Special nif node and material names

[Septfox]

Title related.

 

Basically, I would like to get together a full list of node and material names that have special effects in the Gamebryo engine Bethesda-modified Gamebryo engine revisions. This way, I can avoid making any dumb mistakes when naming stuff and not have to waste half an hour figuring out why something's not working right. Not that that happened recently, mind.

 

I know of the following node names so far:

Foot:Body

Foot:Legs (not 100% sure on this one, I do know the legs on an outfit I just put together wouldn't shade properly without this name)

Foot:Arms (just guessing this is one based on the above, if so it's for making arms display in firstperson?)

Upperbody (FO3?/NV, culls the node's shape in first person, thanks dazzerfong)

Arms (FNV only? forces arms to display in first person IIRC)

Lava (Oblivion, applies the water shader, thanks throttlekitty)

Scb (fun fact: putting this on a shield's shape node makes it so the shield is stuck to your arm. permanently.)

The various meatcaps (FO3/NV)

The various gun nodes (FO3/NV)

 

Materials:

Hair

Skin

 

What others am I missing? I'm interested in the node names mainly for Oblivion, which is why I'm posting this here, but if you know any for the other three games feel free to toss'em up.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Septfox

[throttlekitty]

naming a material Lava calls the water shader.

edit: this in Oblivion.

Edited January 12, 2012 by throttlekitty

[dazzerfong]

In FNV, calling something 'upperbody' will make it disappear in first-person. Edited January 11, 2012 by dazzerfong

[throttlekitty]

I re-read your post, and realized you wanted "gamebryo", rather than game specific. This isn't really the case, each gamebryo-powered game has their own ways of doing things, particularly materials/textures/shaders configuration. Even between Bethesda games, the rules change.

[Septfox]

You're right, I should have been more specific. I meant Bethesda-modified Gamebryo, Oblivion's in particular but others as well (in case I start playing FNV again). And while yes, there are differences between Bethesda engine revisions, some basic things like the skin and hair materials carried over...I thought others might have as well.

 

@dazzerfong

Ah, I actually knew that one, since I recall reading a thread somewhere about someone having clipping problems in first person. Thanks for making me remember it.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Actually there's some more magic behind those node names you listed there for Oblivion NIFs.

 

As soon as the material "skin" (every case works) is used, the node name decides which of the 4(5) texture slots of the race will be used.

 

The proper keywords are "upperbody"/"arms", "lowerbody"(/"legs", untested, likely not), "hand", "foot" (,"tail", but this seems to not work reliably so far), again case doesn't matter. The texture slots referenced by those should be pretty self-explanatory.

 

There the special character ":" which serves as a "remark" indicator. Everything after this simply gets ignored and just serves as an additional description to the reader.

That's why node names such as "Foot:Upperbody" aren't uncommon. This tells the game engine to use "foot" texture while telling the user reading the NIF contents it's actually meant to be the upperbody.

 

Using material name "skin" while the node name doesn't contain a proper keyword can confuse the engine up to the point where texture and mesh issues occur ingame.

Using a keyword'ed node name but not using material "skin" will do nothing. It's just a regular mesh, using regular material properties set in the NIF and the one-and-only race-independent texture file assigned in the NIF.

Not using material "skin" will also not make the mesh adapt in skin tint and coloration to the settings done in CharGen and, again, will not use the race's individual textures.

 

As for rendering in 1st person, that's a little vaguely specified in Oblivion. So far I found out only very few "slots" are even considered to be rendered at all, and of those slots' contents not all parts are rendered at all times either.

I'm unsure whether those keywords like "arms" or "upperbody" have any say in the matter though, because famous body mods' upperbodies don't have these many times and my own custom bodypart meshes don't use these either (only named "foot" and nothing else) and still everything renders in 1st person. But like I said, what renders in 1st person and what doesn't in many points is still a miracle to me.

 

There's also those special node names and materials used for heads ("all" heads the same, so it's likely to be special names). I fail to recall them right now though, and I'm pretty sure I've seen mods do things different and the heads still worked. Just another weirdness I guess. :whistling:

[Septfox]

That...that was ridiculously informative. I'm torn between being impressed and suspecting that you're actually an undercover agent sent by Bethesda to keep tabs on all of us.

 

I did have my suspicions about "Foot" only mattering, not anything appended to it. After all, in an outfit I tossed together in NV, the arms are actually named "Arms01", and they work perfectly in firstperson. It may be, though, that NV ignores the rest of the string if it finds a compatible keyword. As for the remark indicator, that I wasn't aware of. Perhaps Oblivion isn't quite as smart as NV when it comes to reading/selectively discarding sections of strings, and that's why it needs that indicator to begin with? Or maybe NV's engine simply passes "arms01", "arms02", ect. as simply "arms" to make sure the user can specify more than one block to be displayed in firstperson while avoiding having nodes with duplicate names, and does away with the old indicator.

 

*shrugs*

 

The mismatched node/material is what happened to me on my legs; it had a random node name and the skin material, which caused it to use the proper texture in-game, but the skin tone wasn't being adjusted to match the character's. The seams were also a bit funny. So I can see what you mean by "issues".

 

 

I'd go on more, but it'd mostly just be me talking to myself, so I'll spare you. Thank you, good sir, for your detailed and informative post. If you happen upon any further information on head nodes/materials, I'd be very interested in hearing about them as well.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, I guess others would just say I was spending too much time with this. Your's is actually sounding better, but no, I'm not. I only ran into this revelation totally by accident, back then during my first humble steps into custom-shaped bodypart modeling.

Yeah, actually I ran into a brickwall first that is. But after digging my way through the concrete for weeks on end the revelation finally came. I just don't feel right letting others "brickwall" like I did, if I could easily prevent it by sharing this knowledge.

 

I was actually surprised I couldn't find anything of this anywhere myself back then. And apart from a few random occasions in other people's question threads like this one this still hasn't changed so far. This rather "vital" knowledge about body meshes, skin and bodyparts inside clothing items really should be spread more broadly, maybe common knowledge even, but it still isn't, so the least I can do is save others the trouble I encountered figuring it all out myself, "the hard way" as they say, and tell everybody asking all I know, as little as it might be.

 

Now, as for those head stuff I mentioned, I rechecked some things and am now pretty convinced you can just disregard all I wrote about this previously... well, I didn't tell any names, so basically I didn't actually write anything at all, but yeah, just forget about it all.

Node name as well as material name of heads seems to not follow any specific rules. I first thought it'd be "_ArgonianNeutral" and "Breton male head" for Argonian heads by all means, but the Vanilla Imperial head mesh uses some ominous "8 - Default" or what it's called as material instead and Head06's node is even named "Head06", something clearly not coming from Bethesda by any means, and the material is yet different again... so I'm pretty convinced there's nothing hardcoded or keyword'ed here at all. After all, body meshes required these tricks, because there's only "1" single set of them for "all" races, but for heads, those and their textures are defined on a per-race basis anyways, so it's not needed to begin with.

 

But what's missing from your list still is those obviously hardcoded material names like "EnvMap2", which enables environment mapping on the mesh it's used by. And I've seen others like this enabling special render functionality as well, but my bad memory strikes again and once more their names escaped me. I'll let you know when I find anything else of interest.

[Septfox]

Googling "Oblivion EnvMap2" led me to several more.

 

From http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/235645-nifskope/, presumably in the earlier days of Nifskope:

EnvMap2 = (Environmental Map 2 ) adds a material that acts like a harsh specular map to the object , its used to simulate glass in oblivion and its used on windows and the glass armor. Also glows in the dark a lot. (applied to the whole object or controlled by the specular map inside the normal map or a glow map) *Needs Apply Highlight

 

EnvMap1 =(Environmental Map 1 ) acts almost the same as EnvMap2 but it has more softer reflection and has an image to simulate the reflection of the world, it also changes colour with the time - IE: at sunset if the world has a red sky - the thing you apply it to will have a red glow , even if you are indoors. Glows in the dark but more softer. (controlled the same way as EnvMap2) *Needs Apply Highlight

 

Metal = Same as EnvMap1 but has no "Time colour changes" - maybe slightly better Metal look to it. *Needs Apply Highlight

 

Lava = Acts like Water (ironic) - makes the object transparent and add water or puddles to the object. But also removes the Skin (weights) from the object, so if applied on a character it will freeze the character into a T- Pose or some other pose , but works "good" on objects like swords and shields - but its very cpu intensive (applied to the whole object)

throttlekitty had brought up Lava already of course, but it's good to know that it kills weighting before finding out the hard way, eh?

 

Buried in the CS wiki:

Name - Generally may be named anything, except for when calling one of these special use shaders:

 

Right Eye - Eyeball shader.

refractF - refraction shader as seen in the chameleon effect.

Secretblack - (I think that's the spelling, it might have a space) Used for hiding a mesh from both the render scene, and the minimap. (there is a static named secret black, you place it above a cell portion to hide a secret room from the minimap)

Controller - You can attach a MaterialColorController here, useful for some effects.

 

I feel like we're starting to get most of them together now, woo.

 

 

It really is surprising, and a little annoying in my opinion, that a proper list of material and node names hasn't been posted somewhere that it would be useful by now...like say, the official wiki. People really shouldn't have to go digging through multiple sources and still only end up with incomplete information; personally, I think Bethesda themselves should have put out a list a long while back. It's not an unreasonable thing to expect, I don't think, seeing as it's their game that we're modding and their tailor-made nif layouts that we're working with. It would take all of ten minutes of one of their dev's time to create and fill a page.

[AnimalRiot]

These links might help though this stuff is way over my head can bear lol... too much information :pinch:

 

NIF Files

 

Niflib documentation