Tutorial: 3ds Max Skinned Meshes Into Game

[PrometheusTS]

 

Ok thankyou so I can merge , delete, weld vertices freely as long as I do Clone the very same armour and move the vertices into a more "normal" position after the _1 bulky one?

Basically yes.

 

but if I move vertices won't the rigging skin bring those back into position? I mean I have to redo all the thing since beginning to make match the morphed _0 to the _1?

No. any pushing verts around under skin at the subobject level will be fine, having skin in the stack will not undo anything like that.

 

Do I need any special mofifier to make the morph work etc?

Nope. The only essential thing is that the 2 meshes must share the same vertex number order.

Als can I cut and paste the modifiers ontop of stack ? as I work better with editable poly than editable mesh so Coudl I transform the mesh into editpoly and then stack back the cutted modifiers and repaste over the edit poly?

 

Well yeah. I recommend edit poly when using skin anyway, as you can work under it and skin will actually update, even if you add cuts/extra geo. If you do so with edit mesh you may have problems...

You can cut and paste modifiers. but you may experience some errors if you have reordered the vertex number array between any meshes you are copying and pasting from, or the meshes are just totally different. Mileage may vary on specific modifiers, some have more leeway than others.

I was thinking to actually Cut all the modifiers , transform themesh into editable poly and repaste the modifiers on top of that , would that work fine?

 

I ask all this as I do not want to go all editing andwork and discover that in the end one of those steps where crucial to make work the mesh ingame ....

 

Also another question is do you have any advice to follow to get to make the other morphed shape? like start from _0 and make after this the _1 or viceversa , or is better for example importing _1 and _0 and work on them instead than making a _1 become _0 ? but if I do this last doingthe same operations mostly woudl I keep the same order of vertices? what happens if for any case or error one of the vertices do not correspond to naming or order how can I discover that?

 

Or is there any modifier that can help to make a better morph work?

[Reddimus]

there is a tutorial on niftools on how it works.

 

The difference from F3 to Skyrim's use is that instead of setting up the different dismemberable body parts(which is 10x more complicated than skyrim's use/set up), It's only used for disabling sections of the mesh from rendering when wearing other armor pieces, basically it's a way to minimise clipping. For example the shins will be on one partition so that when boots are worn, that part of the mesh that would other wise be covered by them is disabled from rendering. refer to vanilla assets for it's use and how to correctly set it up on your asset.

 

ATM I'm just worried about how to get this in game at minimum. If essentially all I need to do is follow the tweaks in the OP and replace BSLSPs and the BSDismember, I'm not sure what else I'm missing. Files _0 and _1 the same files also.

Edited December 16, 2011 by Reddimus

[Ghogiel]

@Reddimus: so is it not working in game?

 

I was thinking to actually Cut all the modifiers , transform themesh into editable poly and repaste the modifiers on top of that , would that work fine?

to start with instead of pasting, you can just use skin utilities to extract skin weights to a mesh then convert to a edit poly, then add a new skin and import the weights... and don't copy and paste a BSdismember modifier around edited meshes.. well not without actually going through it and fixing it. I jsut add a new one just before export, like I say it takes 20secs to set up an outfit as they only have like 3 partitions.

 

OR just add an edit poly modifier to the stack move under skin and edit in that modifier, you can also 'collapse to' and it'll collapse the poly down onto the edit mesh in effect replacing it.

 

There are 5 different ways to do any of this.

 

Also another question is do you have any advice to follow to get to make the other morphed shape?

 

You MIGHT be able to not be totally anal about it. Max does actually have a mathematical way it orders vertices in any given mesh. If you get max to reorder the verts, then it should re order them in the same way every time you do soemthing like collapse the stack, as long as you haven't added or removed any geo of course. One problem people are having is that they aren't letting max reorder the verts.

 

And yeah there are various ways to edit one mesh to basically morph/vert snap conform to another. I would hope that you can do so and vert order would remain intact. Meaning you can probably easily modify a fat or thin version relatively simply. Which is probably no more time consuming as modifying one version then doing the same again to get the other. It really depends if you are trying to modify a vanilla asset or just making your own.. well not really, it's still the same, the only difference is you are trying to keep working morph intact as opposed to making a new morph variation. Just don't think of it as different and it makes sense all the different ways you can mess with/make morph variations.

Edited December 16, 2011 by Ghogiel

[Reddimus]

Yea, it keeps crashing on equip.

[Ghogiel]

Did you change the body part in the BSDismemberSkinInstance partitions to the correct number. If you exported with a new BSdismember modifier, those body part names are for F3 and are not used in Skyrim..

[Vannus]

BTW I'm just editing the mesh at the bottom of the stack, using the existing Edit Mesh.

I'd recommend not doing any edits to the actual Edit Mesh modifier at the bottom of the stack. For one, it's Edit Mesh, and that's not as good as Edit Poly, so I always recommend adding Edit Poly modifiers if you're wanting to change anything. Keep them under the Skin modifier. And two, it's destructive editing, so it's best to add on top (like adding layers to a Photoshop file so your changes/additions are non-destructive).

 

And yeah there are various ways to edit one mesh to basically morph/vert snap conform to another. I would hope that you can do so and vert order would remain intact. Meaning you can probably easily modify a fat or thin version relatively simply. Which is probably no more time consuming as modifying one version then doing the same again to get the other. It really depends if you are trying to modify a vanilla asset or just making your own.. well not really, it's still the same, the only difference is you are trying to keep working morph intact as opposed to making a new morph variation. Just don't think of it as different and it makes sense all the different ways you can mess with/make morph variations.

I'd love to know more about these methods, as it was the main issue I was facing when I was trying to have a go at it. I just found it too time consuming to resize the mesh to the other weight scale. I even tried the compound object Conform, which sort of worked to a point, but bits weren't working well at all, and it was just as tedious as not using it at all. (I'm talking about the entire body mesh, not just armour, if you're wondering why I'm saying it's too tedious to do! Maybe I'm just too lazy, as others clearly have managed it.)

 

I had originally made my edits twice—one to each mesh—but wasn't aware of the morph importance at the time (I forgot it was actually a morph and not just a swap!). It was unfortunate because while I kept the exact same vertex count, the order was totally messed up, and I couldn't get it to match. I was hoping Morphix was going to help me there, but it doesn't seem to work with 2012 :(

[Reddimus]

There're two nodes in this file, one below EbonyBody and one below Cuirass. One was set to 32, the other to BP_TORSO. Changed them to both be 32. Getting the same crash.

 

I just read the OP again. It doesn't mention anything about it crashing the game, just that the mesh won't appear. There must be some glaring misstep I'm taking here?

 

-Imported with OP's settings

-Edited mesh below Skin modifier

-Delete and reapply BSDismember @ top of stack (Is it necessary to do anything inside of this modifier?)

-Export with OP's settings

-Replace BSLightShaderProperties with original mesh copies (Do this for multiple instances?)

-Vertex colors/has normals

-BSDismember nodes have value of 32 (Do this for all instances?)

-Save as 'mesh'_0 and 'mesh'_1 (Auto sanitize?)

 

If you could imagine this was your process, what am I doing wrong?

Edited December 16, 2011 by Reddimus

[Skree000]

There're two nodes in this file, one below EbonyBody and one below Cuirass. One was set to 32, the other to BP_TORSO. Changed them to both be 32. Getting the same crash.

 

I just read the OP again. It doesn't mention anything about it crashing the game, just that the mesh won't appear. There must be some glaring misstep I'm taking here?

 

-Imported with OP's settings

-Edited mesh below Skin modifier

-Delete and reapply BSDismember @ top of stack (Is it necessary to do anything inside of this modifier?)

-Export with OP's settings

-Replace BSLightShaderProperties with original mesh copies (Do this for multiple instances?)

-Vertex colors/has normals

-BSDismember nodes have value of 32 (Do this for all instances?)

-Save as 'mesh'_0 and 'mesh'_1 (Auto sanitize?)

 

If you could imagine this was your process, what am I doing wrong?

 

Run this process, should work for you, just got a full on body replacer working ingame flawlessly. The MOST IMPORTANT step is the final one, about the renaming of node Zero. And it has to match the mesh names of BOTH _1 and _0 versions, for the engine to know which mesh is which.

• Have custom mesh open in Max
• Import matching Vanilla mesh with partial skeleton (remove unused bones)
• Skin wrap from vanilla to my own
• remove vanilla mesh
• in skin modifier on my own, remove-zero-weights, just to be safe (this seemed to stop the CTDs)
• export to nifskope
• open second copy of nifskope with vanilla
• delete material block in modified
• paste branch of the material shader branch from vanilla to modified
• set HasNormals to none in modified
• set HasVertexColors to yes in modified
• rClick'd 'Center/Radius', Mesh>Update Center and Radius
• BSDismemberSkinInstance > Partitions > BSDismemberBodyPartType set to the numbers to match vanilla, rather than whatever Max spits out
• Ignore BSPartFlag entries, did not seem to matter (?)
• Nifskope>View>Block List> Show Blocks in List
• Open the "Header">Strings array
• modify entry 0 (root node), rename it the mesh you are saving as. ie in this case, FemaleBody_0.nif, save, then change name to FemaleBody_1.nif and save as that one. I used caps to match vanilla, not sure if important

[Reddimus]

Thanks a lot. I'll try it tonight when I have some time.

[DOGREDRUM43130]

Has anyone found a simpler way of modifying body meshes? I need to remove parts of the Astrid body to prevent clipping through the armor. A problem that wouldn't exist if the missing area under the underwear wasn't so big. Anyway, I have one body that shows up in game. It looks like a bomb went off inside her, but I'm sure I could fix that with other posts in this topic. I'm just not thrilled with idea that to get the other weight I have to take that mesh and move all those vertices.