because it removes the nude torso and replaces it with the armor, which includes a torso (or equivalent) of its own.

[NaomeShade]

Good day Nephenee13.

I've read the tutorial. I cheked the boxes in import/export it shows and used her skeleton. I've really made progress. There is no exacly full empty space now... The game provides a small black thing and black spikes as I rotate my character. The thing is becoming more interesting. And again I need help! :ohdear:

Edited November 18, 2011 by NaomeShade

[Nephenee13]

I'll check your NIF when I get home, though no promises, I'm fairly new at this myself

 

What is the original piece you started with? I assume its available here, could you link to it so I can make a comparison?

[NaomeShade]

Thank you for your trouble. I have to upload latest mesh, the one I had showed here was bad one.

Edition using tutorial:

FINAL_MESH.nif

The original one. From SPB's collection mod... The content may look indecent :sweat: but there is pretty nice suit from Mercenary section. So I just give you a link to this it.

http://narod.ru/disk/31741836001/MercUpper03BL.nif.html

I dont know whether it isn't forbidden to upload parts of plugins... So dont beat me!

[Nephenee13]

Ok, you definitely f'd something up good. And I'm not quite sure what you did. You definitely lost the textures, and have done something to cause ridiculous distortion as well.

 

I think that that file is unsalvagable, you probably need to try again from the base file. Unless someone with more experience can help. But it looks to me like you accidentally deleted something important, whether it was in Blender, or in NifSkope, I can't say.

 

Sorry.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, from the NIF structure's point of view this seems to be a totally valid file. Nothing is off in this last one.

Only the texture sources are absolute pathes, which makes it useless on other people's installations. Texture sources should start with "textures/", not "d:/".

 

I know the item you were editing, so I'm not concerned about the absence of any body part meshes. They never were in there to begin with and this clothing could only be worn with its fitting complements or you'd get horrible gaps ingame.

 

I mounted it on a skeleton in NifSkope and let some animations play. Everything was moving and deforming properly. So the rigging isn't off either.

 

It's just the textures off here. Make sure "d:\program files\oblivion\data\textures\a neptunia\mcbodysuit01_05.dds" exists and there's also a "d:\program files\oblivion\data\textures\a neptunia\mcbodysuit01_n.dds" (important! NOT "mcbodysuit_01_05_n.dds"! The game is searching for the "_n" right at the first "_"!).

 

I'll fix the absolute pathing and point it into the mercenary folder (don't know if I've got an "a neptunia" folder on my drives) as the textures seem to be only altered versions of the originals (which I have) and try it out ingame. Will let you know if anything out of the ordinary happened.

 

Oh and to explain why I'm suspecting the textures, I know from my own mods that a missing normalmap ("..._n.dds") does not only make the mesh go black or invisible, but can also even break the rigging, make the mesh deform horribly!

 

edit: While fixing the texture pathes so it'll work for me I noticed the faces of the "Bodysuitliner" were flipped outside-in, making the thing see-through from outside! It was easily fixed in NifSkope though by just flipping the faces.

The big upperbody part though is missing some faces on the back, so there's a gap now between the upper part and the lower. Let's see what it does ingame.

 

edit2: Looking fine ingame, no distortions and nothing invisible. However, due to the Bodysuitliner overlapping the Bodysuit part in many areas, there's some horrible clipping going on down there.

Might I ask what you intended to change at this clothing? Right now there's no obvious difference ingame. I'm led to believe you wanted this Bodysuitliner part to be gone even, so you could see the changes you did to the Bodysuit thing. But that's just guessing.

Edited November 18, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon

[NaomeShade]

I know I may be doing useless work. The plugin provides the whole fine set of course... But I wanted to make a unique set of a rogue-like female character. Unique. As I can't make new meshes myself all I can do is to look through the plugin base to find pieces of armour and compare them. I liked Nightweaves set very much. I meant I liked its lower part very much, but other parts are sertainly 'heavy' and I dont like them :dance:=)

Spending insomnia nights I've finally find the only light-like suit of my dreams - SPB. But when I put them together I saw that they... dont look nice...Low part of the suit slips into the upper part of the leggings. :sad:

One more night to find, download and install blender and then understand (well understand how to edit things) it to edit the suit.

What I actually have done to it is just deleting triangles before the place where leggings should be --- so everything should look fine.

 

Now I made other names to dds files - so _n is the first --- BLACK SPIKES BECAME BIGGER!!!!! :ohmy: Mahtawa told me to make _n.dxt3 (yeah one more night to get to the photoshop) instead of just _n.dds . But it wasn't the true problem. Thank you for your patience.

Edited November 18, 2011 by NaomeShade

[DrakeTheDragon]

Wait a second. I think there's some confusion here.

 

What exactly does "black spikes" mean for you? There were no "spikes" at all when I was testing it ingame, and the "black" is a sign for missing normalmap textures.

What exactly do you mean by "Now I made other names to dds files - so _n is the first"? Do your texture files now "start" with "_n"? That'd be more wrong than before. The "_n" is a suffix to the filename, right before the ".dds". So if your texture is named "MyTexture.dds", your normalmaps have to be named "MyTexture_n.dds" or the game won't find them. There's some oddities when using "_" in filenames, like I told you, so for a texture named "mcbodysuit01_05.dds" the game will search for a normalmap file of the name "mcbodysuit01_n.dds".

 

Changing the normalmap's compression to DXT3 doesn't involve altering its suffix. In fact the game will not use any file NOT ending on ".dds". If your normalmap now ends up being named "MyTexture_n.dxt3", nothing will work anymore.

But did you even change any textures to begin with? If you didn't touch the textures nor the normalmaps, you just have to take care the normalmaps are copied along with the textures, so every "XYZ.dds" has a fitting "XYZ_n.dds" in the exact same folder. And if you rename anything, keep this relation intact, that's all. If you just took the original normalmaps from SPB, there's no need to touch their compression or whatever. They very likely already are in DXT3 or DXT5 anyways, or they are even stored uncompressed, with alpha channels. No matter what, they "are" fine already, as the original you copied from is already working fine ingame.

 

So I was right, you altered the mesh named "Bodysuit", removing some faces so it better fits with those other lowerbody items. Did you also alter the mesh named "Bodysuitliner" though? It is covering the area you tried to free up by the cutting, so it'd be counterproductive to your goals. That's also what's causing clipping down there. So I'm wondering what it's there for or if it just wasn't deleted, yet.

 

There's one more thing that came to mind while fixing the "absolute" pathes in the texture sources. The game is very strict with files' locations. The CS will complain if you leave the Data folder while browsing for resources. Model files outside of "meshes" can't be selected, maybe even armors can't get a mesh not inside armor. However, your textures not residing inside "armor" could also be something the game could hickup on. Maybe try moving them into "textures\armor\a neptunia\mcbodysuit01_05.dds" and change the "NiTextureSource" entries in the NIF accordingly.

 

Also always a good idea is applying the full range of "Spells" from "Sanitize" before saving in NifSkope, although some of them should be applied automatically on save.

 

Oh, and for reference, creating anything that's more to your liking than what's already there is never "useless work"! Don't know where you got that idea from.