Ball Dress Idea

[Shootist82]

There aren’t that many ball dresses that are not reskins of the sequin dress. I have an idea for a new ball dress and was wondering if I should peruse creating it as a mod. Is anyone else was interested in my concept?

 

[montky]

that'd be awesome!

I hope you'll give making that mod clothing attire a go, as it is a very sleek design.

 

will you be making the 3D mesh available in addition to the mod itself?

I concur, it'd be nice to see more costumes and clothing.

 

will it be compatible with stuff like CBBE and bodyslide too?

that's fairly rare too.

 

 

 

I like to see what The Institute etc would come up with.

that, and costumes for New Lands folks, stuff for the Memory Den Virtual Holodeck.

the only 'pristine' place in my playthrough, is the pre-war virtual holodeck new lands,

so, maybe folks have 'nice stuff' there hehe.

 

as bleak as it is topside,

maybe a few folks would make nice clothing for special occassions etc?

post the Boston Accords,

I think folks'd start wearing better attire more often.

 

 

[Shootist82]

This will be my first venture into clothing creation. I want the dress to be simple, sleek and elegant. I do plan on releasing the dress in CBBE with Bodyslide. This will be a bit of a longer project for me because I will be working on this outside of my regular job, and I have to learn how to do everything from scratch. I appreciate your input, and encouragement.

[ArchGaden]

I'd love to see a good ball dress added to the game.

 

I'm just learning how to mod in clothing myself. I recently released my first attempt (grass skirt and coconut bra mod) and I'm proud of the result. The skirt is essentially a retexture of the grognak outfit, removing the boots and gloves, and hammering the vertices with Outfit Studio's tools until they fit the CBBE female body. The bra is the result of importing a mesh from fallout's resources (a nuke head) and some heavy vertex hammering on a Monno Bikini top (the author has given standing permission to use their assets with credit). You can do quite a lot of rehashing existing outfits in Outfit Studio (part of Body Slide) and could potentially do your whole ball dress there, or at least a good 'first version' to learn some basics with.

 

As a brief overview of outfit modding, here is what I've been through;

 

Texture modification is the easiest part. I use Paint.net (free and powerful enough) but the bigger fish like GIMP and Photoshop are probably the preferred choices by artists. I'm not much of an artist myself. You can get plugins for Paint.net that handle making normal maps. There is online tool (easy to find in a search) that handles normal maps as well with a quick and easy web interface. Specular maps are arcane trickery that no modder seems to fully understand yet. Basic old school black and white specular maps work alright in some cases, and if you look around, you can find guides detailing some information on how Fallout 4 uses color information... enough to muddle through making a decent specular map in most cases. Cloth and metal are probably the easiest cases to handle, so you may not have to muddle much with specular.

 

The nexus has tools for selectively unpacking Fallout 4 assets and modifying materials to point to your own textures. For the ball gown, I'd recommend starting from one of the existing dresses (pre-war, house, sequin, ect). You can slice up meshes in Outfit Studio to make a frankenstein dress from pieces you like. In your case, I'd recommend starting with the longest of the fallout 4 dresses you can find. Judging by the concept art, you want it long. Cloth physics are VERY finicky in Outfit Studio and it's easy to accidentally destroy them. Cut out as much of that dress as you want to use and try not to meddle much with the bottom portion where the physics part is. Leaving that as untouched as possible is your best bet. Expect to screw it up a few times before you get the dress working right. There are plenty of guides out there detailing how to do specific things with Outfit Studio and Body Slide. You'll have to pour over them a few times. I'd estimate it took me about 10 hours of work to get a mesh working how I wanted it to in-game for my first attempt and that was just the grass skirt.

 

Once you've got a first attempt at a mesh, you'll then have to make an outfit for it as an ESP/ESL mod. I highly recommend looking at how a CBBE clothing mod with a similar piece is setup... what body slot it uses, how the fields are filled out, ect. You'll want to start by replicating that for your dress. For my grass skirt and coconut bra, I made the terrible choice of trying to start from the base grognak files, which essentially replace the body, when really what I wanted was more akin to a separately equippable bra/panty combo. I eventually looked at several bikini and underwear mods to see how it was setup, fixed a few issues, and got it all working nicely. Starting by the example of other CBBE items will save you some trouble I think.

 

In the case of a ball dress, you'll probably want several choices for materials. There are several guides out there detailing how to create armor material swaps that can be changed from the armor workbench (ie, create a material mod category with options to select in-game). I found two big guides on that, and both of them missed one BIG step. You have to add a display name to your attachment point keyword. If your mod slot isn't showing at the workbench, check that! I spent probably 3 hours trying to figure out where I went wrong. I eventually stumbled upon a buried forum post that solved it. Someday, somebody might stumble upon this.

 

I'm currently trying to figure out more advanced mesh editing. Outfit Studio is limited in what it can do and has some issues (like some vertices not being selectable) and is generally quite awkward for fine work. If you want to create something new you need some real 3D modeling software. Blender and 3DSMax are popular for working with Bethesda's games. 3DSMax seems to have much better support, but you have to pay for that. The transitions between Blender and Fallout 4 is tedious I'm finding... I still haven't' successfully managed to get a mesh from Blender to Outfit Studio, but I know others are doing it. There are lot of obsolete guides out there. Once I crack that, almost anything will be possible.

 

As a note, Fallout 4 does not have real cloth physics. As I understand it, it has cloth bones in preset locations with preset weights, so you can really only create outfit physics that conform to that. If you try to make your ball gown drag that floor, I don't think that will be possible without some messy or static behavior in-game. Most likely, you'll have a lot of trouble making anything longer than the basic Fallout 4 dresses (roughly ankle length). Similarly, you probably can't deviate by too much shape-wise for those physics enabled vertices. Your concept art looks doable from my limited experience though. A little shaping within reason doesn't seem to cause issues. There could be an even more advanced way of adding new physics bones and weights that I don't know about yet. I do hope there is.

Edited December 1, 2017 by ArchGaden

[Shootist82]

Thank you ArchGaden, I appreciate the tips. I was going to try to make the top half in blender first and see what I could do in blender from there. One of the hardest parts about the lower half is the slit in the side. I am still looking a few tutorials to figure this sorcery out. Thanks for the encouragement.

[ArchGaden]

I'm not sure how far along you are, but I played around a bit with blender and figured out what I think is the best current way to get meshes from Blender to Fallout 4. I found out that Outfit Studio imports objs easily. From there, you can export as a nif for use in Fallout 4. It's a much more direct and simple process than the old guides were telling me as most of those used NifSkope as a go between. NifSkope has lost the ability to import at all and Blender's nif export plugins are a crapshoot (best seems to require Blender 2.49). I also read a guide on how to get dress physics working from there. You have to grab nif from a vanilla dress in Outfit Studio and set that as your reference, then copy bone weights over to your version of the dress. That would make it possible to do the whole dress in blender. The slit should be easy to handle in Blender. I haven't attempted that portion yet. I'm still learning Blender! I really hate Blender's interface. 3DSMax was easy to learn, but I don't have access to that now. Blender is like Dwarf Fortress.

 

If you wanted to add a slit to a dress in Outfit Studio, you could select vertices along a vertical line, then use the 'Separate Vertices' feature from one of the dropdown menus to split that piece into a separate mesh which you can then delete. You may want to remove more verts to get the shape right. If you move around verts, be careful to try and avoid warping UVs too badly. The tools in Outfit Studio are crude though, so it may not be possible to get the result you want there.

[Shootist82]

Thanks ArchGaden, I have blender, so ill start there. My job has been keeping me pretty busy, so I haven't worked on it much, but I have some spare time tonight so ill be working on it.

[BILLY500436]

I'd think it'd be a nice touch to design a series of KMs for the NIF based on weather conditions for simulated wind blowing.

[montky]

@billy500436-er

yup, I agree entirely!

 

 

some keyframes and animations like that for capes, flags etc...

from fabric tents and curtains in "Better Bazaars"

to those animated clotheslines,

to even the movement of some garments,

it'd be awesome to have proper coordinated OnEvents for the weather.

 

It'd make rad-storms much more terrifying hehe.

luckily, the folks who made that clothes-line container mod,

made that a 'community framework', so it could be easier for folks to include some stuff for their meshes.

 

 

[ArchGaden]

Is there an example anywhere of clothing in Fallout 4 reacting to the wind? I didn't even think that was possible.