Any tips for diagnosing broken nifs?

[DocClox]

I made a light mesh. It's basically a concrete housing protecting a ground tracking light from the workshop, only I ripped out the light's animation and added my own. What I did works just fine in Nifskope, but crashes the CK when I try and use it. I know it's not the textures causing the crash, because I ripped out the animation (again) and the static version loads fine with the those same textures.

 

I've been checking the fields against working ones from the game, and so far as I can tell, it ought to work, but clearly I'm missing something. Any ideas for how to find the problem?

[niston]

Just fixed something like this the other day: Nif would crash the CK, but work in game.

 

First, I've removed Nodes/Branches from the NIF, one by one, each time trying to load in CK, in an attempt to isolate the problem source.

I begun ripping out the animation related stuff, eventually removing even TriShapes etc.

But there was no success: The NIF still crashed the CK until I had removed even the last trishape and was left with no rendering geometry.

 

So I had a look at the textures and reprocessed them all with icestorm's texture toolbox (convert to TGA, then back to the required DDS type).

That wasn't successful either.

 

Next thing was to remove all materials from the NIF. Lo' and behold, that worked; CK would no longer crash and presented my NIF in uniform purple (missing textures, of course).

So then I removed all BGSM files for the next test. That also worked.

I then re-added BGSMs one by one until I found the offender(s). Had a good look at them, turns out in this case the SSR flags were set in the offending material files and that would crash CK on load.

Fixed the flags and with that, the crashing was gone.

[DocClox]

Useful to know. I would never have thought to check the materials

[GrimGrim31]

I had this issue with a mesh because of the node hierarchy. It would load just fine into NifSkope but crash CK. it happened when I converted a NIF to an OBJ to edit in Blender and then exported the finished OBJ. I converted that to a NIF in Outfit Studio and then tried to use it in CK. Crash to desktop! So I had a good look in NifSkope and saw the hierarchy issue.

 

What happened in my case was that a water layer trishape became a sibling of the main NiNode instead of being a child of it. Once I made that trishape a child of the main NiNode, no more crashes.

Edited April 27, 2021 by GrimGrim31