SSE Outfit Studio Posed Nifs

[6Sfool]

I know that Outfit studio allows me to set a pose while I'm editing to see that bone weights are applied properly, and I know that often nifs have poses baked in. Usually this means it looks fine in Outfit studio with no pose, looks fine in Nifskope, and looks fine in game- until I edit it. It's not a problem when it's an armor piece because I can delete the bone weights and therefore the pose, then copy them from the reference. It's a lot more difficult when it's something like a creature.

 

My current project is a quick tweak to Mihail's Giantesses. I like the implementation but I decided to replace the giantess' models with the ones from Naked Giants. Worked perfectly fine when I swapped the Nifs and skeleton out, but I wasn't done just yet. I decided to add a fur top to the bodyslide file from Female Creatures Reworked, with the goal of less hideous but actually dressed giants. Saved it and checked the nif out, it was wildly distorted, mostly from some bones being moved ~200 units along the z axis. So I went back in Outfit Studio and saw that it had a pose. Loaded a new reference and copied the bone weights over and eliminated the pose from the whole project, easy. Then I booted up the game to test and saw the exact mirror of the wild distortions. I assumed that the skeleton accounted for the pose and I had to remove the pose from that too, but you can't just load up a skeleton in outfit studio like any other nif.

 

Essentially, I could leave all the assets untouched and have the resources from the other mod with the pose baked in and no in-game issues. If it's the skeleton-nif pose mismatch I could find a way to fix the skeleton. If I leave the pose and add the fur top then I assume that the top will be the only thing distorted since idk how to copy poses (especially since a manual check shows everything set to 0). How does anyone else work with distorted meshes to avoid everything being bent out of shape?

[Hanaisse]

If you're working on anything other than the human body, make sure you change the reference skeleton (in Settings) to the skeleton of the creature you're working on before export. This is most likely why you're getting wild deformations.

[6Sfool]

I tried again where I let the pose be and set the skeleton to the one for the giant. The shapedata nif body looks screwed up (not the top though), the whole thing looks perfect in bodyslide, and in game all is well except the new top which is floating above the giant's head. It's about what I expected from that approach, I'm just wondering how to get the top to conform to the rest. There's really no documentation for these pose issues beyond deleting the pose entirely.