Creating Skyrim Armor in Blender Tutorial Series

[Zquad1]

Sorry Zquad1 if I confused you.

alurict is correct, in a way. It entirely depends on the design of your gloves. Start with the hand mesh only. If your gloves go up the forearm, then import the body mesh to size around the arm. That's all you'll need it for, delete it after fitting. Use the hand mesh to do the bone weight copy to your gloves, then import a fresh hand mesh skeleton to rig it.

Be careful with your partitioning. If the gloves only fit the hands then that's fine, you'll only need one partition for the whole thing. If the gloves go up the arms, you'll need two partitions - the hands and forearms. In Blender, call the hands partition BP_RIGHTARM2 and call the forearms partition BP_RIGHTARM. See the skin partitioning section Part 4 Step 4 to help you with these vertex groups. In NifSkope change that to SBP_33_Hands and SBP_34_Forearms (remember the reference table).

As for the feet issue, I'm not surprised. Any of the body mods out there have better feet meshes than vanilla (more polys, more detail) so that's the difference in file size.

 

 Hanaisse & Alurict........ You are AWESOME!!!!  I'll give that a try, I had done it that way before & I even gave the Gloves the Hand & forearm Slots in the CK, But it still didn't come out looking right. But I'll check the Partitions out I haven't really messed with that before, so I'll look at your tutorial a little more closely because there are more gloves that go up the arm then the ones that don't so that's something I must learn, & that gives me some other ideas to experiment with...

 

& I seriously thank you from the bottom of my heart for lending me your expertise on this. I can't thank you enough.

 

oh & for the feet I mean the Femalefeet_0.nif is 249kb & the  Femalefeet_1.nif is 245kb

Edited March 30, 2014 by Zquad1

[Zquad1]

Hanaisse Oh my Gosh Thank you soo much that worked like a charm I haven't tried the Partitioning yet but I did a couple gloves that cover the hands & WOW I am sooooo happy now I can complete some armors I have been converting.

 

Is what I did was Import the Original Gloves, Delete the Skeleton, & Deleted The Hand Mesh, Imported the Hand Mesh from the 7Base Body I am using, Delete the Skeleton again, Form fit the Glove to the New Hand, add the UV Maps, Then added Textures to the UVMaps, then deleted the Vertex groups for the Glove, but not the Hand, Then I did the Bone weight Copy, then Imported the Hand Skeleton, then Exported the mesh into a .nif & it worked great.

 

You are the Best!!!!

[Hanaisse]

Glad to help.

[AnaCostia]

Hello, I found this tutorial and I wanted to say it's very very complete and easy to follow, congratulations and thank you!

 

I used to make little works with meshes in previous games so essentially I just needed to understand the differences with Skyrim and... wow, how many things to set in nifskope

While I was reading around I stepped on another tutorial too and some things were different. Fact is, following the tutorial on this site I managed to do my mesh, following that other one I didn't manage it, I only can assume these things I missed were important.

 

I'd love to ask, if it's not a big problem, about some of these differencies, to let me understand better.

- Is it necessary changing dismember partition in nifskope from BP_TORSO to SBP_32_BODY? Is it because Skyrim doesn't understand "BP_TORSO" string?

- Stripify Geometries, some like it, some hate it. What's the deal?

- Shaders / Has Normals / Num UV Sets: when I'm confused, I just copy parameters from another model. Comparing different armors of different mod authors, I find discrepancies, even on a simple thing like Body - Has Normals - No (sometimes find Yes, others I find No). Is there some documentation that all these parameters? I dug a little on Google and all I find often is "do this, flag that, set in this way" without explanations on meanings, so I can't understand why other armors have different parameters but it would be really useful for me for future works... So for example that tutorial on the other side wasn't flagging "Skinned", in an armor I took as example Skinned was flagged both in the armor and the body, in my past I used to flag Skinned and also Facegen for body, etc.etc.

 

I wish everyone a very good day and thank you again for this tutorial

[Hanaisse]

Hello, and thank you. I'm glad you found it useful.

 

You've raised some good questions, and I will try to answer to the best of my knowledge. Of course, I can't answer why other tutorials are what they are. I can speculate that perhaps they were written before anyone really understood all the aspects of Skyrim meshes. It took me some time to piece together the specifics used in this tutorial, along with trial and error. But mostly I gathered all my information by dissecting existing meshes.

 

1) Yes, it is very necessary to change partitions from BP_XXXX to SBP_XXXX. BP is old Fallout naming convention. SBP is new Skyrim naming convention - Skyrim Body Part. Blender cannot yet export meshes with SBP named partitions but the Niftools folks are working on it.

 

2) Stripify geometries has its uses, but is not necessary. Back in Oblivion it used to be the norm to use NiTriStrips and rarely use NiTriShapes. Skyrim (again, by studying existing meshes) likes to use NiTriShapes. A NiTriStrip is a "shape" node organized in strips of triangles, so same thing just broken down more. I assume Skyrim's optimized engine can now handle the better NiTriShapes.

 

3) This might take a bit of explaining, and is somewhat explained in Part 5 of the tutorial.

First rule;
- Any "skin" of an armor/clothing mesh must always be set with Num UV sets = 1 and Has Normals = no. This is because skin uses Model Space Normals (as opposed to UV normals) and an exterior specular map (the _s.dds texture file). This also makes the shader flag SLSF1_Model_Space_Normals a requirement.
- Any "armor/clothing" is set normally as Num UV Sets = 4097 and Has Normals = yes. These pieces of a mesh use UV normals. When I say 'set normally' this means that all meshes - clutter, architecture, landscape - use these settings. Now, why 4097 you might ask? I have no idea, lol. This was the value discovered when Skyrim meshes were decoded.

Second rule;
- Any mesh that is to be worn in game requires the Shader Flag SLSF1_Skinned. Period. If it's not set, then the object will not be worn. This is a common error when people make clothing and wonder why their mesh is "invisible" when worn. It's not invisible, the game just doesn't know it's a wearable object. Every NiTriShape of a mesh requires this shader flag.

Third rule;
- Back to discussing "skin" parts of a mesh. Skin requires the Shader Type to be set as Skin Tint, to tell the game how to interpret the shader. Additionally, these parts also require the SLSF1_FaceGen_RGB_Tint shader flag to tell the game that this part can also use the different skin tint textures. If not set, then you'll probably find odd discolouration in game.

There is no general documentation on this, which is why I put together the tutorial in the first place. You can find some explanations within NifSkope itself, it has help file popups when you hover over anything. Try hovering over Shader Flags to see what most of them mean. As I said earlier, I gathered all this information by examing in detail existing Skyrim meshes. When in doubt, look up a similar type mesh that you are making and basically try to copy it (another tip I tried to point out in the tutorial).

I hope this helps.

[AnaCostia]

Thank you very much for the great explanation, I pinned this page on my preferred, on the browser. It's definetely too much important.

 

And regarding rule II, I already noticed that on Fallout, I just found quite ... "peculiar" that some tutorials forget to specify that since it's too much important. You know, if there was some "Official guide", I could simply stick to that and think "this is wrong, the official guide says to do in this way". But when there isn't something like that, all I can do is assuming... and my sixth sense often leads me to make wrong

 

Again, thank you very much

Edited May 7, 2014 by AnaCostia

[Renix]

So I've finally decided to delve into modding and lo-and-behold this is what I decided to start with. I got fairly far without much of a fuss but something was messed up along the way.

 

I made it as far as the CK, but the entire torso of my armor won't show up. The skin parts are fine, the armor has an issue, though. I'm assuming it's something I did wrong in the last Nifskope section. For starters - the Torso section itself doesn't have a BSDismemberedSkinInstance part of it. At first I thought that was the way it was supposed to be, but looking over the screenshots and other tutorials I see there are two instances of BSDismemberedSkinInstances, one under the Body and one for the Armor. I thought this was an issue with how I did the exporting steps in Blender, specifically the Vertex groups for skin partitions, but I redid it a few times making extra sure I didn't miss any of it and it still won't transfer over to Nifskope. 

 

Other than that there were a few discrepancies between what my nif imported to Nifskope and what you had in the tutorial, but nothing that caused issues or I couldn't fix myself. 

 

Anywho, I think I've described it well enough, it seems like a basic enough issue, but I can't find anything through google or otherwise to figure out what's gone wrong. I tried to copy an existing BSDismembered bit from an existing vanilla mesh, but obviously that didn't work because of the existing partitions that didn't match up. Any tips would be fantastic or let me know if any additional information is needed.

[Hanaisse]

Post a pic of your Blender export settings. Make sure you didn't miss the Export Dismember Body Parts option on the far right side.

[Renix]

Linkage

 

Pretty sure that's how they were, I don't think I've touched anything since then. It exported the one under the Male body nif, but not the armor. I used the selectall key when exporting so I doubt it was me derping on the selection when I exported it either.

 

Thanks by the way.

Also A+ on the response time. I like you.

 

Edit: An typo.

Edited June 10, 2014 by Renix

[Hanaisse]

Ok, nothing wrong there. Would it be possible for me to look at your .blend file and your exported .nif files? You can PM them to me.

[Renix]

Can do. I did it a few times and moved around the texture and mesh files a bit so here's to hoping I get the right ones, if there's any problems let me know. I'll PM them in just a minute.

[Hanaisse]

Ok, I've looked over your blend file. Your rigging is bad, and needs to be redone. (Part 4, Step 5)

 

The armor part is not rigged to the skeleton at all. Remember to select ALL objects before importing the skeleton.

Also, the skeleton is dirty (see the second pic under Part 4, Step 5).

 

Otherwise, it looks good. You don't actually need the BP_Torso partition on the "skin" part, since only the arms are showing. So just partition them all together under BP_Rightarm.

 

You should be able to clean all this up with this blend file. Just delete your skeleton, re-save, and do the trick of opening, saving, closing the file several times before trying to import a new skeleton.

[Renix]

Ok, I've looked over your blend file. Your rigging is bad, and needs to be redone. (Part 4, Step 5)

 

The armor part is not rigged to the skeleton at all. Remember to select ALL objects before importing the skeleton.

Also, the skeleton is dirty (see the second pic under Part 4, Step 5).

 

Otherwise, it looks good. You don't actually need the BP_Torso partition on the "skin" part, since only the arms are showing. So just partition them all together under BP_Rightarm.

 

You should be able to clean all this up with this blend file. Just delete your skeleton, re-save, and do the trick of opening, saving, closing the file several times before trying to import a new skeleton.

 

Alright, excellent. I was actually having a huge amount of trouble getting a clean skeleton, I tried a whole bunch of different things trying to get it to clear (I actually hadn't found your little blurb on opening and saving it in between attempts) but basically I was so focused on seeing the .nif.01 on the toolbar across the top that I think I completely missed the .nif.001 down below and I thought I finally got it.

 

About rigging the skeleton to the armor part - how exactly do you see this? I thought I was being fairly meticulous about selecting everything before importing the skeleton, apparently not. Is there a way to rig it manually?

[Hanaisse]

Just do a select all "A" so that everything is highlighted first.

[Renix]

I was making sure I did that, I must have messed it up on this one. Hrm.

 

I got the skeleton clean for sure now, so we'll see how it works here in a little while after I noodle through this again. Thanks for all the help, I'm shocked you're still around managing this age-old tutorial. The internet needs more individuals like yourself. 

[Renix]

Welp. That did it. I spent a few hours sifting through nifskope, certain that I couldn't possibly have mucked it up in Blender, yet that was the problem the whole time. Figures, I suppose. Ah, well, perhaps now I can make a bit of progress and get a few steps closer to making a mod. Thanks again for the help. 

 

Now that I think about it, I think I was obsessing over highlighting everything when I went to export the file, not when I was importing the skeleton. Well, damn, hah.

[Hanaisse]

Wonderful, glad it worked and I'm always happy to help.

[Colev0]

Complete greenhorn, here.

 

I've been having trouble getting UV map data to properly show up in NifSkope after exporting my finished .nif from Blender. I'm nearly certain that it's because I'm editing an existing creature model, wolf.nif, which has no skin partitions assigned to it (that it uses in-game, anyway). Would this be what's skewing the UV map data, or is there another common mistake I could be making during the import -export process? Was I wrong/foolhardy to use this tutorial for editing a creature model in the first place? Any assistance would appreciated (even if it's to point out a lost cause ).

[Hanaisse]

Creature models can be difficult when it comes to skinning/rigging, but the same principles apply.

 

When you say "to properly show up", do you mean there's no UV data at all or something else?

Did you assign a material and texture to it in Blender? Does the UV mapping look fine in Blender?

The wolf.nif only uses NiSkinInstance and not BSDismemberBodyParts, so just uncheck the "Export Dismember Body Parts" when exporting.

[Colev0]

Sorry about the lack of clarity, I just really didn't know which problem to bring up first.

 

When I finished UV mapping meshes, applying textures, etc., I exported the enitre model as a .nif, attempted to make the appropriate adjustments in NifSkope, and part way through noticed that the UV map data was missing, with all points mapped at (0,0). The new model was also lacking tangents and bitangents, which were present in the original model, and had a different number of vertices.

 

I tried to find a workaround by exporting each mesh on the model as a .3DS and importing them into a separate instance of NifSkope. UV map data was present, but when I tried to copy the NiTriShapes for the meshes into the instance containing the un-UV mapped model, the UV map was skewed in the process. 

 

Trying to import the meshes as .obj had the same result, though I think something bad would've happened regardless.

 

I made sure to uncheck the body parts option on export and try most of these things again before posting. No luck: the UV map data staunchly refuses to cooperate in NifSkope.

 

Thanks for the quick response; if there's still more tips to give, I'd be glad to hear them. At any rate, I think the problem might be related to what I've tried to do with the model in Blender. I'm gonna continue to fiddle around with it, perhaps scale back the changes I made. Wish me luck, and thanks again!

[Hanaisse]

I'm out of tips, guessing can only go so far.

 

Could you post pics of what your UV map looks like in Blender and what the result in NifSkope is?

[Colev0]

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/gallery/image/29352-nifskope/

 

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/gallery/image/29351-uv-map-wolf/

 

...Here they are. Does anything stand out? It probably warrants mentioning that the vertices corresponding to the torso, legs, and tail on both sides overlap on the UV map. Could that be a problem?

[Hanaisse]

No, overlapping UV's are not a problem. From what I see, everything in Blender looks fine, however, in Nifskope it's obvious the UV map is not exporting. Notice the line Has Normals saying no ... that should be a yes and you should have Tangents and Bitangents.

 

You have me stumped as to why it's not exporting. Are you using the proper latest supported version of NifScripts (2.5.9) ?

 

The mesh also doesn't seem to be rigged to anything. It says there's an armature modifier, but it's not named.

[Colev0]

Egh. Nothing doing on my end. I tried to reinstall Blender, NifSkope, PYFFI, the works. Same stubborn UV data.

 

I did manage to get it to appear in NifSkope once, albeit without tangents and bitangents. Also, the wolf's teeth appeared to have no texture applied to them, even though they appeared to be mapped correctly in NifSkope. The model was see-through in some places, too: something wrong with the shaders, perhaps? Anywho, I think this "project" may be out of my league at the moment. I'm gonna go back to modifying textures and see if I can't come back to it when I'm fresh. Thanks once again for the help, though; I had fun!

[Hanaisse]

You can send me a PM with your .blend file and I'll take a closer look, if you'd like.