Tutorial: 3ds Max Skinned Meshes Into Game

[greywaste]

Guys, crashes on export after you've deleted anything on a mesh are likely to be due to the dismember modifier, you'll need to re-assign polys to the correct piece or workaround it by assigning all to 20 and then deleting the 22 and 26 and not worrying about clipping.

 

Anybody gotten the stencil property to work? Attached it correctly just doesn't seem to change regardless of flag - sorry if this was already asked and answered.

Edited December 8, 2011 by greywaste

[MysticBinary82]

I tried it but my mesh is kind of broken but visible.

[PrometheusTS]

Guys, crashes on export after you've deleted anything on a mesh are likely to be due to the dismember modifier, you'll need to re-assign polys to the correct piece or workaround it by assigning all to 20 and then deleting the 22 and 26 and not worrying about clipping.

 

Anybody gotten the stencil property to work? Attached it correctly just doesn't seem to change regardless of flag - sorry if this was already asked and answered.

MEans?

[Vannus]

There must be a "skeleton.hkx", "skeleton.nif" and a "skeletonbeast.nif" in \meshes\actors\character\character assets

 

I don't get my mesh to work ingame too. I try to edit the nude male mod. I did already change the mesh and put some more realism into it but I always get my mesh screwed ingame.

By screwed, I'm expecting you mean the vertices are all over the place? I bet it's probably to do with morphs. Have you checked at the lowest and highest ranges of body weight? Try a new character and set the weight to lowest, does it look right? Then move it, does it break? Then at highest, does it look right again? If so, it's down to morphs.

 

The problem is, each mesh (for armour or bodies, anyway) have two files: a x_0 and a x_1. The x_0 is the smallest size on the body weight scale (skinny/slim), and x_1 is the highest (muscular). In order for Skyrim to morph between these for values other than the min and max, the models must match exactly in terms of vertex count and order. This is where everything (at least for me) is tricky.

 

One cannot just expect to make modifications to one of them, and then try and replicate those modifications to the other. Everything must be done from the mesh with the same vertices. So, if you're changing the actual vertices of a mesh, you'll then have to use that same mesh for changing it to the different size, without adding or deleting vertices—doing so will break the morphs.

 

This, for me, is why I haven't made my own body yet. I don't know of a convenient way of resizing or even re-ordering the vertices. There's Morphix, but unfortunately it's old and hasn't been updated, and I cannot get it to work with 2012. It's a real shame because I bet that would have been ideal, otherwise.

 

I've even tried using the Conform compound object, but what with riskily having to weld all the unwelded seams in the body, it's not ideal, and the results were never perfect enough to use—the odd stray vertex would be totally in the wrong place, and it was too tedious to fix it all.

 

I'd love to know thegal's method of doing this, though I'm not sure he uses 3ds Max anyway, but it would still be interesting. I'm not patient enough to resize the body manually, which would be a big job if you wanted to then make changes to the mesh again at a future date! Which I definitely would ;) Maybe I should look into it again, but it's just such a time consuming process and I'm always phobic towards releasing anything I make, haha! I should change that habit and release something for once, really.

[SPARTdAN]

An arrow to the knee should do more damage than a head shot, since it will mean you can no longer be an adventurer.

[Vannus]

I have downloaded the latest 3dsmax exporter importer , the things I did are the following :Since I have found no skeleton I only found a skeleton hfx something not the nif skeleton , so I have taken this and placed in the same folder of the mesh I wanted to import , befoure this step I took 2 armors and merged into one nif , as the usual stuff done to have a new armor so far just by erasing parts of the meshes with photoshop work , anyway I did this and then imported in 3dsmax , it imported and seemed fine keeping the stacked modifiers , so I proceded to delete parts of one armor and parts of the other , I am not sure why but the armors seemed doubled in the import , altough in the nif file they where one single block so I delete the duplicates , then I reexport it and .... crash .... :( the mesh I mixmatched are the dawn robe and the steel plate armor ...

Right, to my knowledge, there are two skeleton nif files that are most important: skeleton.nif (male) and skeleton_female.nif (female). They are both located in the meshes BSA, with the male under "meshes\actors\character\character assets\skeleton.nif", and the female under "meshes\actors\character\character assets female\skeleton_female.nif".

 

Depending upon whether your mesh is for male or female or not, you'll need the appropriate skeleton nif file in the same directory as the model you're importing. As my tutorial originally said, it should give you an error stating which skeleton is missing; does yours not?

 

An arrow to the knee should do more damage than a head shot, since it will mean you can no longer be an adventurer.

Lol, did I miss what this was in reply to?

[MysticBinary82]

@Vannus

 

You could use the snap tool to align the vertices one by one.

 

That script would be cool... and there are no other scripts which do the same?

Edited December 8, 2011 by MysticBinary82

[Vannus]

@Vannus

 

You could use the snap tool to align the vertices one by one.

 

That script would be cool... and there are no other scripts which do the same?

Yeah, certainly I could, but that's extremely tedious to do for all the body's vertices each time I want to change the mesh.

 

I haven't been able to find an alternative script, no :( I really hope there is one out there if someone knows of it! It seems, oddly, re-ordering vertices for morphs isn't a very common thing that's needed. I'm not sure of the typical way of easily doing morphs, then.

 

Did you find out if this was the issue or not for you?

[MysticBinary82]

I am not sure, cause right now I did it again and the mesh looked good exapt of 2 faces... I'll see if I can fix that.

 

I also do a search for a simular max script.

[throttlekitty]

You can easily just add the werewolf-transformation spell to your spellbook.:

player.addspell 00092c48

Equip it and then trigger it with the shout-key.

 

You can also just spawn a (hostile) werewolf close to you (make sure you're in godmode so he doesn't kill you):

player.placeatme 000A1972

 

As for my .nif, there is nothing special about it. But yes of course, here you go:

 

http://dl.dropbox.co...rewolf_nifs.zip

 

Place the .nif of your choice in skyrim\Data\meshes\actors\werewolfbeast\character assets\ to check it out in game.

 

Let me know if I can do something else.

Ok, I found a few things, but the crash comes from the Properties list, two shapes have the AlphaProperty linked before the BSLightingShaderProperty. Reversing the order they're listed fixed the crash.

 

Other things: Looks like the max exporter sets "Unknown Short 1" to 8. Probably not a big deal, the only places i've seen values other than zero is on trees.

TriShapeData>Center gets garbage data written to it, hover for a tooltip, and you'll see invalid floats. rClick the TriShapeData and do Mesh>Update Center/Radius to fix it. Previous titles used center/radius to determine if an object was offscreen, and whether or not it should be drawn, and the editors use it to create the bounding box for selections.

 

edit: oh, and i'm not sure about morphing with werewolves. there's an fx mesh they use for the transition, but it doesn't morph with the character. Hard to say if it morphs to the werewolf body, since they're both the same shape.

Edited December 8, 2011 by throttlekitty