Importing/Exporting hair = not-right transparency/lighting

[Septfox]

Hey guys.

 

Back in my Oblivion days, I found that I rather liked one of the coolsims hairstyles. I tweaked, prodded and experimented until it was perfect for my character. Ended up using it until I stopped playing a while back.

 

Fast forward to the year 200x. I find that another of the coolsims styles is about right for my character, so I load it up in 3ds to add my personal touches. Everything goes fine; I import it, make my changes, export to a nif, and copy the LightingShaderProperty and AlphaProperty blocks from the old nif so all the settings are right, check normals to make sure they are in fact normal, make sure tangents are updated, etc etc.

 

The game loads fine, no unusual loading time, no crash. But my hair...well.

 

Before:

 

http://i1192.photobucket.com/albums/aa336/septfox/Skyrim/hair0.jpg

 

After import/export:

 

http://i1192.photobucket.com/albums/aa336/septfox/Skyrim/hair1.jpg

 

(just to clarify: the hair actually uses two nifs, the outer, nicely-transparent hair you see the most of, and the inner, mostly-opaque hair that provides a backdrop since Skyrim's transparency handling is kind of bad. the problem here is some spots in the outer nif don't seem to be lighting the same as the rest)

 

I don't get what I've done wrong. I didn't add or remove any vertices, only moved some, but it still seems like some kind of weird sorting error.

 

3ds import/export settings:

 

http://i1192.photobucket.com/albums/aa336/septfox/Skyrim/import.jpghttp://i1192.photobucket.com/albums/aa336/septfox/Skyrim/export.jpg

 

 

Any ideas? Do I have something set wrong, or am doing something stupid here?

[nuska]

Looks like flipped normals to my eye. You might want to pop a 'Normal' modifier on top of your stack and tick 'unify' before you export, see if that redeems the problem.

[Ghogiel]

I doubt that, looks like a sorting error to me. Often you just can't import nifs without reordering the vertices. One solution is to actually reorder the verts prior to exporting in max. You could try exporting the hair as an obj from nifskope and getting the model in scene that way, which possibly will keep vert index intact. The export should work correctly as long as you do not strippify it.

[thefudgestix]

You might have multiples of vertices or faces? Maybe try viewing overlapping faces?

[ziitch]

If it's like the smoothing option on inter-object seams on the Blender plugin, you probably need to turn off the Auto Smooth option so that the faces aren't modified in the process.

[didiusdeddysalam]

your hair problem :

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/File:3ds_Max_exporting_custom_assets_image_7.jpg

Quote : "I also exported it as a NiTriStrip. By ticking the generate strips box. If this model used alpha transparency(or was rigged), I would have unticked that box, as very often stripifying causes alpha sorting problems."

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/3ds_Max_exporting_custom_assets

Edited April 30, 2017 by didiusdeddysalam