MacKom Makes a Mess (WIP thread)

[MacKom]

Ok, so...long story short - the topic title says it all. I could put a flashy and funny intro here, but surprisingly, nothing comes to mind. Spite the fact I`m pouring in massive amounts of coffee in me while we speak. *twitch twitch* O______o

 

To clarify a bit more - I`m not exactly a complete noob. I do know my way around textures (being that I`ve been painting digitally for 3 years now and hope to land a job as a concept artist some day...as if 9___9), vertices and polygons I are terms I understand (triangles are meh, quads are yummy and everything else is OMGWTFRUDoin?!!!) and I absolutely LOVE to brush away inside ZBrush (<3). However...3DSMax is evil (you know it is), nifscope is EVIL (yea, I know it isn`t) and CK is master evil mega mind (yup, I said it), so tackling these will be quite a challenge. Luckily, I have no social life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*awkward pause*

 

 

 

 

 

So, moving on, here`s what I`ve been doing for the past 3 days...a new hair. That will, hopefully, evolve into a new hair set.

http://i1182.photobucket.com/albums/x443/PxelSlayer/WIP.jpg

 

I realized that there aren`t many lore friendly hairstyles out there (tho there are many nice ones), with the exception of "Lovely hairstyles" (which are, go figure - quite lovely!), and since there are NO hair importing tutorials...well, we better do something about that, eh?

Now, the one in the picture is OK, but there`s lots of things that need to be improved, so I will re-examine the mesh, textures and everything else and post the process, issues and problem salvation as I go along. What I do hope is that I don`t end up lonely in this thread, so any comments, suggestions and brain storming are very welcome. I actually see this as a bit of a group project, even tho I`ll do the hands-on side of the job.

 

 

 

Ok, for starters, this pretty much covers it.

In next post I`ll go over the mesh, re-examine it, see what can and can`t be done etc...but first - coffee time! :D

[Rabbit1251]

Well, in my opinion, and speaking only for myself mind you, I believe there is always room for more hair mods. The one that you are working on has a movie star quality about it. I like the drape and the texture very much. I could see myself using something like this and being greatly pleased with it. I look forward to your coming installments on this project.

 

 

Rabbit

[AurelTristen]

In your hair travels, ever run into this problem? Adding new hair mesh, looks just fine in Nifskope, but is floating when I bring it into Creation Kit.

 

 

 

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b55/AnimeNanashi/HairProblem.jpg

Edited February 24, 2012 by AurelTristen

[MacKom]

@Rabbit - Thanks for the comment. I`m actually using "Game of thrones" TV show as an inspiration for designs. So, yea, there will be lots of long hair and braids. It`s a medieval thing. I will however try to stay away from the "glamour" trap by making hair textures coarser and not so shiny (kinda like vanilla ones), unless I specifically go on and create something for a "queen" or "king" or "noble" character. We`ll see.

The problem with Skyrim tho (and most games, to be honest) is that most of hairstyles are relatively short (say, shoulder length) to avoid clipping. As you can see from my first image, there`s lots of clipping going on (and since all Witcher imported armors have big and wide collars, long hairstyles will look bad on them...:C ), so I have to make everything wider and bulkier...sad, really, but oh well. At the current state my mesh is, it looks really nice on tight clothing. The moment you put on an armor - wham. -_____-`

 

@Aurel Tristen - TBH, I haven`t even started fiddling with CK. I hate it with the intensity of 1000 burning desert suns. Does that count? :P It`s nice to see what kind of a problem I could be facing tho. Thanks for the spoiler XD

I did notice that, when importing an .obj file into 3DSM for skinning along with an original hair file, they are miss-matched. So, I had to extract the femalehead.nif from Skyrim-meshes.bsa, delete the bones and rigging and save that as my new template. The one I had (downloaded from Nexus) was a bit off position wise. So, sorry, I really can`t help you with this one, but perhaps someone else more experienced will. What I would like you to do is to post a solution for your problem once you get it right, just so that valuable piece of information dosen`t get lost. I (and everybody else) could use all the help we can get.

 

 

 

And, since I promised it in my last post, I`ll upload a picture of my mesh revision. I made it bulkier now (I had to,b/c of that darn clipping >.<), and I also realized that I can get a bit more comfortable with the poly budget. Thanks to SF_Double_sided setting (r is it...node? No idea how to call those things) I don`t have to duplicate and invert faces just to get visible back side. Very cool! So, I`ll up the poly count a bit (it`s at 1156 tris ATM...and normal maps can only do so much), and re-arrange them.

It would be much easier to start over, tho. The first one was just a test to see if I can do it, and apparently - I can. So, yay for me, and let`s move on!

[jet4571]

You will have allot of problems with the hair on the chest. the breast size changes and the hair does not so it will disappear beneath the breasts rather than drape across at max body size or will be floating at minimum. Thats why there are no default hairs that cover the chest.

 

Foretrenty explained the hair issue with placement in the NPC Editor mod comments. I wont hunt up the page but you can. It was quite insightful for anyone wanting to make a hair pack.

Edited February 24, 2012 by jet4571

[MacKom]

@jet4571 - Yea, I know. From what I could figure out, I saw that default hairstyles use .tri files which make them scale with body weight (I think), but I have no idea how to make or assign one. Still, I`m not being discouraged, I`ll make it work somehow! ^_^

 

And thanks for posting where to find something about floating hair issue, so Auriel, have a look at this wall of text -

 

 

The reason for those floating hairs is because those hairs are not correctly formed.

 

Here is something that is a little technical but not too difficult to understand:

 

Skyrim standard hairs are constructed around the origin - 0,0,0 - and then translated up using a bone vector so its fits the PC's head correctly. For NPCs, the face object is already at the origin so there is no need to translate up.

 

Some of these custom hair are - all due respect - hacked into working position. Some had coordinates drawn not at the origin but higher at the PC's head. (coolsims hair) which I already corrected. But then there are some that are drawn at the origin and then translated up wrongly using skin bones and skin transforms.

 

These will cause extra processor work to translate and scale and then retranslated to what you see in game. For example TERA's hair set is scaled 3.7 times bigger by bone scale, then rescaled 3.7 times smaller by skin scale, then rescaled back to 3.7 bigger by skinbones scale.

 

That caused extra drawing work (CPU), but to the hair modder's eyes they looked 'in position' but its not correctly formed. I already auto fixed coolsims' - but it seem everyone has their own take on it as long as the hair show up in game. Thats why you see floating hairs on some custom hairs.

 

I dont expect everyone to be tech savy, so I suppose I'll fix everyone mod for them as the NPC editor load them - but this will take time. I am currently doing the face feature morphs, but I'll also include hair fixing too before the next version is released.

 

As for supporting only replacers hair, that is by choice. As you know every new hair mod .esp need a FormID, and so far I cannot guarantee future offical DLC or other mods might also use the same FormIDs the hair modders use. That can cause a lot of confusion. I will wait for Bethesda's CK to observe how they will handle it before I decide how to support them.

 

And maybe this...?

 

0. backup up and then open hairXX.nif in NifSkope, XX is the number of hair you want to fix

1. any encountered Translation and/or Center properties should be reset, use clear command (right click on property, click Clear in menu) those properties will reset to 0.00 or close, don't worry if hair move out of place, it's ok, we will fix that later

2. any Normals property should be normalized, if you right click on it there will be command for that in menu, same as above - not sure what normalizing does but I was suggested to do that

3. right click on hair mesh, do Tranform->Apply, confirm

4. save as different filename, ie. hairXX_1.nif

5. right click on hair mesh, do Tranform->Edit and experiment, in my case moving hair along Z axis by -120 helped (in step 1 I noticed Center and Translation had Z value changed by 120)

6. right click on hair mesh, do Tranform->Apply, confirm, hair should stay in place but Translation and Center may reset to 0.00s - that's ok

7. save as ie. hairXX_2.nif

8. replace Datameshesactorscharactercharacter assetshairfemalehairXX.nif with your fixed hairXX_2.nif, keep a backup of both files though

9. launch NPC Editor and edit your NPC again, create mod, overwrite

[Werne]

Nice work, the hair doesn't seem too high-poly unlike some stuff I've seen and it looks natural. I wish I have your texturing skills, I can't even texture a simple weapon right :(. I think the poly-count is perfect, you could add some more "depth" to the hair by moving some verts around and making a good normal map (I love normal maps, though I usually screw up when making them).

 

I believe you won't have that much problems with breast clipping, but you will with armor. Armor with breastplates and heavy armor in general will definately clip with the hair, but so does vanilla when you think about it.

 

All in all, I'd definately download this, looks realistic, lore friendly and bloody well done :thumbsup:.

[MacKom]

@Werne - Thanks. The thing with hairs from The Sims is that they don`t use normal maps, so in order to look smooth and add some surface details they have to have a higher poly count. I myself am a minimalist, especially with meshes (I really do believe that less is more), so I try to bring out the most with textures. A good texture on a very simple, but nicely UVMapped mesh makes wonders. Where as, you can have an intricate high poly mesh, but if your UVs are bad and you don`t pay attention to textures - it all turns out mediocre at best. And we (I) just can`t have that! ^_^

Textures are an art form for themselves. Also, never underestimate the power of a tablet (I have a pretty cheap one, but it`s serving me well. I will get my greedy little hands on a Wacom some day, I swear by my life. Cintiq...*_________________* <3 ) and custom brushes. A lot can be done with a simple hard edged one, but some things are better left to custom ones.

 

As to a daily update - I`m calling this one done. For now, anyways. I`m kinda sick of it, so I think it would be best to move on to another one. It` still a replacer (not touching CK yet :psyduck: ), so,,,yea. Coffee time! ;D

[d4em]

For one, your intro made me laugh, so thanks xD

Also, to work around the weight clipping issue, you could make wigs instead. Clothing always responds to weight.

And as for your "textures are more important than meshes" statement - agreed. Shame i'm not that good of a texturer >.>"

[MacKom]

@FakePersonality - Glad I made you laugh. I`ll be performing here regularly, so enjoy the show. And don`t forget to tip your waiter! :biggrin:

 

I never really considered making "wigs" out of these...simply b/c I don`t quite understand what it would mean. Technically, that is. I guess it could be useful to make them with ***_0.nif and ***_1.nif files to simulate the weights, but then you`d have to craft them...not quite realistic. But then again, hey - dragons. I mean... :rolleyes:

 

And just to clarify a bit - it`s not so much about which is more important (meshes or textures), but how well can you make them work together, IE fixing "flaws" of one with the other. They should both get equal amounts of TLC during the making. If one takes the time to make a really, really good mesh, then one should also take the time to make a texture to match. Just my personal opinion. and you know what they say about opinions :whistling:

 

Ok, first wip of #2. Since the first one is kinda fitting for a mage, maybe this one could be more of a "ranger" style. I am worried about the "kamehameha" effect it has going, tho...hm... :confused: