Equipping Armor to a non-biped character

[Funkonaut]

I'm making a quest that revolves around the creation of a ride-able mammoth mount. I have successfully made a mammoth mount that both the player and NPCs can ride and that generally fills the same role as a horse. It is its own race that is essentially a carbon copy of the original mammoth race but with my own custom skeleton (same MammothBranded.nif mesh as the original though). I created this skeleton purely in NifSkope and as far as I can tell it's solid and everything else about the mammoth (animations and such) remains intact and unchanged.

 

I would also really like to customize further by adding armor to the mammoth (saddle, bridle, spikes, doesn't matter, something to make it look more badass).

 

Pretty much every custom armor tutorial I've found is for biped/player/NPC characters, so I've tried to follow them and transfer the info to armoring an animal. So far I've done:

 

-Renaming a body part node (I started with "Saddle", picked a random number like 50, they are all unnamed by default) under the race tab

-Made new forms for the test armor piece (that's basically a copy of the horse saddle) for both armor and armor addon types, and assigned them to the Saddle node I just named, and put them into an outfit for the mammoth to equip

-Opened up the .nif of the mammothsaddle.nif mesh in NifSkope, browsed to the BSDismemberSkinInstance nodes of all the NiTriShape nodes and entered the Saddle node's number under the Body Part property.

 

Attempting to equip them on my EncMammothMount NPC throws an error:

 

MODELS: 'BASE meshes/Actors/Mammoth/Character Assets/MammothBranded.nif' object MammothBranded:0' has a skin instance that is not dismemberable. Add 'W' array to object in max."

 

I get that in the humanoids, equipping a piece of armor makes that section of their body (the partition) disappear underneath it, so the game doesn't have to think about both, and that the animal meshes don't have those partitions. However, I found someone successfully got armor on a dog: My link (nikki lawrence post) but they don't give enough info to go on about how they edited the dog race beforehand (custom mesh with partitions added in 3DSMax? the W array thing?) before adding armor.

 

So I guess I'm just trying to fill in the missing pieces in my knowledge -- the dog mod shows it's possible to get armor on an animal and not just bipeds, but does it require a complete rework of the mesh in 3DSMax and adding some kind of "w array" (which I don't understand at all) or is there just something simple/obvious I'm missing?

 

Thanks for any tips or direction.

 

 

EDIT: p.s., I would just ask the person who made the dog mod but that site doesn't seem to have an option to register and post anymore =(

Edited October 26, 2012 by Funkonaut