Camera glitch with custom race

[grauritter]

Hello everyone.

 

I have just now tried to dip my toe into the shallow end of the modding pool. Ive spent that last 4 days watching videos, reading tutorials (The construction set Wiki has ALL of their images broken, BTW), been to several forums. I have been picking apart existing mods to see how they work and I think Ive got a good basic understanding.

Im having a lot of fun actually learning about how all the files are linked together :smile: And I want to thank everyone here for all of their generous time in putting out help and tutorials.

 

So Im making a race. For now, Im just manipulating an existing one while I learn the ropes. Once I am comfortable with what Im doing, Ill get my hands dirty in 3D Max.

What I did was I took CM_Pym (which is a beautiful sculpt BTW!) and I added a new texture to it. Did a male version basically.

The problem I am having is that, while it looks great during the Character Creation screen (new game); after clicking done and spawning in the jail cell, the camera is somewhere inside the character's body, near the floor.

 

My guess is that the camera is linked to a mesh; Im guessing the mouth NIF? And I have messed up that link somehow.

 

Does anyone have any ideas on what I have done and how to fix it? I will load it up and take some screen grabs here in a minute.

 

I have attached the face texture I created. I am very happy with how it is coming along. I have learned that the in-game model does tend to stretch the texture a bit, making facial features along the brow exaggerated. LOL while the texture has some arched eyebrows, in game he looks PISSED. HAHAHAHAHA!!!

 

 

 

Thank you to anyone willing to brainstorm with me and help me figure out this problem. Screen grabs are coming.....

 

Kindest regards,

-Jason

[grauritter]

I am running on Windows 10. I found that I need to make a specific adminstrator security profile for my specific username, set to ALL files, folders and subfolders. THEN Right click the Oblivion Root folder, set its security parameters to ALL as well. Windows 10 has a very annoying habit of periodically resetting these security exceptions and making the writing of files locked. So I am constantly rebooting, then setting security parameters.

So that was one issue. The other issue is that my Printscreen button has been hijacked by some Cloud-like service I dont use and refuse to sign up for. So I cannot take any acreen shots until I dowload a third-party screencap app. Hooray.

 

So the above camera glitch happens to all races, not just my custom. So its not my files. I have turned all my favorite mods into OMODs, cleared out Oblivion completely, fresh-installed and am going through reactivating the omods to see if one of them is the culprit. After spending some time looking around I realize I am not in the Imperial Dungeon cell. For a split second I appear there after character creation, but them I am dropped into some alternate hell where the camera is surrounded by several Dead monster models and one monster that is alive and turning in circles. Its all just a mess of <actor> objects pilled within one another. The <Cell> is light blue. So if anyone has seen this before please say something. It would appear to be some sort of test <cell>.

 

Im also wondering what the deal is that 12 people have seen this thread and not one person has said anything and 23 people saw my other thread and again crickets. Whats with that?

 

If I can find a solution to this issue, I will post it so that if anyone else has the same problem, they have the answer. I can at least help others.

[DrakeTheDragon]

The discrepancy between views and replies usually stems from lots of people very well wanting to help, so coming in to read your OP, but then realizing they can't help and leaving again.

 

Especially here in the Oblivion section the amount of people even regularly visiting is rather small by now. Subtract from this number the people who don't know an answer to your questions and you know why the ones responding are so few.

 

For what it's worth, by what was given by now alone I, too, have no idea what could be the problem here. But you talking of being moved into some different cell, while I don't recall ever having heard of a cell like this before either, raises the question where it's coming from, and if it could be responsible for what's happening here.

 

A list of the mods you use and your load order could help others help you with this. Maybe someone recognizes some mod from the name and suddenly remembers the weird cell/mess.

 

On the other hand, these camera dislocations usually occur when using a 3rd party animations in 1st person view mod/skeleton resource, fake first person, or any such similar feature from for example the famous combat mods, Deadly Reflex or Unnecessary Violence, among others, and then missing to replace all 1st person animations with their 3rd person counterparts, or having some left-over true 1st person animations remain, triggering the dislocation of the camera as soon as played.

 

And again, a list of your mods would help here with this, rather than just blind guessing around.

[grauritter]

Thank you kindly.

I have misspoken, I was just too excited to join what has seemed like a very inclusive community. So I got disheartened :(

I did a clean re-installation. Then installed mods one at a time. The Cell come to find out was from the Imperial City Dinosaurs mod I downloaded on a whim. It was never meant to be a mod, just a resource, so I was teleported to the authors holding cell where several dinosaur body parts and such were just crammed together by the game play engine. It honestly was horrific!! LOL

That seemed to be the source of all of my problems.

 

While I have your ear, I do have a question Im having trouble finding an answer to, if you please. Where in NifScope can you adjust the settings on a mesh's info to reduce the shine on skin? I see lots of replies that say to use NifScope but not where therein.

 

Thank you very kindly.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Sorry for getting back to you that late, but the last days have been rather busy at work.

 

Well, the shininess of surfaces in Oblivion is actually controlled by multiple different inter-mixing factors.

 

The most obvious would be the "glossiness" property of the NiMaterialProperty node of each NiTriShape/Strips branch inside the NIF tree on the left.

 

Then there's a rather effective one, the "apply mode" of the NiTexturingProperty node of the same branches.

APPLY_MODULATE is the default, no special effects added,

APPLY_HIGHLIGHT, however, makes it like the surface is wrapped in cellophane, very shiny,

(there's others, like for environment mapping I think, but their exact names and effects escaped me.)

 

And then there's likely the most important one of all, as it's serving as both, a localization filter as well as a multiplication factor for all the above effects,

the alpha channel of the base texture's normalmap ("<filename>_n.dds").

 

The more opaque the normalmap is, the more reflective and shiny it will be. In fact, if it isn't almost completely transparent, it will in most cases just shine like crazy. (The same goes for texture/compression formats which don't have an alpha channel, like DXT-1. No alpha means completely opaque means shiny like dumped into vaseline.)

 

 

However, if you're talking "skin" like the skin of races' bodies, i.e. the special render engine hardcoded material name "skin" (case-insensitive), keep in mind this material's properties as set up in NifSkope will be completely ignored by the game and instead replaced by what results of the appearance slider settings done during character creation.

 

The special material "skin" will make it so the body parts' skin can be fine-tuned during character generation and also will override any texture by what the race record inside the game says. (The body parts need to also have special hardcoded names from "upperbody"/"arms", "lowerbody"/"legs", "hand", "foot" and "tail", case-insensitive and ":" can be used as a remark indicator, everything coming after it is for the user to read and ignored by the game, like e.g. "foot:upperbody" as commonly found in body mods' files tells the game to use the "foot" slot's texture of the race but the user that it's meant to be the upperbody.)

 

So when the material's named "skin", changing its values will have no effect, usually. I don't know about the "apply mode" of the NiTexturingProperty, but chances are it'll still work.

What will always work in all cases is the alpha-channel of the normalmap, but as was said the normalmap used for the mesh will also be decided by what the race records say for the texture.

 

 

Well, I hope that makes sense. I was forced to recall almost all of it from memory, as I'm currently unable to start my Windows VM to run NifSkope and look it up.

If there's any questions, never hesitate to ask. And again sorry for the long delay.

[grauritter]

That makes perfect sense! Thank you very kindly. I have been reading about NifSkope and fidgeting around with it. After your explanation, it makes a LOT of more sense :)

 

I think that once I lock down the glossiness there it should fix it. The normal maps all look the same between the face and body DDS alpha files, so it has to be the nif settings.

 

No worries on the delay! honestly, it takes me forever to get back here also at times :)

 

By any chance do you know of a good tutorial on making new clothing items? I have sculpted a pair of boots in 3DS Max, textured/skinned them, and now Im trying to figure out what all I need in the nif file :( Because looking at examples of vanila items, there is a lot of stuff in there and I dont know what I am looking at.

 

Cheers!