Invisible Custom Mesh

[Vladeisan]

So I've been working on a custom armor mod for robert's body made from scratch (not a port or anything. 100% modelled in blender from scratch, only used robert's body meshes). (BTW I'm a noob. Only other original mod I made was a crappy weapon port a few years ago)

It's a full armor set but so far I'm only done with the cuirass and won't go further until I learn how to do this properly.

Yes I did tons of research and followed tons of tutorials and no matter what I do, for the life of me, when I equip the cuirass ingame its ALWAYS invisible. I tried shortening the texture path/shortening the name/changing the texture/EVERYTHING. And it looks fine in nifskope. It looks like it should. So here's the process I use and if it doesn't get solved I'll probably upload the files somewhere and let an expert look at them.

 

Here's the cuirass in question:

 

 

So after I import the upperbody.nif mesh in blender 2.49, I export it as a 3ds file and then import it in the latest version of blender for more comfortable modelling. After I'm done with the modelling mesh (and setting texture paths and then changing them in nifskope later*) I export it as a 3ds file and import it back into old blender where I then Import the skeleton.nif (btw I use Universal Skeleton Nif, so I imported that) and finally export everything as a .nif file (using oblivion default settings).

I've also heard about weight painting but I really dont understand what it exactly is and how to do it correctly. Just to see, I took the meshes in the weight painter in blender and all 4 objects (body, leather belt, and both fur pelts) are blue.

So anyways, after that I put the .nif file in it's respective folder in the meshes folder and to the same with the textures, I open the .nif file in nif skope and set everything accordingly, save, then just open construction set and place the armor ingame.

 

Please help a poor beginner modder. It only took me 5 hours to make the mesh and choose the textures and literally around 2 days (and counting) to make the armor work ingame before taking it to the forums. Just as a comparison.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, faulty NIF files, missing normalmaps ("<texturename>_n.dds"), etc. aside, weight painting, also called "rigging", is a very important part of creating a mesh. It's made to tell the vertices which bones of the skeleton they should stick to and how much in comparison to other bones. If your mesh has absolutely "no" weight painting/rigging at all, its vertices will either shoot off into infinity and create a heavy infinitely stretching polygons mess, or sometimes also disappear completely, it's pretty random, actually, how unweighted/unrigged vertices misbehave.

 

You should not have been able, though, to export a mesh, while any of its vertices were still unrigged. You said you looked at it with the weight painter in Blender, but did you also switch the Armature bone selection around? As a vertex is usually rigged to more bones than just 1 (there's a game-specific max. the NIF Scripts maintain), it's no use checking just 1 of the skeletons bones.

 

A very simple trick to get started with a somewhat functioning rigging/weight painting, especially when the clothing mesh is that close to the body's, is to use the NIF Scripts' "bone weight copy" script to copy the bone weights from the body mesh to the according vertices of the clothing mesh. Once this is done, you can go into "pose mode" with the skeleton selected in Blender and move the armature skeleton's bones around, to see how useful the current rigging/weight painting already is, then switch between this and the weight painter to further tweak the vertices' weights.

In your case especially the bone weight copy tool should get you started quite nicely though, as close fitting to the body as this is.

 

But just to play safe, you could also show us the final NIF tree from inside NifSkope of your finished NIF. The trained eyes of the regulars in here will usually spot any obvious mistakes rather quickly.

[Vladeisan]

Alright, well here's what I assume to be the NIF Tree:http://tinyimg.io/i/XtFkCXA.png

[Vladeisan]

I also tried using the bone weight copy script but I get "More than 1 mesh has vertex wrights, only select 1 mesh with vertex weights, aborting"

 

Update: I fixed it. Now the mesh shows up ingame FINALLY, but of course theres all kind of clipping and stuff. But I figure I can do that on my own. Thanks for the help! Seems it was all in the weight painting all along.

Edited May 12, 2018 by Vladeisan

[DrakeTheDragon]

Oh, yeah, sorry, I totally forgot about that. My fault. Before you can use the bone weight copy script for a full copy, not just "update selected", you have to remove any existing weights on the mesh to copy the weights to. I usually do that by removing the vertex groups, but I totally forgot telling you about it.

 

Yes, you can also see rather fine in your screenshot above, there's absolutely no skinning data to be seen inside your NiTriShapes/Strips, i.e. they weren't yet rigged to anything. Your new NIF file now should have an additional block with proper skinning data in each NiTriStrips/Shape block as well, usually a list of references to bones it's rigged to.

 

Yeah, the clipping usually stems from imperfect rigging, as is what's usually achieved by the bone weight copy. You can fine-tune it yourself now with the weight painting tool, but it might take some time until you're satisfied with the results.

 

(It took me 2 weeks of daily work until I finished the rigging of my first attempted dragon wings, the publicly available version. Of course there's been no use to the bone weight copy tool with what I was doing, so I had to paint every weights for every bone of my wings' skeleton myself by hand... and to make things worse, I didn't have a clue as to what combination of weights at which vertices will make them fold correctly or anything back then. It was like the first time I hand-painted bone weights from scratch at all... Needless to say, the 2nd wings, as of now still unreleased, went much, much smoother after all I learned the first time around.)

 

Glad I could help.