Conformulator Issues

[jamochawoke]

Hey guys. I just completed a ton of Nord-styled helmets (yes even a proper horned one like you see in the trailer for skyrim on the dragonborn!) using some pieces of some license free viking helmet resources I found.

 

I was able to create so many different styles of helmets by pre-making (or in the case of some helmets seperating a piece of a mesh in Blender) a bunch of parts then mixing and matching them and changing the textures in Nifskope.

 

However, I am unable to make EGM files for these helmets using the Conformulator tool.

 

It says that I cannot have multiple nitristrips in a nif when conforming the helmet. I tried joining all objects in Blender and even welded vertices together but on export as a nif it will seperate everything out by material as seperate nitristrips (each material has its own texture).

 

I then tried opening the file in Max 2010 and joining the objects and exporting as an OBJ file. That didn't work either. I'd just get a generic error from the Conformulator tool about the Object file.

 

So... what do I do? I could make 2 more versions of each helm :wallbash: and make a script to change it for the beast races (the only races it doesn't fit) but my mod is already pretty script heavy and I am trying to make it as smooth as possible.

 

So is there another way to generate an EGM file or am I stuck with refitting the helms and writing scripts?

[Caithe]

Did you try to not stripify them so it create NiTriShape in your nif instead?

 

I've only used comformulator once so this is only a suggestion.

Edited April 4, 2012 by Caithe

[DrakeTheDragon]

The issue is that EGM files contain a list of shape morphs in the form of "offsets" from base location on a per-vertex basis. Which vertex is affected is determined by the vertex index. There cannot be EGM files for a NIF that contains more than 1 single NiTriShape or -Strips node, as then there would be a number of vertices with the very same vertex index, each node starting from 0 again. If you can't make it so your helmets are only 1 single part, same material and using different parts form the same single texture file, then, unfortunately, you're out of luck with Oblivion, I'm afraid.

[jamochawoke]

Ughhh... UV mapping is my personal pet peeve (I can retexture like a boss, but I hate uv wrapping meshes from scratch, it drives me up the wall). The only way to get them to export all as the same material is to join them all and then uv unwrap every single helm and then retexture. With the 36 hours of texturing I've already put into these helms and all of the hassles I've put up with with getting the speculars to look right... no thanks.

 

So it looks like I'm going to be stuck with scripting different versions of the helms :/. Either that or race-restricting them from beast races, which would suck, since I love playing Khajiit the most haha.

 

I really wonder how Bethesda made the .egm files in the first place. I bet it could handle multi-object meshes.

Edited April 6, 2012 by jamochawoke

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, I don't think you'll need to "re"-unwrap your UV maps. I'd just join the meshes, assign the same material to all faces, and then in UV Editor or however it's called assign the same texture file and just re"arrange" your maps. If all else fails you can simply paste together the individual texture files like in a grid or something and then just shrink and translate the existing maps so they fit onto their respective parts again.

 

Scrappy drawing for visualization:

 

 

Oh, and Bethesda certainly used the professional licensed Singular Immersion Face Gen Modeler to create their heads and all.

Their helmets are all one-piece designs as well though. It is the file format of EGM files which doesn't allow for more meshes at once, not the way we modders create them.

Edited April 6, 2012 by DrakeTheDragon

[jamochawoke]

Gotcha gotcha. Well I went ahead and just made Argonian and Khajiit versions of all the helms I had already made. I've already made female head mesh versions for all of them so it only took about 3 hours work to push and pull some verts around to get 16 versions of the 8 helmets I made to fit the different races. The scripts to get everything switched around on the right races took an hour on top of that. If I had redone the textures like I was thinking it would've been a week-long project.

 

Thanks for the info though. It's definitely something I will keep in mind for later when I go to create new helms; and I will definitely be making them as a single mesh in the future. These were just a little too complicated this time around so I just found a way around it :/.