De-uglified Armours

[vometia]

I thought I'd have a bash at de-uglying some of the armours that I might've been inclined to use had they not offended my delicate sensibilities. The particular armours I thought I'd target is elven and glass, both of which are as much of a fashion faux pas as wearing paisley alongside tartan. It's just not done. Er, or something. Anyway, silliness aside, I really wasn't keen on the overall look, so I thought I'd give my rudimentary Blender skills another outing now that there's a couple of guides for how to edit Skyrim NIFs. Here's what I've done so far:

The glass armour always seemed the most egregious to me, what with the gigantic shoulder pads, the "third boob" and the weird thing on the breastplate that looks like it'd be more at home on a space-suit as the helmet's air supply. So I reduced the size of them to more sane proportions, with quite a bit of fiddling: first of all, I mucked up the vertices on the "big" mesh so that it turned out a complete mess, so I had to copy the "small" mesh and re-size it by hand, which is always asking for trouble when it comes to clipping. Haven't noticed any problems so far. Bits of it were also missing, though I worked around that by cutting-and-pasting the dismember block from the original file. I don't recommend doing this, as I discovered later...

I remembered to take a "before" picture this time! Sadly, I didn't remember to do it in decent light. Sigh. Anyway, the elven armour may not have three boobs, but it does have an even more insane collar type thing. UKers might know what I'm getting at when I say it would be good for role-playing Harry Hill. But I'm not, and I don't like it, so I reduced it to a more sensible size. I did both types of elven armour, the "light" one being just the same without the fancy pauldrons/epaulettes/whatever and some added buckles.

This one was tricky because I really couldn't get it to show up in game, and attempts to copy the dismember block as with the glass armour resulted in a moan about an incorrect vertex count and then a ctd in game, so I had to actually try to figure it out myself. Again, my solution is probably less than ideal, but I found that using only two partitions and setting the ID of both to 32 (they were originally 32, 34 and 38) caused all the bits of armour to show up. I don't particularly like not understanding what I'm doing and "appears to work" may cause other unexpected problems down the line. But for now... it works.

It took me all afternoon just to do these two, so I'm not sure I'm in a hurry to work on any more; though admittedly most of that time was trying to work out the various problems with the dismember partition IDs. Oh, and I added some nicer shoes as well.

I suspect I should've probably been more ruthless with my customisation, but even with the more subtle changes I think I've improved the look of the armours quite a bit, or at least they're more in line with my personal tastes. I wouldn't say they're really fit for release, but I thought I might as well post what I've been up to!

(Hmm, my character seems to be having quite a bad day from a photogenics perspective: I was more interested in capturing what I'd done with the armours than attempting to pose her a bit more effectively. Oops.)

[darthsloth74]

vometia: I really like the new look you've given to those armours. I prefer your armours to the vanilla ones. Myself I've only exported helmets and swords at present. I was just wondering why Skyrim armour meshes need the dismemberment modifier on everything it seems a little odd considering the game only allows decapitation. I haven't seen any NPC's get chopped into bits like F3 but if it needs it thats fair enough.

[vometia]

Thanks!

I think that the dismember block is perhaps a bit of a misnomer in Skyrim, but rather it seems to control areas of the mesh that are dynamically enabled or disabled depending on how other meshes overlap with them. For example, with footwear, regular shoes only take the place of the mesh for the characters' feet, whereas boots also occupy the space for the lower legs: it would appear that the dismember block deals with switching the relevant components of the mesh in and out depending on what else is equipped so they don't overlap.

Which reminds me, I haven't actually tested that with my updated meshes to see what happens...

[darthsloth74]

Thanks!

I think that the dismember block is perhaps a bit of a misnomer in Skyrim, but rather it seems to control areas of the mesh that are dynamically enabled or disabled depending on how other meshes overlap with them. For example, with footwear, regular shoes only take the place of the mesh for the characters' feet, whereas boots also occupy the space for the lower legs: it would appear that the dismember block deals with switching the relevant components of the mesh in and out depending on what else is equipped so they don't overlap.

Which reminds me, I haven't actually tested that with my updated meshes to see what happens...

vometia: Ok thanks that explains things better. I guess thats the reason why if you wear the wrong boots with the Archmage robes your characters calfs just vanish. I honestly thought it was just down to how an alpha was being used, the dismemberment modifier explains a lot.