Trying to mush together MF mod armor and Mercenary armor

[dragonslayer2k12]

I really hate that lower arm mesh from mercenary mod so I tried some nifskope lego with the parts from MF mod arms and at first it worked in game but after wearing it around I got CTD after a while and I managed to salvage my save game by unequipping the armors from my character then saving. That save loads but when I load it and try to put on that armor it CTD every time.

 

What I did was copy the elbow pad from MF armor to the merc medium arms and that pad plus the forearms from MF mod to the merc heavy arms. I also replaced the merc light arms with the merc medium arms so the shoulders are covered for both light and medium but medium has also the elbow pads. It looks great in game before I started getting CTD so I am trying to figure out what is going on. I copied the elbow pad branch to the merc armor medium nif file and made sure the txt names matched what they were in the original MF mod nifs. I also made sure the materials names matched because without those the armor is purple in game. I had to copy over one bone from MF mod nifs for mediums it was a forearm bone and another bone for heavy it was the hand bone. I forgot to check the body slots in FO4EDIT at first so when I checked of course I forgot to uncheck the pipboy slot for light arms after changing the nifs so did that and still CTD.

 

The thing that stood out to me right away and is confusing but may be the problem is the way 3dsmax exports nifs. If you ever try importing a nif made in 3dsmax by a modder it always looks too low in nifskope like some of it is going through the ground or is under ground. Default nifs don't do that at all. So the MF mod has this too low problem in all their armor meshes and I remember from nifskope lego in skyrim I could change the translation and then reset it somehow so the moved mesh stayed where I moved it but not so in nifskope2 and fallout 4 I can't find that reset but I can move the mesh with translation numbers.

 

So I just left the odd looking meshes where they were and in nifskope2 it looks like the elbow pads and forearms are below ground but they line up just fine in game just like they do in MF mod. Maybe I forgot something? Was I supposed to do something else in nifskope2? Anyone can try this if they have both mods installed I have nifskope2 alpha 5 maybe I have to update to 6?

[dragonslayer2k12]

Ok I found it the problem was the wet texture txt name. The MF mod pieces have specific bgsm names for the wet texture of any mesh and instead of that specific name carrying over when copying it was pointing to the 0 nif node name which in this case was Medium as the whole mercenary armor medium arm is named in nifskope as the 0 node so no wonder it was crashing :-O Well that was a simple thing and I read about four tutorials that all blabbed on and on about using outfit studio and bodyslide but never mentioned making sure to get things right before I noticed this problem.

[Deleted15964729User]

Making sure to get things right is sort of a prerequisite for most guides :)

 

Good detective work finding the offending value amongst the blocks.

[dragonslayer2k12]

I did the leg parts too and now they finally look good with those MF mod knee pads in the middle. Toss in some custom combat armor mod here and there to get a badass BPD swat look. I was thinking if anyone wanted to really screw up their mod so console users would totally freak out just make the mistake I did with the wet texture assignments. That mistake corrupted five or more saves before I could fix it and it almost destroyed my playthrough it could have easily infected older saves. I would save often and kept going to drumlin diner and finding the PA just south of there and as soon as I got in the PA CTD then trying to load a save just before entering PA would also CTD and about five saves before that one too so this is a very naughty thing to do hehe:-)

[dragonslayer2k12]

I forgot to post this earlier but both the mercenary mod and the MF mod add armors and clothes to many npcs like gunners and caravan guards. By screwing up those armor pieces it is possible to screw up a lot of npcs too which is probably why the save games were so borked.