Simple Monster Mesh Trick

[Braggi]

In teaching myself the basics of the creature section of the CS, I have poked around in a number of larger mods. One of these was Midas Magic and from part of it I developed a problem solving method. It goes like this:

The fellow who made the mod did an incredible job, no question. In poking through his summoned creature nifs, I cam across an iron golem - one that reminded me a little of the same named creature from TES1 Arena. Being an old school gamer, I just had to play with it a bit. I moved the mesh and textures from the BSA, examined them to learn about them and then set a simple prototype creature up with them. Unfortunately, as soon as I dropped the golem into a cell, the CS started bellowing animation errors at me. I could have simply used the "yes to all" button to ignore them, but as a modder, I prefer not to do this - those error messages are there to help you, after all. So, I read through them and discovered that the mesh errors were for missing body parts.

I tested the creature in-game and found it worked OK, but there was an animation bug - every so often my avatar would start moving really slowly. I could jump normally, everything else around me was animated normally and my weapons swings and casting animations were fine - it was just walking that was affected. Puzzled, I retested it. It was random in when it would hit, sometimes not happening for a hour or more of game play. I discovered that the bug only hit when I was in a cell containing a monster with missing meshes. I also discovered the golem was based on the ogre skeleton. Aha!, so if I put the head mesh in place, I'd fix it right? Right... sort of. The missing mesh fixed the animation bug on my PC, but it also appeared on the golem. Great - an iron golem with the ogre's lower jaw and pointed ears, sticking out. Disabling the head mesh caused the editor errors to come back.

Since I have no experience with modeling or rigging, creating a new skeleton and mesh were pretty much out of the question for the time being. What I needed was a quick and dirty but sound and workable answer. To make a long story short, after about nine straight hours of experimenting with the CS, Nifskope and the Photoshop dds plugin, I finally found one, as follows:

1.Create a DX1 Alpha texture with the alpha set to "0" and the color of image pure black (RGB 0,0,0), making it effectively transparent.

2. Extract the ogre head from the the Meshes.BSA, drop it into the golem's mesh directory and open it up in Nifskope. Re-texture the head using the transparent texture.

3. For the final step, use Nifskope to add the Node > Nialphaproperty to the NiTrisStrips section and the entire mesh becomes transparent.

4. I next tested it with head mesh enabled. Eureka! - no ogre head where it shouldn't be, no editor errors and no animation bug.

A very simple workaround which I thought I would share. After I learn how to create and rig my meshes and skeletons in Blender (which will likely take some time)I'll do things the proper way, but for now this method works flawlessly. Yes, the engine is still doing the calculations for the mesh (or so I believe) but it is at least out of the way visually and its absence isn't causing bugs.

(I only picked up and started playing with Nifskope about 6 days ago - but I can see it is an absolute godsend.)