Converted Skyrim Modder's Resources Showing Up Everywhere Except in-game

[Roadhouse699]

I've been gathering modder's resources for a pretty big project I have in mind for Fallout 4, and one of the places I'm getting them from are Skyrim Modder's Resource packs. I converted them all to the proper Fallout 4 format using the NifPlugin for 3ds Max, as you can see here with this example:

 

 

The two issues persisting with this mesh are the fact that

a) in Creation kit, individual BSTriShapes will disappear as the camera is moved, then reappear when it moves again.

b) the mesh shows up as a red exclamation point in game

Anyone run into this before? If so, how did you get around it?

[Roadhouse699]

I figured out can make them show up in game by copying the BSTriShapes into a pre-existing mesh, but there are still issues:

1. Individual BSTriShapes disappear and reappear as the player's view of the object changes

2. The collision from the mesh it was copied into is still there, rather than the accurate collision for the new mesh.

 

This leads me to believe that the bhkCollisionObject not being a bhkNPCollisionObject is part of the issue here, as it's one of the only differences between this mesh and meshes original made for Fallout 4. Still doesn't solve much.

[deadbeeftffn]

Hard to say. If you can provide your (broken) Nif, I could have a closer look at it.

[Roadhouse699]

Sure thing, here's the one before the collision was replaced.

And here's the one from after I copied all the BSTriShapes in to a Fallout 4 mesh

[deadbeeftffn]

On first glance there are some problems. The bounding boxes of (nearly) all BSTriShapes do not match. That's the reason why meshes are disappearing depending on the view.

You haven't treated the exported Nif with elric. Thus, the CK can read the collision object (emitting a warning), but the game itself can't. This should be the reason for the red "!"

Also, the flags of all nodes are - hmmmm - not really wrong, but not really correct too.

Currently elric crashes if i try to convert the Nif, which simply means that there are still some other errors.

I'll be back soon, just gimme a day.

[deadbeeftffn]

Finally I could fix & convert your Nif and could successfully test it in game. You can download the Nif from https://we.tl/t-eY3TqosgOw

There are two versions.The first one is based on you collision but it has a small error. On one wall the collision is reverted, thus you can go through the wall into the house, but you can't go out.

For the second Nif I recreated the collision.This one works fine but the collision object itself is a litle bit simplified compared to the original one.

[Roadhouse699]

Thanks a lot, I don't know much about 3d meshes myself, I'm more of a level design guy.

 

While I greatly appreciate this, there is one minor issue: this converted mesh was 1 of about 250 (I'm actually tossing around the idea of a total conversion now that I have a lot of experience with the Creation Engine). I don't expect you to convert that many, so can I ask what exactly you did here?

[deadbeeftffn]

To answer your question:

- fixed the bounding boxes of all BSTriShapes.

- changed the flag values for all nodes to 14

- added a BSConnectPoint::Parents node

- fixed the bhkCollisionObject node

- processed the nif with elric

 

:smile: I'm pretty sure that all of this problems may be addressed and fixed with 3DSMax. Unfortunately i'm not familiar with 3DSMax and thus of no help.

At least you should try to convert your meshes with elric. You'll find it in the fallout4-folder in Tools/Elric. It's mandatory to read (and follow) the readme. It's not that complicated, though :wink:

 

If elric crashes - and it does so very often and totally silent - there's still something wrong with the nif. Best bet is to remove a node from the Nif and try to convert this 'stripped down' version again with elric. If this works, you've found the villain, if elric still crashes, then there is a problem with another node... you got the picture? So one more hint: Uncheck "Remove unnecessary extra data" in the elric option window. This option is one reason for crashes, right after problems with the collision object.

[Roadhouse699]

Alright, sorry to keep dragging this out, but when you say to fix the bounding boxes, are you talking about aligning all the bounding spheres on the mesh? And what exactly did you do with the collision? I'm not that knowledgeable with .nif files in general.

[deadbeeftffn]

Each TriShape has its own boundig sphere. You can see it if you click on the bounding sphere entry of the node. The sphere must be big enough to include all vertices of the TriShape. The center of the sphere is not always the 0,0,0 coordinate of the node. The center should be placed that way, that the radius of the sphere could be as small as possible.

 

For the collision object i copied some values from another (functional) Nif. Actually, i don't know what i'm doing there. The Havok stuff is not documented publicly, so this is more or less trial and error and intuition.

 

Anyway, it definitely is possible to export your NIFs with 3DSMax and the only additional step would be to process the resulting Nif with elric. I'm pretty sure there are enough tutorials on how to setup 3DSMax to get proper results.

This would be more efficient (and faster) than fixing each node in each and every Nif by hand :wink: