[LE] Armor elements disappearing depending on distance and angle

[xavier0self]

Ima make an updated post here. My original issue was not fixed by what I thought I had done right. I'm now more experienced and have deduced what MY exact problem was and have come here to share what I have learned.

 

To reiterate what was happening: I was seeing specific meshes clip through other meshes as I backed away in free camera mode. More clipping with more distance. (I think 3rd person is also affected)

 

My actual problem was that I had poorly weighted my armor piece with a bone that was painted beyond it's normal operating boundaries. (not sure what constitutes the boundaries) You can't see where the boundary is in Outfit Studio. But if you paint past it you can have "clipping" issues and "spiking out" issues in the over-painted areas (only) when zooming out in free camera mode. The specific mesh will start to slowly appear more and more through other meshes, or "spike out" as you gain distance from the mesh.

 

 

The garbage of this problem is that you can paint the mesh beyond its bone boundaries, but you can't tell unless you check in-game. You can't even tell up close, you have to back up your perspective.

AND to make the problem even more interesting, painting past a bone boundary can sometimes fix other weighting issues and make the mesh behave much nicer in certain positions, where you've over-painted.

But you can't tell that there's a problem at first, or for a while. In fact, you think everything is TOTALLY FINE.. (MAYBE EVEN FIXED if you're unlucky like me lol)

I suggest you try painting some completely wrong bone on the completely wrong part of a mesh just to familiarize yourself with some of the effects. It may help you identify problems in the future.

 

convenient side note: You can build new meshes with Bodyslide WHILE Skyrim is running to check and test bone weighting on the fly, if you hadn't known. Just alt-tab from Skyrim mid-game, edit and save-as your mesh with new changes, REFRESH OUTFITS in Bodyslide and then build mesh. In-game, you just have to re-equip the armor piece that you freshly built, and the new changes should be implemented. Changes that work include painting bone weights (but not deleting bones), mesh morphing, and even zapping shapes sometimes works fine while the game is running. Be sure to REFRESH OUTFITS each time before building a newly saved Outfit Studio project. (If the mesh ever becomes distorted by doing this, you just have to restart Skyrim. Probably nothing wrong with the mesh file).

 

 

 

SO LESSON HERE: If you hand-paint bone weights because you're a keener like me, BE AWARE YOU CAN PAINT PAST A BOUNDARY THAT IS IMPORTANT TO STAY IN, BUT YOU CAN'T SEE IN OUTFIT STUDIO.

 

This issue is rare when copying bone weights from a reference shape but might still occur if you set the search radius too high. Copying weights from armor pieces might have a higher chance of introducing this issue, but not overly-prone to cause the issue. It is remedied by finding where the overage is and simply removing that over-painted bit on what ever bones are affected. Easier said than done, but your mesh is probably fine! Just find the bad bone.

 

 

 

On a side note: I have actually used this to my advantage once. A mesh wasn't behaving properly in this one position (it was all contorted and spikey-ugly) and no matter what weighting I tried I just couldn't fix it. But low and behold, I intentionally painted the most minimum value of a bone that was just outside of it's operating boundary right where the mesh wasn't behaving, and the mesh looked much better than before I over-painted. Mind you, it did start to spike out when I moved away in free camera, but it was such a minimal amount that it was basically unnoticeable and only happened when the mesh was in that specific position. So I did a greasy there, but it worked.

Edited October 1, 2021 by xavier0self