Modding Skyrim with TESSnip and Nifskope

[darthsloth74]

Can I just ask in regard to the importing of obj's over nitrishape block details will I get weird results in regard to skin modifiers.

 

For example if I cut the female foresworn armour up into bits in max and export them as objs and I then try to import individual pieces over another set of armour will I get problems?

 

This is all new to me circumventing the fact that theres no fully functioning tools at present, so I'd appreciate any guidance anyone is willing to offer.

[Ghogiel]

of course that isn't going to work as the skin weights vertex arrays will have different numbers of vertices, and the order will be totally different.

 

keeping skin intact with Obj import would only work if you

a) do not reorder vertex number index. like collapsing a modifier stack, converting from editable mesh to a poly, or reseting xforms will all reorder vertex array. Making the vert numbers in the skin match totally different vertices in the mesh, say the number on some verts on the mesh will corrispond to the numbers on the vanilla vert order verts, which could be the knee or some other random part, making the mesh basically turn to mush.

 

b) do not add or remove any geometry. If you do then number of verts in the mesh will not match the number of verts in skin for the other mesh. probably insta crash.

Edited December 3, 2011 by Ghogiel

[Waaaghbafet]

Has anyone worked out how keep the khajiit ears/hair from vanishing when a helmet is put on? I've tried using the circlets as a base but it doesn't seem to show up in the game. All I get is a bald cat with no ears and 2 big holes in his head. Renaming a circlet has the same affect.

 

I wanted to create some new race specific helmets and whilst I was looking at the defaults ones I noticed the standard Dragon Scale helmet actually has slots for khajiit ears but as the game just seems to remove the ear geometry whenever a helmet is added all that remains is the large holes.

 

Lets use Dragonscale helmet. Did you bring over the ARMA for dragonscalehelmet_khajiit and change its MOD2, MOD3(?) path for your new helmet. Then take that formID and apply it to one of the MODL on the ARMO dragonscalehelmet ?

(Reason why there is 4 MODL for almost all helmets in the game) each points to the 1 of 4 different ARMA entries

 

Edit: If you're not replacing any items, the ARMA formID needs to be unique.

Thanks, I'm not totally familiar with TESsnip so I wasn't sure what you meant with the ARMA part but I did make sense of the rest of it. Not sure it'll fix my problem though as the original Dragonscale Helmet has the same problem and I was looking to see if that was fixable first. I'll just go back to modeling and texturing until the kit comes out though I think. Far easier.

 

ARMA is another GRUP in skyrim.esm

You will need to copy that and bring that over to your own plugin

Delete all the entries in ARMA except say Dragonscalehelmet_khajiit

Double click Dragonscalehelmet_khajiit and change its formID to something unique

take that new formID and paste it in MODL under your helmet in ARMO (another GRUP that you should have in your plugin)

 

Note#1: Helmets have 4 MODL (each one for humans, lizards, orcs and kitty) each MODL points to their respective ARMA formID

 

Note#2: ARMA also has 3 other entries for helmet like...

Dragonscalehelmet_orc, Dragonscalehelmet_lizard one.. and then the original to work on humans properly

 

Hopefully this 'paints' a better picture on how the system works.

 

If not, I'm not very good at explaining it in paragraph form.

Maybe I'll create a tutorial when I get home with pictures :)

Edited December 3, 2011 by Waaaghbafet

[darthsloth74]

Okay I understood some of that. I assume it will work with swords and axes etc since that only relies on a collision capsule shape and not a skin modifier?

[Ghogiel]

Okay I understood some of that. I assume it will work with swords and axes etc since that only relies on a collision capsule shape and not a skin modifier?

obj import will work with anything that isn't skinned basically. Collision is a separate mesh, and block, so you can treat is as completely separate data to the mesh geo. Skin though is specific information that links bone weights to specific vertices in the mesh.

[darthsloth74]

Okay I understood some of that. I assume it will work with swords and axes etc since that only relies on a collision capsule shape and not a skin modifier?

obj import will work with anything that isn't skinned basically. Collision is a separate mesh, and block, so you can treat is as completely separate data to the mesh geo. Skin though is specific information that links bone weights to specific vertices in the mesh.

 

Ok thanks, at least that means I can give something mesh related a go. Then I'll have to get my head around the TESSnip stuff.

[Liaen]

Edit: Nvm found it Edited December 3, 2011 by Liaen

[Plutoman101]

So, I've spent the past 4-5 days trying to get this to work. To first clarify; yes, I've set masters, and all that jazz. I've compared and contrasted against various fallout 3 mods, seeing what I've done and haven't done. I've gone through and edited every single weather field to a new value, changing all the night RGB values to near 0, if not absolute 0. I've gone through all the lighting templates, changed them. I've gone through the imagespaces, and the imagespace modifiers, but I'm having a hard time puzzling them out.

 

Essentially, interiors don't darken at all. Regardless of what I set the lighting templates too, they don't darken. I've changed all sorts of variables, but from all I can see, it just does nothing. Outside, by modifying weather files, I've managed to make nights darker - momentarily - and then the eyes adjust.

 

For testing purposes, I've edited CELL, WTHR, IMGS, IMAD, LTMP, and the LIGH files to make them darker. I went through several cells and checked all the references to edit the light files. Changed ambient inside cell, made sure it linked to a lighting template, checked the lighting template, checked the interior weather file, modified that, checked the imagespace and set eye adjust to 0 (also tried 1, and an absurdly high number, for the heck of it - but the GECK implies that 0 would set the adjusted lum to the actual lum), checked the imagespace modifiers and got lost, but tried a few edits based on what I could glean from the changes in fellout (never copied anything - just used it as a reference file), modified the same subrecords as it modifies.

 

At this point, I'm just out of ideas. Nothing tested worked, at all. I don't know if there's something with my game that prevents it from working, but I can't see anything to do more. Any assistance?

[wtfmanreally]

So, any ideas yet on why can I replace a vanilla weapon, but whenever I try importing it as a completely new weapon using a .esp, the game CTDs upon equiping it? Edited December 3, 2011 by wtfmanreally

[Waaaghbafet]

So, any ideas yet on why can I replace a vanilla weapon, but whenever I try importing it as a completely new weapon using a .esp, the game CTDs upon equiping it?

 

The past couple pages, I explained how to use the GRUP WEAP and GRUP STAT to create new/duplicated weapons with new textures. Same would apply to replacing vanilla.. just don't need unique formIDs and so forth ...