Armor invisble in the CS

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

Ok, so, wanting to learn something new, I tried my hand at Blender and modeling! I took the dark brotherhood armour and mixed it with the pouldrens of Deadric armor, just cos it looked cool and I wanted to to a basic test. I unpacked the meshes .BSA to a random folder, and edited the darkbrotherhoodm.nif file a little bit. Then I imported the deadric currais onto it, edited it so it was just the pouldrens, and stuck it onto the armor. At this point everything was still grey (though certain bits were black) but it was not the colors it was supposed to be. (I presumed thats how things are ment to look.) Also, I had moved the entire thing around, so it was not in its original place (I dont know how important that is)

So, feeling proud of myself, I export this .nif into its own directory of my data folder!

I load up the CS, create a new piece of armor, set the model to my .nif, stick it on an npc anddd..... invisible man sindrome. Every bit that was covered by the armor is invisible.

So, I read around, and I unpack the textures .BSA. I copy the textures for deadric cuiraiss and Darkbrothoodm, and I map the textures for both of them so it looks like this:

(see the little window at the bottem that is nifscope)

I save the nif, try again in the CS... same result.

So, where have I screwed up here? for clarity, here is me selecting the .nif file in the CS

(the window bottem right)

and here is the result

(the argonian head and tail floating in the bottem left window)

I hope someone can help here, this way of editing armor seems fairly common, I dont want to miss out!!

Thankyou thankyou thankyou in advance,

Mysterious Mr. Bear

EDIT:

Oh, and of course if anyone just has a quick link to a tutorial on editing armor this way....

Edited December 27, 2010 by Mysterious Mr. Bear

[InsanitySorrow]

Since you have re-pathed the textures in Nifskope I don't think it's a missing texture problem. So it's either a rigging or weight painting problem

Edit: A link

Multiple tuts

[Hanaisse]

You copied the _n.dds normal maps into the textures folder too?

If that's not the issue you could try this tutorial about how to do all this just in Nifskope, and not worry about rigging, etc.

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

Oh gee, rigging? Normal maps? ....weight painting? Excuse me for a second, I think I just realized I've thrown myself into the deep end of a deep, deep pool....

To be fair, I have heard OF rigging and didn't think it was necessary if the two pieces already came from pre-made armor... but I was wrong.... and I figured a normal map was more athestics and less essential so I didnt bother copying that either. Weight painting... nope, drawing a blank there!

Thanks guys for those links, they both look very useful... I'll take a look at that nifskope one Hans, just because it seems very easy and will let me quickly do what I want to do for my actual project, but I will make it my goal to figure out how to rig things manually with blender with that tutorial you sent insanity, out of sheer stubberness/curiosity :L

However now I shall sleep, as its tooth hurty in the morning and I'm out of the house by half nine tommorow doing college work! I hate it when real life gets in the way of genuinely interesting things like this... haha

Thanks again for the links and the quick responce, I can stop being so frustrated now and get some sleep Will post up here tommorow if it worked or not

Mysterious Mr. Bear

[Artisanix]

On that screen with NifSkope open... you have two NiTriStrips blocks expanded, and none of them has NiSkinInstance data block, so that means the armor is not rigged to the skeleton at all.

[InsanitySorrow]

Thinking about it, you never edited the models themselves, so you'll not have to adjust the weight painting. Which means it's just the rigging to do, which is actually easy

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

Trollf, that was a very sherlock homes way of figuring out the problem! :L

Right, rigging.... Insanity, I looked at that link you posted and cuteunits tutorial is down.... which one should I follow, as they all seem to be for differnt things :S And what exactly IS rigging? The idea I have of it is that you put a skeliton inside the armour, then attach the sholder armor to the sholder bone, the chest armor to the chest bone etc etc.... Is that anywhere near the truth?

[Artisanix]

Well... actually when I started to think about this, we use a wrong term here. As rigging refers to the creation of the skeleton, the bones. And those have been already created. What should be done with this armor is skinning - the process of "association" the various parts of skin/clothes/armor to the skeleton (bones).

When the mesh has no any skinning info then the engine simply doesn't know how to move properly all parts of the object with the bones. Skinning just informs the engine that this particular part of the mesh is assigned to this certain bone (or bones) and should behave according to those bones' movement and rotations.

To resolve this puzzle, just select each part of the armor one by one and check whether it has any vertex groups under the Link and Material window - if all parts have vertex groups then it's probably something wrong with your export settings (some of these may be set incorrectly - so you may want to post a picture of those here for inspection).

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

Hmmm... It does seem that all have vertex groups, though I'm not sure so heres a screen shot to make sure

And of course my export settings, that I havent touched (I think)

I'm a bit confused now... It cant be something to do with textures? they DO appear right in nifskope....

[Artisanix]

Nope, on these pictures you've just posted no any vertex groups are present.

Just look at the very first picture you posted in this thread, you should notice that under Vertex Group label there's one bone listed as Bip01 Spine2, so this means that one of selected objects has been skinned to that bone. And on your latest pictures there's no such thing at all. So, can you post picture with your import settings then?

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

Hmm, thats interesting.... So, if a vertex group WAS present in the first image, should the armor not have shown up, even just a little?

These are also untouched by me... I notice that it says "if skinning fails with default settings..." Whats that about?

Thanks btw for being so patient

[Artisanix]

There's nothing particularly wrong with your settings, so you should make a test - open blender with blank project and try to import any of the armors, and see whether vertex groups for any part of that armor are present (but remember that you need to select that part of the object with right click to have vertex group displayed for it).

The only difference I can spot between your and mine settings is the version of NifScripts - I use older 2.5.4.

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

-takes a look at the default armor-

Ahem.

So, thats what all those floaty black lines were for

Ooooooh, god, I am a fool

Right, for my next trick, I shall repeat what I did WITHOUT deleting the floaty black lines... at least the ones involved with the parts I'm using.

Oooh, but hangon!

You say in my first screen it did have at least one vertex group... do I need ALL the vertex groups there for any of it to work? because there was just NOTHING on the character...

Also, lets say I want to take the deadric pouldren and stick it onto the dark brotherhood armour and attach it to it's skeleton- how do I do that? Maybe its in a tutorial around here somehwere....

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

Yet another issue here guys... :l

Well, I started from scratch and built a new design in Blender, then inported the meshes one by one in nifskope, retextured everything, and generrally worked my arse off. To result... almost all of it is invible. I go back, realise I hadnt parented the bones to the armor, and so went about doing that (I did this by selecting one piece of the armor, then shift clicking the skeleton so both were selected, then ctrl+P, armature, name groups) as instructed by one of the tuts insanity posted.

So then I open it up in the CS annnnnnnd....

Now stop me if I am wrong, but are his fingers and legs not looking a little scew-wiff there?

What on EARTH has gone on here???? I'm very tired right now so I can't think wether this is important or not, but every peice of armor is attached to every vertex group...

Haha, hopefully someone can set me straight here... I'm pretty impressed with what I managed with texturing/re-hashing meshes, and it would be good to just fix up whatever attrocities I have commited onto the skeleton and use this mesh for my project....

Thankyou all for your help and patience, (and links!) I would still be figuring out how to inport .nifs if it werent for you guys!!!

Mysterious Mr. Bear

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

I have things working again now... In the end, to sidestep whatever I did wrong, I rebuilt it all from scratch, and this time didn't choose "name groups" when parenting the objects to the skeleton. I then exported each piece of the armor individually and placed them on my brown textured dark brotherhood armor in nifskope using copy branch. I think the issue WAS with vertex groups.

Hopefully someone reading this will loose a few hours of hassel

Hopefully thats the last of the problems, thanks again everyone for tips and links

Mysterious Mr. Bear

Edited December 28, 2010 by Mysterious Mr. Bear