Need help removing hidden body parts from custom armour

[Mayfly53]

Hello everyone,

 

Now that I have some free time, I'm trying my hand at meshing again, this time in a lot greater depth.

I've had reasonable success so far, but I now encounter a problem. I wanted the bare arms to show in my armour, as well as part of the torso sides which are visible looking into the armour from the sleeve. I used the body mesh from the vanilla vanilla prisoner clothes (prisonerrags.nif), because it fulfilled this without me having to do as much work.

 

However, that body mesh also includes the shins, but these clip through my armour when running. I know I can delete these (using 3ds Max's whole element selector, which selects these shins separately to the upper body), but how do I then remake the skin wrap and BSDismemberSkin Modifier? Previously, I skinned the armour to the body mesh, but what to I skin the body itself to? I've tried omitting this step, but Max won't allow that. I've tried copying the BSDismemberSkin data from the unedited mesh and pasting it onto the edited one, but that made the mesh's coordinates fly way off. I've also tried importing the malebody.nif, skinning my desired body to that, then deleting it again before exporting, but that caused a mess of exploded arms in game.

 

I know it's not a discrepancy between the _0 and _1 meshes, because both had the same number of vertices afterwards (and I use the lightest end of the weight slider anyway).

 

I'd appreciate any help you can give me :)

 

TL;DR: I want to delete hidden parts of the body mesh the way Bethesda has done, then rebuild the body's BSDismbember data.

[Mayfly53]

Basically, I want to remove the leg parts and leave the upper body/ arms. See the picture

http://i.imgur.com/Pm6t8Gs.jpg

How do I rebuild the BSDismemberSkin Instance after editing the mesh like that?

[Elleh]

(Aaaaah I saw this before work, but I had to leave. :C )

 

So anyway......

 

Have you considered simply making the leg portion invisible with textures and an alpha property? Wouldn't be the most "optimal" way of doing it, but it really shouldn't cause any problems.

 

If you want to do it "properly" however, it should be pretty straight forward. For one, you shouldn't need to delete the existing skin modifier. I have a few fingers that show in my custom gloves, and all I needed to do was delete the extra faces of the hand. If for some reason you do want/need a new skin, you should just be able to do a skin wrap to the full male body nif as you described. I'm unsure why it did not work for you. Could you explain your process?

 

As far as BSdismember goes, you probably don't need to delete that one either. (Unless you are not importing it, for some reason?) Or delete the old one, quickly slap a new one on there and set it to whatever - I usually use "SkyrimTorso1" for everything. In nifskope you can set it to the proper body part. I'm assuming it will be "forearms" in this case.

 

Honestly, "a mess of exploded arms" does sound like a potential problem with the weight. I have no experience with that yet myself 'tho, so I wouldn't be much help if that is indeed the problem.

[Mayfly53]

First of all, thank you for the reply.

 

Giving the body its own texture as opposed to the default malebody.dds really isn't what I want to do. I know it's a workaround, but I want to know how to do this right, for future projects too.

 

I was under the impression that as soon as I touched the editable mesh, the skin and BSDismember data became invalid and had to be rebuild. Is that not true in all cases?

 

Also, what procedure do you use for remaking skin and dismember data? From tutorials I've followed, my procedure is to apply a smooth of 2, then skin wrap to the body underneath (in the case of armour, I got confused when editing the body itself so there's nothing underneath to skin to). Then delete the skin wrap, highlight the new skin and make BSDismember, usually of "Skyrim, Main Body" (I have no torso1 option, but it's essentially the same thing I think).

 

As for the exploding, it can't actually be from the weight, since my character is on the _0 weight. But I think it was from trying to copy the NiTriShape data in NifSkope, the coordinates were off, so the arms ended up being like 120 z-units above the armour. I think that caused the explosion in-game.

I guess I rushed it a bit. I was experimenting :psyduck:

 

Can I import a second instance of the male body temporarily and skin the edited one to that? Is that the right way to go about it when editing body parts themselves?

 

I appreciate your help.

[Elleh]

Hm, I don't believe it becomes invalid really. If you fudge with it too much then you might have some wierd stretching going on with animations. I.e, you move this vertex here, but the skin data hasn't changed, so it will move like it was over there , wich could mean it will fly off strange places if it was moved from it's original location a great deal. Deleting parts also should not be problematic - the weights in the skin data will remain the same. You will only run into problems if you add geometry to the mesh, such as from extruding. And with BSDismember, just think of it as a way to tell the game what parts to cover on the body. It's the same situation as the skin data - taking away parts will do no harm, but it you add anything new you need to tell the exporter what partition that geometry is a part of. Unfortunately, you don't actually have many choices in Max - it just needs to be there in some shape or form so the exporter won't crash. I'm assuming selecting different faces will allow you to specify multiple partitions, but I have not yet needed to do this so...... IDK.

 

So here's what you can try:

 

Import your prisoner clothes (make sure you are importing the skeleton and skin modifier), and delete all but the body. Don't touch the existing Skin or BSDismember. In the editable body mesh, select the shins and delete. Alternatively, you could import the entire malebody_0.nif and delete the necessary parts.

 

At this point, if you absolutly feel the need to reskin this portion (but as I said, it shouldn't be necessary in this case), it really is exactly the same as using Skin Wrap with clothes or armors. Just delete the existing skin, import the malebody_0 and copy the data from that. I really, really encourage you to try it without doing this and just using the old skin data. You might be suprised. :wink:

 

For BSDismember, same deal. Should not need to be touched, but if you want to double check you will apply it in the same manner as clothes or armor. Delete the old modifier, add a new one, select the entire body portion and set it to.... anything. In fact, as I am looking at the prisoner clothes in Max it would appear that the body under the clothes has only one partition - "Skyrim Main Body" (or Skyrim Torso 1). So choose that when you set up the BSDismember and you shouldn't need to change anything in nifskope.

 

Then just export your edited male torso along with your armor. :wink: Fix up your shaders in nifskope and make sure your dismember partions jive with the CK and your other armor pieces. That ought to be it.

 

There is a tutorial somewhere 'round here that talks about what you want to do. If I find it, I will link it. I have lost it, somehow. -_-

 

EDIT. Can't spell.

Edited May 17, 2013 by Elleh

[Mayfly53]

Thank you very much! I did as you said, and while the mesh worked perfectly, the texture turned to shiny block colours (in-game, in NifSkope nad Max it looks perfect), so I may have to reskin the various elements anyway, I'm not sure. I almost have this procedure worked out, there's just this one last kink it seems.