[wip] plantigrade feet for beast races

[Grimoa]

Nope. Actually I'm not into playing Beast Races myself. But I'm all for lore-friendlyness and race-equality. :thumbsup:

 

Keep your fingers crossed that I can work out the last two problems this weekend.

[Dragten]

Hey Grimoa.

I really like your progress on the feet. It looks very good so far.

If you were to post a list of current mesh and texture-related problems you are having, I might be able to help you out with what I know.

[Grimoa]

Wow, thanks!

As I said, I plan to work on it tomorrow, hopefully resolving the last issues. At least the last before the finitial release, that is. ;)

Currently there are three issues, two of which I hope I will be able to fix myself and a third one that leaves me totally stumped. If you are still interessted, read on ;)

 

The weight slider keeps troubling me, but I think I have a solid suspection what is causing the problem.

With the slider all the way to the right or left it looks good, but in between I get vertex explosions. Now, the feet and claws are seperate objects and if their order in the nif file (after exporting from blender) is switched, the game will try to extrapolate between the vertices of the small feet and the big claws and vice versa. If that's not the case, I don't know.

 

I'm using the same model (hence the same UV map) four times, "only" (only. ha. still loads of work) scaled and adjusted at the ankle. The (vanilla) textures for the argonian female body and the argonian male body look the same to me (except from the color). So why is it working for females but not for males? And the normal map seems to be missing. (There's a picture on the previous site of this topic.) It's possible I made an error copy and pasting the BSLightingShaderProperty... That would be dumb >.<

 

Those two I hope to fix.

 

Last, there's a weird thing going on when testing the feet ingame. I use tfc to move the camera close to the feet and than revolve around them. From some angles they look fine, from others the claws seem to be shifted, clipping into to feet... I whish I could do a video but I don't think my pc can handle that.

I had a similar problem months ago when I tried to create claws for the hands. Those seemed to float in and out of the fingers, when my character moved her hands. I suspected I messed up the weight painting (copying that is) and eventually gave up on it. Thing is, the feet do not move, it's only the camera moving.

I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow that show what I'm talking about. If there's no solution, than so be it. Maybe releasing it so more people can try it out will bring an idea. Or maybe it's just my game being funny and not an actual issue at all.

 

Thank you again, Dragten, for offering your help! It's very much appreciated. :)

(As I said, I hope I will be able to solve some of the issues. But since you asked, I thought I provide some detail.)

[Dragten]

Ok, lets see.

 

***Weight sliders.

Are you sure that the _0 mesh is the modified version of _1, without any vertexes removed?

Make a backup of your current _0 mesh. Open your _1 mesh and import a _0 body.

Start scaling, so the size fits the body.

Finally, I would suggest manually moving the polygons at the seam. Supposedly, there is an equal amount of polygons on the edge on the body and above the ankle. Just select a vertex from the body, copy the X, Z, Y coordinates, select the vertex on the foot, paste coordinates, repeat until you don't have any more.

Make sure to add the skin modifier, too.

No need for claws or any other objects yet, to save time.

Then just export as _0, fix the shader and test.

 

If it works, continue with claws. Again,import the _1 claws, scale (keep all the vertexes!), export. Fix the shader and paste to the mesh. Test.

If you do not remove or add any vertexes to a mesh, the slider should not mess up on you.

 

***Texture

If both male and female body textures look same, simply try:

When you have to do the BSLightningShaderPropety copy-pasting, just copy the one from default female body for your female feet, and copy the one from the default male body to your male feet. It should work. Just remember, copy the correct one, delete the original one on your model (along with MaterialPropety (or something), if you have that), paste, assign to Node. Save.

Do that on both _0 and _1.

If you just do copy-pasting from original bodies, I just can't see what can possibly go wrong with textures.

 

***Se-through claws.

It sounds strange indeed, but maybe this will help:

For your claws mesh in the NIF files, after you applied the correct BSLightningShaderPropety, in NIFSkope, look for a field called "Shader Flags 2". Double-click it, open the drop-down menu and activate SLSF2_Double_sided. Save.

If it works, it means that your polygons on the claws are "inverted" or "flipped".

If it does not work, then I really have no more ideas what can be wrong.

 

 

********

I hope some of these things will help you.

If something is unclear, ask away.

[Danidragon]

o.=.o I hope the problems get fixed .eager to run around with those xD

[Grimoa]

Thanks for taking your time to explain! :)

 

Just select a vertex from the body, copy the X, Z, Y coordinates, select the vertex on the foot, paste coordinates

That's... Why didn't I think of that? Why did I adjust all the vertices by hand? >.< That would have spared me a lot of work. Thanks for the tipp, I'm sure it will come in handy!

 

No need for claws or any other objects yet, to save time

That one aswell. Half the amount of nifskope adjusting. -.-

 

In the meantime I have fixed the weight slider. :) It was as I suspected. The positions of the NiTriShapes were switched.

 

Aaaand I fixed the textures, It was a dumb mistake. I was using Better Males wich apparently came with an incompatible texture.

What baffled me was that the texture was wrong in nifskope aswell. I believed nifskope to use the texture from my unpacked textures.bsa. I had forgotten I set it to look in the game install directory aswell and I didn't know it would prefere those.

 

Lastly, the double sided flag sounds clever, I will try that. Right away.

 

Hopefully I can release tomorrow. :)

 

Edit: OMG. I think that did the trick. I will have Tests-Feet (my argonian test character^^) try some more poses and stuff, but at first glance it looks good.

 

I have to get back to my equippable (finger) claws, see if it works for them aswell :dance:

Thank you!

 

edit2: now it's gone all funny again. I need some sleep. And a pizza.

And if I have to hear those repetitive people from the whiterun market one more time, I'm going on a killing spree!

sorry, never mind that.

Edited May 12, 2012 by Grimoa

[Grimoa]

See, that happens when I push on instead of going to sleep. I ticked the wrong shaders. It's a drop-donw menu and I... missed >.<

 

Now it's working, aaaaaaand its up!

 

Next, breakfast.

Edited May 13, 2012 by Grimoa

[Dragten]

Awesome, trying it out in a second.

Thank you for your work.

[Danidragon]

Awesome,already downloaded. :dance:

[Grimoa]

To do list for version 1.1

 

*get rid of the polys on the claws

*make better textures for the claws

*make the feet bigger (femals a bit, males a bit more)

*tweak weight painting, (I think the position of the ball of the foot looks off when sneaking.)

 

Oooookay. Starting from the top: "Set smooth" doesn't seem to be the solution. The modifier aims to make the angles more flat, thereby smoothing the edges. But to get it really flat, I would have to sacrifice to much of the shape. I think I found a solution, or at least an idea that looks promising. Read on ;)

 

I installed sculptris the other day and already had some fun with it.

The program allows to draw textures and bumpmaps directly onto the mesh.

My very first try resulted in a normal map that looked like this:

 

 

http://img7.imagebanana.com/img/ynvlekdw/wrong_n.jpg

 

 

So, noooo, I don't want the wireframe on the normal map. How am I to get rid of it, if it's on the normal map?

I went back to Blender and subsurfed the mesh, to get a smooth version to draw the texture on. (Remember: Too much polys to put it ingame!)

Here it is, with a hand painted texture as well as hand painted bumps. (Alright, I did use one of those fancy brushes. it's not like I painted every little bump by hand.)

 

 

http://img6.imagebanana.com/img/1zon0ewx/sculptris01.jpg

 

 

Cause someone had suggested adding a specular map:

I used a greyscale copy of the texture for the normal map's alpha channel, cause apparently that's where the specular map goes, if there's no seperate texture_s.dds.

Yup, but ingame, I still had the old visible poly issue. So I thought, maybe it's one of the shader flags in nifskope?

I tried copying the BSLightingShaderProperty from the feet to the claws and after unchecking SF21 I got this:

 

 

http://img7.imagebanana.com/img/q61h0cg5/nopolys.jpg

 

 

 

No more polys! Without adding vertices! :teehee:

Now I have to sort out why the color is wrong. It's not a tint mask, as the color does not change according to the body color.

 

In case someone is interessted:

As long as SF21 was checked, the game used the body texture on the claws, no matter what path I set in nifskope.

 

Are you guys actually interessted in this? Is it too much or to few information? I feel like I can't just post pictures without saying a word or two but I don't want to go into detail too much in case it's boring. But I still hope that I provide enough information that it could be helpfull if a fellow mod author should ever find this thread via the search function.

Edited May 19, 2012 by Grimoa