[SKY] Insanity's lanterns and flames

[BrettM]

Newbie (very!) modder here trying to figure out how to properly add flames to Insanity's beautiful lanterns. Tools are Nifskope and the CK. I'm not after a lantern I can carry or anything. Just a static lantern using Insanity's skin.

 

For my first attempt, I carefully went through the lantern nif and restructured all the nodes and redid the string index so all the names and node positions matched vanilla CandleLanternWithCandle01. Then I copied over the controller block from the vanilla nif. Voila! Wonderful working lanterns!

 

Well, almost. If you approach the wonderful working lanterns from the side or back, the flames do not appear until you practically have your nose pressed against them. The distance varies slightly depending on one's angle of approach. The glass seems to somehow confuse the animation, since everything is fine if I simply remove the glass branch from the nif, leaving just the frame and the candles. Flames are then visible from the same distance as the vanilla lanterns at any angle. What needs to be done to make the controller and glass happy with each other?

 

I pulled the same trick on the hanging paper lanterns, but it seems rather irrelevant for those. The glow effect of the candles is only (barely) visible from where you can see the bottom of the lanterns. The paper, sadly, does not seem affected and looks like the unlit versions. Unless I'm doing something wrong with these, as well, which is always a distinct possibility. Still, I think these might be better if they just used a glow map like the framed paper lanterns.

 

Anybody have a hint for me?

 

Brett

 

[WillieSea]

As far as I know, its always been a known limitation of the game engine that you cannot get two transparent layers to work very well together, the second one usually turns invisible except at certain angles.

 

The glass and the flames are both transparent layers.

[Tamira]

I solved the problem by replacing the BSLightingShaderProperty with that of the glass of one of the vanilla bugs in a jar (adjusted the paths to the correct .dds and _n.dds of course).

I don't know which of the values is responsible for this, but it works, the flames now are visible from all sides.

[BrettM]

Thank you both for the information. It's good to know that I was on the right track in identifying the glass as the problem, and I now have another bit of knowledge about the limitations of the game engine. At this rate I may turn into a real modder one of these days.