Skyrim armour bodyweights

[ResolveThatChord]

So, poking around the BSAs, I've noticed that all armour and body parts (with the glaring exception of the head) have seperate lightweight and heavyweight nifs. I'm curious to know exactly how it works, and more importantly how to make it work for my own models, but my question is this: will we always have to make two models, with the same triangle count, different vertex weights, but identical texture spaces? And if so, what methods can we use to make this easier on ourselves?

Obviously, we could model, skin and texture one of the two first, then rearrange the vertices to make the other. This would be time consuming.

I've thought of a tool that could help. I could create an armature for one of the two bodies, then scale and translate the bones so that one body is warped to approximate the other, and save this state as a separate keyframe (I think the in game body slider would work something like this). Then by auto-weighting our custom armour to the armature, we can use the keyframes to deform it to closely match the other body weight, which could minimise the amount of tedious re-modelling.

Does anyone have any ideas? And if I made this armature, would anyone be interested in having it uploaded as a modder's resource?

[Rowan]

I think I know enough about blender to know what you're talking about, but I haven't worked with any of the armor meshes yet so I don't have any additional ideas. What you said about the armature seems like it's a good solution. I would definitely use a modder's resource like that!

Edited January 18, 2012 by Rowan

[_echo]

Could you provide an example light and heavy weight armor? I cant find any.

[ResolveThatChord]

Could you provide an example light and heavy weight armor? I cant find any.

Certainly. As far as I can see, this applies to all items of clothing and armour (except shields) and all body parts (except the head). So for example we can go into the "Skyrim - Meshes.bsa" and go meshes > clothes > chef > f, and we can see there are two nifs for everything, each suffixed with "_0" or "_1", meaning minimum bodyweight or maximum bodyweight respectively. So we have a "chefhat_0.nif" and a "chefhat_1.nif".

[_echo]

Im seeing little to no real difference between the models. So I cant imagine body weight being an issue unless you are making a specific body weight armor.

[ResolveThatChord]

Not at all! If you look at the medium fur armour, for example, the difference is pretty huge; one is approaching emaciated, the other is a steroids ad model. In anycase, I suspect it may be completely neccessary to make both versions.

[_echo]

Or you could go for an inbetween size. Why make more work for yourself? But meh, thats your choice.

Personally, if it looks good as is, why bother with a second?

[ResolveThatChord]

...At character creation, you're given a slider that determines your body weight. Some people want to be muscular, or skinny, to a certain degree. Every single vanilla set of armour or clothing accommodates this choice. This is achieved by creating two nifs, one for minimum bodyweight, and one for maximum bodyweight. Through some system, having these two models allows you to pick anything in between; for example, if I wanted a medium build, then my character's body, armour and clothing models will have a medium build, by averaging the positions of corresponding vertices in the two models, or something.

If we build only one model, then we eliminate the player's choice of body type. This is unacceptable. Am I not making sense? You're making me feel like I've missed something obvious, but I cannot see what you're trying to say. Seriously, if this can be achieved with only on model, then great. But how?