About creating clothing and armor

[lb10111]

Hello. I am interested in creating custom armor and clothing for Oblivion and possibly Skyrim. I can already model and texture and get the objects in game but I can't shake the feeling that I'm doing something wrong along the way, or not doing something that I should be doing. Two things I've noticed about my custom clothing so far: sometimes the texture appears blurry and distorted in areas when zoomed in, and the normal map seems to have no effect(i.e., whether the alpha channel is dark or light it appears the same in game). So I thought maybe I could list the steps I take from 3DS Max to Oblivion and maybe someone could guide me on the right path...

 

Here is what I've been doing:

 

- Import Oblivion's body part(s) that my clothing will at least partially cover

- Model the clothing to fit the body

- Add a Skin Wrap modifier to the clothing, add the body parts to the modifier, convert the modifier to Skin

- Add an Unwrap UVW modifier to the clothing

- Spend two hours trying to make a decent UV map, saving the UV template for texturing

- Select the clothing and body meshes and export to .nif

- Copy a texture to the Data\Textures\... folder and the .nif to the Data\Meshes\... folder

- Open nif in nifskope, add a TexturingProperty and point it to the texture

- Open the texture in GIMP, draw the texture, export it back and generate mipmaps

- Apply normal map filter to the texture and export it next to the texture, generating mipmaps

 

Also I'm wondering how the smooth modifier works with Oblivion. I read somewhere that you're supposed to add the smooth modifier and select smoothing groups 2. However this causes my mesh to look like has dimples all over it. Not sure if it's just the way I modeled the clothing or what.

[Ghogiel]

While none of this is likely to do with your texture issues> The only thing I can think of that you haven't mentioned is while in nifskope> spells > batch >update tangent space. Your normal map should be being read, if it wasn't you would have bigger problems, but perhaps the reason why it doesn't do anything is there is no tangent space data to work from. otherwise you should post the maps and images of what you are experiencing in game.

 

anyway UV it before you skin it. You could edit the UV then drag it under the skin and 'collapse to'. But you should collapse the UV modifier before export in any case.

 

with outfits I usually hide everything I am not exporting and just export the scene. I leave the skeleton unhidden. Always have export hidden nodes unticked in the exporter dialogue. Otherwise things get exported as invisible data, because I am often using layers and hiding things in my scenes that would be bad. If you don't untick export hidden nodes, in nifskope you can got to render>show hidden, and all the hidden objects in your max scene will be shown. Which would obviously be a booboo

 

Make sure you add a material to the model that has a dds in the diffuse slot before exporting, you should never need to "add a TexturingProperty and point it to the texture". the NiTexturingProperty should have exported all linked up to your texture, and if you set the file paths up in the exporter and are using the texture you want on your mesh, then you won't even need to point it to the texture.

 

The smooth modifier is just a global smoothing groups you can apply to your model. it's a superfluous modifier that some people think they need to use and that solved their smoothing groups from borking their outfits in skyrim, In edit poly you can adjust and set your smoothing groups up just fine, it's used because of the body weight slider morphs. It won't help solve any issue with oblivion though, all you would be doing is adding everything to one smoothing group, and maybe you want to do that, quite often you don't want to do that, so it's not something that has a universal use.

Edited September 15, 2012 by Ghogiel