How to scale existing skeleton in Blender and make game see it.

[EPDGaffney]

So, anyone that has read my radroach thread realises I want tiny ones for something. Using the scale function in the GECK makes it so that I can have about seven tiny radroaches, but I had a fight with 100 regular-sized ones just now and whilst I wouldn't call it smooth, it played smoother than when I had 15 of these scaled ones.

 

So, I went into Blender, reduced the poly count, reduced the texture size, and shrank the model. In-game, it's the same size as before however. So I tried shrinking the actual skeleton file, and that didn't help. My guess is that I have to shrink the animations themselves but ...why would life be so cruel?

 

Anyone know any more than this? Also, what are the export settings for just a skeleton by itself?

 

Thanks.

[uhmattbravo]

Did you make sure to apply scale/rotation? I could swear that just resizing the mesh should've been enough though. Unfortunately, i'm going on my spotty memory and not hard, provable fact on that one.

 

All I do to export skeletons is click 'use default settings' or whatever, make sure 'use bsfadenode' is selected, and choose 'creature' on the collision settings (it defaults to skin for the material, but since I do a lot of metal stuff, I can assure you that changing it to whatever else in the 'blood' tab in GECK still works.

 

After you have it exported, go into Nifskope and make sure that BSBound is parented to Scene Root, not Bip01. I'm not sure if that last part is nessicary for modifying an existing skeleton, but it's needed for the way I learned to make new ones.

 

Also check your constraints. I hear they can get messed up, on export, but I can never get them to work right anyway and just end up using destruction data in GECK.

[EPDGaffney]

Thanks. That was helpful but I'm still not getting any results.

 

I think I must have forgotten to apply rotation and scale the first time, because quite madly, now it appears to be the correct size in NifSkope, but in the GECK and in the game, it looks like this:

https://prnt.sc/i9pclf

 

Mind you, this is just a scaled radroach. In fact, this one has had no adjustments made besides the scaling. If I paste the vanilla model over it, it's clear that the game is deforming the tiny model to meet the size of the skeleton, which I truly hope is the only other thing I need to touch.

 

I tried doing the skeleton again, and if I don't apply rotation and scale, it looks great but the results are the same, which I can make sense of in that NifSkope knows the scale is .1 on the Fade Node. But when I do apply rotation and scale, it looks like an explosion. Mind you, I've never worked with skeletons formatted for this engine, so I have no idea what I can and can't touch.

 

http://prntscr.com/i9px25

http://prntscr.com/i9pxic

 

Additionally, no exported skeleton seems to get any collision.

[uhmattbravo]

Exporting a skeleton with collision is very possible. Are you selecting everything before exporting or just the armature?

 

The other thing is that if something is small enough, the engine might appear to skip the collision altogether. I had it happen with the wheels on a shopping cart vehicle (creature based driving system) before. They'd do fine on terrain, but the whole thing would occasionally sink into road meshes and get stuck while driving.

 

 

As for the scaling the mesh thing, i'm starting to wonder where i'd heard that because your stretched out mesh just makes more sense to me than that. Sorry. I did mention my memory isn't the greatest, right?

 

Anyway, typically when I run into a size issue on a creature, I personally just take it back and redo the whole thing from a static mesh (new armature, redo the rigging, new collision shapes, new animations, etc...) because i'm not convinced that scaling the armature actually does anything productive. I know i've tried it before, but I don't really remember how it went wrong or why I opted to just do it the hard way from then on. But again, i'm working with skeletons I made myself, so my knowledge of working specifically with existing ones is very limited. As a result, there may be an easier solution out there that I just don't know about.

Edited February 3, 2018 by uhmattbravo

[EPDGaffney]

Everything is selected. I only ever use A to select stuff on export, so it's all or nothing.

 

Well, about the roads, I've found that on some of them, I can just drop items through them, so maybe it's the road and not your trolley?

 

Yes, this does make perfect sense, as it uses the skeleton.nif file for the skeleton, which was news to me but now that I know that it's obvious that this is what it would do when the mesh doesn't match it.

 

I should be able to do this by scaling the skeleton and just doing the collision from scratch, I think, though I

1. don't know how to get the collision exported for a skeleton, and

2. am now considering a swarm particle effect or a mesh with an animated texture to simulate a hundred or more tiny bugs. I don't actually know how to do this yet, however. Never done either for this engine.

[uhmattbravo]

I've never exported an existing skeleton, so I can't really be sure that there isn't a step i'm missing specific to that, but I have no less than 14 hand made skeletons uploaded on here between 3 of my mods and the P.U.P.P.Y. from The Big Rescue, all with fully functional collision using these export settings:

 

http://i.imgur.com/fHgDLwI.jpg

 

Like I said though, I can't be sure that there isn't something that I don't know about for preexisting skeletons.

 

 

A swarm might not be a bad idea. It'd probably be less of a drain on the engine, but I could also see how that might not be quite an ideal solution. If you haven't seen this yet:

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/20383

 

It's quite likely the best place to start if you go that route.

[EPDGaffney]

Thanks a million. If I don't use that skeleton settings image for this, I'm sure I'll come back to it. I doubt that being an existing skeleton would change the export settings.

 

I was planning on using that tutorial already. Haven't read through it yet but it looks extremely well made. Not to mention, I have deep respect for the author to begin with.

[uhmattbravo]

Yeah, it's pretty unlikely, but I was thinking more of stuff involved in importing. I know Bip01 gets turned, and have heard of a fix that sounded viable, but since it's not something I've actually messed with, I don't know if it's actually necessary for the skeleton or just animations, or if anything else needs to be fixed before altering or exporting.

 

Any yes, that tutorial is excellent. I consider it the leading authority on the subject. If it can get me to make animated textures with my limited knowledge of Nifskope, it can teach anyone. Also, i'll second Pix being generally awesome.

[EPDGaffney]

It looks completely correct when importing with the settings I always use, so I'm hopeful that that's not my problem, but good to know about the possibility all the same. Wish me luck. I am definitely going to need it.

[uhmattbravo]

The way I learned it for a new skeleton at least, Bip01 is supposed to run parallel to Bip01 Non Accum (Like if you press 3 on the number pad, both should extend to the right from the center).

 

I can't guarantee that anything will go wrong if it's not running that way, or if it's that way when you import it, but it might be worth trying to turn it if it's not facing that way.