one single problematic material causing invisible parts of armor

[allomerus]

EDIT: Sorry, this issue's solution came to me as I hit the ''ok'' button...

 

To any new modelers like me: NEVER call a material SKIN, my guess is that it tells the game to search for your character's own skin texture, rather than the armor's.

 

All works well now.

 

All my apologies for cluttering the forum, if someone can remove this, please do.

 

 

Hello all!

 

As mentioned in the title... I am so close to finishing my armor I probably won't be able to sleep.

 

So, after hours of painful yet strangely fascinating labor, I managed to get 99% of my new custom armor, with totally new meshes and textures, in working order.

 

Unfortunately, I am facing the infamous ''invisible armor part'' problem, and nothing I've read in any tutorial or any other thread seems to actually offer a working fix.

 

 

 

Before we start:

 

The invisible armor parts I am speaking of are not part of a helm or a head object, but only an upperbody object.

 

All texture paths are correct, I quadruple-checked them at least three times (which makes a lot of iterations), the only possibility for this mistake is delirium, in which I am admittedly falling slowly.

Likewise, All textures have appropriately-named normal maps. Needless to say, the invisible mesh does point to its texture.

 

All parts of the mesh have been correctly rigged and parented to a clean and legit version or Growlfs' skeleton.

 

Those two issues being the most frequent and the most documented, I fail to find anything relevant, considering that:

 

 

The problem can be circumscribed to a single NiMaterialProperty, ''Skin'' as I called it. Other meshes in the same armor use the same NiSourcetexture and show correctly in-game, while all meshes using the ''skin'' NiMaterialProperty fail to show their ugly faces. This is the clearest link between the missing parts. However, I fail to see anything relevant. The glossiness of those items is lower (10) than that of the rest of the armor (25), just to differentiate leather from metal.

 

In all honesty, if someone could throw at me a few possible fixes for this situation, I'd throw my wallet at them. Too bad the Net dosen't allow this.

 

I am once again uploading a screenshot of the .Nif file.

 

Thanks in advance for the help!

Edited December 28, 2011 by allomerus

[DrakeTheDragon]

Exactly. The material name "skin" (case doesn't matter) is a keyword for the engine to try and treat the mesh as an actual body part, provided it also finds a keyword'ed "name" for the NiTriStrips/Shapes affected. This name has to include a keyword from "upperbody"/"arms", "lowerbody", "hand", "foot" (again case doesn't matter), so the engine knows which of the 4 texture slots of the race definition to use. The ":" serves as a "remark" character, as it makes the engine ignore all things coming after it. So names like "Foot:Lowerbody" are not uncommon among nowadays body mods' or Stock replacers' NIF files. This for example tells "the engine" to use the "foot" texture (in most body mods the full-body texture) while it tells "the reader" it's actually the lowerbody.

 

Failure to provide a valid keyword in the name while using material "skin" can make the engine go crazy about which texture to use and cause visual anomalies. It doesn't "have" to, but very often it does.

Using a keyword'ed name without material "skin" is totally fine and makes the mesh use the texture assigned in the NiTexture property.

 

While material is "skin" any information given in any NiTexture property will be completely ignored, BUT you still have to point this to an existing texture with normalmap or you "will" get the corresponding error indicators (purple, pitchblack or invisible) ingame!

The same goes for almost (if not) all properties of the NiMaterial property itself. That's why you can't have glowmaps on bodyparts, as the game engine will ignore your attempt to alter the material's "Emissive" property.

Few things still work, most things are just ignored. I myself couldn't yet figure out the complete list of which is which though.

 

Failure to call your material "skin" while it is clearly meant to be an actual bodypart results in it loosing all properties that make it act like a bodypart. It will use only 1 skin texture, the one you assign in the file, for "all" races it's worn on and will not adapt to skin tint and color variations you did while in CharGen. (Imperial skin on Dark Elves, anybody?)

 

I found this out the hard way... "brickwalling". So it definitely can't hurt to spread the knowledge.

Edited December 28, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon