Gloves and Missing Wrists

[Makaro]

So I decided that I liked the gloves found on the Assassin Armor from the Dead Money DLC and annoyingly could not find any mods that offered them as separate pieces. Thus my adventures into modding ensued. I managed to get it all sorted just how I wanted, 2 separate glove items using the meshes and textures from the main armor, equipable, visible etc. But let's cut to the chase...

The Chase - There are gaps in the wrist. I've seen this all before, far too often. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Body Mod or the Armor I am using. It is definitely cause by my gloves (As this still happens on armor-less vanilla bodies)

I think what I have to do here is edit the meshes so the gloves go further up the wrist to cover the gap. I'm posting all this here because I don't really know if this is what I have to do. If I am right, what can you guys tell me about editing meshes? Is there an easier way? Is it even possible? or is there a mod already out there that I can use instead?

Cheers Regardless
-Mak

 

[EPDGaffney]

EDIT: Before attempting this, check my new edit at the bottom.

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Original Post:

It is possible. Can you do models? Have you ever got anything into NifSkope? What I would do is start a new file in Blender 2.49 (grab Portable Blender on Oblivion's Nexus), erase everything that they start you with, like that cube and the lights and the camera, then import the gloves you like, and then import the armour.

 

Then you'll want to make more 'glove' that comes from the gloves. The armour should have its hands there because the game isn't telling them to be hidden, so you can follow that as a guide. Basically, where the gloves end, grab that edge ring, and extrude it a bit, then snap each vert to where it should go on the body under it. Maybe it needs another edge ring or two to look nice. As long as you don't go really far away from the glove, it should all animate fine if you use the Extrude command to do this.

EDIT: You should probably actually close the glove off with a cap (like the places where the head models should meet the armours), not just match the verts up, as the rigging would probably be different enough to cause a slight gap during some animations if you didn't close the hole.

 

 

Then delete the body and its skeleton. You should have the gloves and their skeleton left. Now, make sure you have no lights or cameras in your scene, select everything (gloves and skeleton), and export it as a NIF, selecting Fallout 3 and Creature from the exporter (assuming you're using Blender 2.49, or 'Portable Blender' which you can get on the Oblivion Nexus, all set up for you). Hit Shadow Map as well, and where it has materials like cloth and metal and skin, I think skin makes the most sense; then export (a lot of people get crashes here, so a save of the Blender file may not be a bad idea).

 

Now, it should all be fine, but if you don't see it in the GECK when you preview it, open it up in NifSkope and see what's there. If you don't see your gloves even in NifSkope, you may have done something wrong, but usually it's visible in NifSkope and you can fix it. Sometimes, it works perfectly, and other times I've seen it export with two scene roots, in which case I just click the top level one and remove the block entirely, which seems to fix it. Other problems could be the shaders. You want to make sure the gloves' material is set to SHADER_DEFAULT and the flesh portion is SHADER_SKIN (or something very like that).

 

I'm still kind of new to modding this game, so I may have messed up somewhere in there. Let me know how it goes.

 

 

 

EDIT: I thought about this a bit more, and I was trying to give you a balanced way to do this, in that it was not too complex and the results were decent. If it doesn't work, you can try actually taking part of the armour the gloves came from and using that as part of this glove add-on for other armours.

 

But a much easier though probably not ideal way to do it is simply to change the slot it occupies ('Biped Oject' in the G.E.C.K.) from LeftHand and RightHand to BodyAddOn1, 2, or 3. In NifSkope, you can scale up the gloves mesh very slightly to prevent Z-fighting, or at least to try. I'm looking at this on one of my characters at the moment, and the clipping issues are minor with the gloves I'm using and without having scaled them up. It risks cosmetic animation issues if you scale them up too much, and clipping/Z-fighting issues if you don't, as well as incompatibility with something else that uses the same Biped Object slot(s), but it isn't terrible and is without contest the easiest method.

Edited November 16, 2017 by EPDGaffney