From Blender to Skyrim

[nanicoar]

Hello,

I'm familiar with 3D graphics but new to modding. Nice to meet you, I intend to stick around. :)

 

I managed to get a .nif body mesh into Blender 2.6, where I feel quite at home. My first goal is to make a muscle-girl mod based on CherryHotaling's CHSBHC, but I have already run into things that confuse me.

 

When I first learned to work in Blender I was told that for animation one is to avoid triangles in favour of quads, but Bethesda seems to have embraced tris fully. Loop-selection is useless here. I don't know if this is bad form or better knowing, and I don't have the experience to judge. What do modders say?

 

Another thing I noticed is illustrated below. Bethesda cuts up models in distinct sections, but I can't figure out to what purpose. The fur and eyes make sense, but the body... Any ideas?

http://i.imgur.com/jzbfr.jpg

 

Finally, for each .nif I import, the skeletal remains, if that's what they are, are always shifted -0.25 units on the x-axis. I'd like to at some point animate and render game assets in Blender, so I'll have to address this issue soon enough. Are there any tuts or instructions on animating Skyrim in Blender?

 

Thank you for reading, hope you reply too. =)

[BaronofHe11]

Maybe they were planning on doing dismemberment.

[nanicoar]

Planning or did? How does it work?

I saw somewhere that what you could do is add an animation that scales down a portion of the mesh to zero. - Do they use both methods?

[huntsman2310]

Does it actually matter if the model was made in quads instead of Tris? Would that make it look much smoother?

[ResolveThatChord]

With regards to the quads/tris thing:

When box modelling it's true that you should avoid triangles. Triangles play merry hell with your topography once you try adding more edgeloops, so adding one means you can't put any edgeloops through it. In 3D animation, you should avoid them altogether, but in game design, keeping a low polycount is a far higher priority.

That said, Bethesda's models still have a topology which is quite easy to follow. When you import a mesh to blender, every single quad is divided into two triangles; the game engine requires this. By selecting all faces and hitting alt+j, Blender will convert them to quads, but be careful because the script is imperfect and will often join the wrong triangles. I personally find it simpler to just look and see where the faceloops are. Since they're good modellers the faces that were quads tend to be (loosely) approximately square, so the triangles tend to be approimately right angled.

 

If you're going to modify someone else's mesh, I'm afraid you're going to have a but of tedious work in converting all those tris to quads properly, but at least it's a good exercise in studying topology. Good for the soul, and all that.

[nanicoar]

Thank you for that. I will probably learn a lot by taking their work apart and putting it back together. =)

 

I'm still wondering though, do you know where I can read about requirements of the game engine like this? If tris is was Beth wants, then tris is what I'll add to their game, but I'd love to know why.

[ResolveThatChord]

A triangle is far more mathematically simple to describe than a quad, and any quad can be split into two tris. That's about it really. Just model your models as you normally would; all quads will be converted to tris when you export it to .nif.

[Ghogiel]

Pretty much every game engines need tris to calculate several things including vertex normals. Even in modelling programs, all polygons of any num of side, are stored as tris in an index somewhere so that it can render correctly on your screen. As a 3d artist you keep those faces open for various reasons... selection and subdivision etc. exporters will collapse any mesh to be connected tris when exported to the game format. No one would model in triangles.

 

the reason why that werewolf is split as it is mostly material definition, since their shader doesn't allow for gloss map input, they basically split the really furry sections from another section comprised of the chest, hands, feet, off to a separate mesh object so that they could modify the gloss and specular levels on them to be more skin like rather than furry. It's a quite subtle effect imo.

[xyks]

I guess regarding teh different sections for the werewolf-mesh that this is made for the transforamtion animation. Watch it and you will see that during the transform the "fur-parts" are buildig up first. The rest follows after that...

[nanicoar]

So in some sense, .nif is intended to be a one-way format? - I'll remember to make my originals available... >_<

 

I have not yet done the werewolf quest, but I did look at a video of the transformation. The fur does come out first and the body is indeed cut up according to gloss. Obviously this means I must make a were-khajiit so that I learn all their subtle trickery. >=3