Zero Two Pilot Suit (WIP)

[Horkerkiiin]

Hi Guys,

So I've weighted everything but I'm having trouble exporting this outfit from Blender, I'm using 2.79 with the Niftools add on (Which is currently in pre alpha but looking around it does not look like this has been worked on in AGES so not sure if it will ever get updated again) and when I try to export my outfit I get this error

 

 

I have no idea what the issue is and I'm stumped, I remember running into this issue last time I tried to export but for the life of me I cannot remember how I got around this. I've seen some people say they export as an OBJ file instead and import the outfit into outfit studio and then export from there as a nif, but if I do this Outfit studio says my model is not weighted but it most certainly is. I'm completely lost, does anyone have any ideas at all?

[grond]

The only thing I can think of is to export as OBJ, import into the old Blender, and after checking things in there exporting as NIF. 

[vometia]

Export to an obj and use BodySlide/Outfit Studio to do all the rigging and other assorted gubbins.  Although by no means an expert, I'm happy to advise based on my own experiences either here or by PM.

Edit: sorry, didn't quite read your post properly (sadly, this is not a first for me!) but normally I copy from a suitable reference in OS before exporting as a NIF and only use NifSkope for any final tidying.

Edited May 30, 2018 by vometia

[Horkerkiiin]

3 hours ago, vometia said:

Export to an obj and use BodySlide/Outfit Studio to do all the rigging and other assorted gubbins.  Although by no means an expert, I'm happy to advise based on my own experiences either here or by PM.

Edit: sorry, didn't quite read your post properly (sadly, this is not a first for me!) but normally I copy from a suitable reference in OS before exporting as a NIF and only use NifSkope for any final tidying.

 

Thanks for the response, I've been looking around and exporting from blender as an OBJ to Outfit studio seems to be the way to go, however I did try this and failed. When you export an outfit from blender as an obj do you export it with an attached skeleton? I understand in outfit studio I will need to do weights in there instead it seems but from what I've read you can copy weights like you can in blender? then export as nif and sort texture files etc out in nifskope?

 

Thanks for your time and help Vometia!

[vometia]

Yeah, just export it as a basic obj from Blender: you don't need to do anything else with it, just the mesh and UV map.  I seem to recall it's much more straightforward if it's done as a single mesh, too.

At that point you can import it into Outfit Studio and load a reference.  For something that's basically human-shaped, the standard body as a reference will be ideal.  I usually use a distance of 0 when doing a bone weight copy which I presume does a sort of "best guess": I never checked officially, but it always seemed to end up with the best weights for my models.  Anything that requires physics or something that's significantly outside the bounds of a human body shape will require some advanced techniques such as masking and multiple references but I'm guessing you probably don't need to worry about that sort of stuff.

You can also assign the textures while you're in Outfit Studio, which is reasonably straightforward: just make sure for any special types e.g. skin you select the correct one from the drop down.  It may require a little tidying up in NifSkope, but I usually do any final bits with the game loaded up: if I want to change something, the usual trio of player.unequipitem, pcb and player.equipitem is a quick and easy way of reloading it to check that the changes have properly taken effect.  I can go into more detail as required but hopefully that's enough to point you in the right direction.

[vometia]

Oh, and I assume you've already done this, but also load up the body reference in OS, export it as an obj and load that into Blender to make sure that your model conforms to it properly.  Unlike Oblivion etc, the model will be horizontal rather than vertical which I found took a bit of getting used to.

Edited May 30, 2018 by vometia

[Horkerkiiin]

3 hours ago, vometia said:

Oh, and I assume you've already done this, but also load up the body reference in OS, export it as an obj and load that into Blender to make sure that your model conforms to it properly.  Unlike Oblivion etc, the model will be horizontal rather than vertical which I found took a bit of getting used to.

Thank you again for the reply's, I will give this a try tomorrow night and hopefully it will work. I'm apprehensive about the weights as I KNOW I will need to do some manual weight adjusting especially with the headgear bit otherwise that is going to move all over the place and it shouldn't.

 

On this note I have just realized I have not posted any pictures of my finished model have I, I have attached them if anyone wants to see them.

 

 

 

I wanted to spoiler tag these so they dont take up a bunch of the page but for some reason I cannot figure out how to put spoiler tags in its in some really obvious place and I'm just looking over it arnt I?

Edited May 30, 2018 by Horkerkiiin

[grond]

You have to add the spoiler tags manually; as far as I can see there's no more spoiler button. How very 20th century of us.

Hope you work out your problem, the model looks great

[vometia]

Awesome.

I've just realised there will be a couple of minor complications with the weighting, though absolutely nothing insurmountable.  One is that you're doing to have to rig the gloves separately: you can either mask them so they don't take on the weights from the body reference, then invert the mask and do a second copy loading the hands (or another glove model) as the reference; or to separate them and have them as a different model.  Probably best to look at the other outfits in the game to see which approach suits you best.

The other is that you'll probably have to do some manual tidying of the collar thingy: I must admit I absolutely loathe manual weight-painting but your mileage may vary and you'll very likely be better at it than I am.

And have you experimented with the material editor at all?  It has a lot of options but fortunately it's fairly straightforward and gets most of the texture-related configuration out of the NIF.

[Horkerkiiin]

14 hours ago, vometia said:

Awesome.

I've just realised there will be a couple of minor complications with the weighting, though absolutely nothing insurmountable.  One is that you're doing to have to rig the gloves separately: you can either mask them so they don't take on the weights from the body reference, then invert the mask and do a second copy loading the hands (or another glove model) as the reference; or to separate them and have them as a different model.  Probably best to look at the other outfits in the game to see which approach suits you best.

The other is that you'll probably have to do some manual tidying of the collar thingy: I must admit I absolutely loathe manual weight-painting but your mileage may vary and you'll very likely be better at it than I am.

And have you experimented with the material editor at all?  It has a lot of options but fortunately it's fairly straightforward and gets most of the texture-related configuration out of the NIF.

Sorry Vom,

 

I've been trying to go OBJ to outfit studio and this isnt working either however I am 100% sure its something im doing or have done wrong.

 

I took a body through OS like you said so I can reference my outfit correctly in Blender (Required me to rotate it and then scale it down... a lot) Then exported from Blender as an OBJ with these settings

 

 

I removed any weights I had previously set up and exported ONLY 1 thing no skeleton, I just tried the bodysuit itself without the add on bits.

OS was a bit fiddly to get the weights copied from my target but I think I got there in the end, I was able to go down the bones list and it highlighted the weights on my bodysuit, I exported this as a NIF and wanted to open it up in Nifskope to see how that was and now I'm met with a flood of errors and my bodysuit does not show up in nifskope now errors I get are in this order -

 

Sorry for the en masse of images

 

I dont know if you are able to shed any light on this at all?

 

Thanks so much for your help

[vometia]

I've seen that message before, but can't quite remember what caused it.  The good news is that whatever it was, I worked past it, and I am "that person" who usually manages to make a mess of it!  I'll spend a bit of time looking at what I did later today to refresh my memory: it's been a few months since I've done any modelling so I really need to get back up to speed.

If we can't figure it out on the forum (sadly, I am not awesome at explaining things: so many of my friends are teachers, a job I am eminently ill-suited for) you could send me the blend file and I'll try shouting at it for you, and document what I do with screenshots for future reference.

[vometia]

Just had a quick look: seems your export settings are the same as mine except that I also tick "selection only" which conceivably could be the significant bit: not sure, though, I think previously when I've forgotten to tick that it just imports a whole bunch of stuff.

From there, importing it into Outfit Studio should give you something like the following.  I mean in the spoiler tags!

 

[vometia]

Oh, it just occurred to me, which version of NifSkope are you using?  Mine is 2.0.0-pre-alpha-6.  I dare say there are newer versions by now but anything significantly older will probably not properly understand the format.

Edit: oops, says in the title bar of your screenies, 2.0.0.pre-alpha-4, so it's probably not that either; though it may still be worth updating just to be on the safe side.

Edited June 1, 2018 by vometia

[Horkerkiiin]

1 hour ago, vometia said:

Oh, it just occurred to me, which version of NifSkope are you using?  Mine is 2.0.0-pre-alpha-6.  I dare say there are newer versions by now but anything significantly older will probably not properly understand the format.

Edit: oops, says in the title bar of your screenies, 2.0.0.pre-alpha-4, so it's probably not that either; though it may still be worth updating just to be on the safe side.

I can get the armour into OS and weight it, or at least copy the weights 

 

Is it because I'm not assigning a texture in OS? That's the only thing I didn't do as I usually sort them in nifskope. But the errors kind of lead me to believe that it's an issue with my actual model? 

[vometia]

That shouldn't be the case: I just did a test import and export when I did those screenies earlier and NifSkope seemed quite happy even with no texture/material being assigned.  I also assume you're using a recent version of Outfit Studio?

[Horkerkiiin]

4 hours ago, vometia said:

That shouldn't be the case: I just did a test import and export when I did those screenies earlier and NifSkope seemed quite happy even with no texture/material being assigned.  I also assume you're using a recent version of Outfit Studio?

I'm at work currently but can check when I get home in a few hours, pretty sure I'm using the most recent version.

 

Is there any absolute must I shouldn or shouldn't be doing in blender before export? I've turned the mesh into tris but that's really the only must do thing I can think of. 

[vometia]

Not that I'm aware of.  In my case I didn't do anything special at all: I started off loading the "donor" model into OS, exporting the obj, importing it into Blender with the default options and doing whatever was required to rework it; exported again using the default options as we both detailed in our respective screenshots, imported into OS to transfer weights and finally exported it to a NIF.  All of them just using very standard, basic options so I'm at a bit of a loss.

There's the other option I mentioned which is if you want to send me the blend file (and absolutely no pressure, I fully understand if you're less than keen to send your work to other people) to see if I can get it into a NIF successfully so we can try to see if we can home in on what's causing the problem.

Alternatively you could try the LoversLab forum (which I hope is okay to mention since it hosts some nsfw stuff) which has more in-depth discussion from people who are much more familiar with OS and the other tools.

[Horkerkiiin]

So I got it into Nifskope without breaking it! finally!

 

 

Think I figured out what my issue was, I was using the wrong thing for weight copying and so it was screwing up the mesh which was then in turn breaking nifskope.

 

Now, the CK does not want to have any of it, when I try to load into the outfit in the CK to create a new armor addon, it breaks the CK. Am I missing some settings in Nifskope that I'm meant to be setting?

 

Its like every step of the process here wants to stop me!

[vometia]

Oh, yeah, that sounds familiar: I had problems with that too.  I think it's to do with materials not being assigned so that'll be the next thing you need to work on.  It looks complicated but really isn't, and if anything is probably easier to deal with than previous Bethsoft games once you've got the hang of it.  ISTR the two things you need to define in the NIF are the material file (the one with the bgsm suffix: just use an existing file as a template in the material editor and substitute your own textures) and something to define the wetness effect.  I apologise for the vagueness, I'm tired and have terrible motion sickness after too much gaming so I'm going to bed and will get back on it tomorrow!

Edit: it's also worth bearing in mind that the CK is extremely fussy and stuff that can crash CK often works perfectly well in the game itself.  I must admit I just used FO4Edit for the most part but it's probably sensible to get it in a state that both FO4 and CK are happy with!

Edited June 1, 2018 by vometia

[Horkerkiiin]

Just now, vometia said:

Oh, yeah, that sounds familiar: I had problems with that too.  I think it's to do with materials not being assigned so that'll be the next thing you need to work on.  It looks complicated but really isn't, and if anything is probably easier to deal with than previous Bethsoft games once you've got the hang of it.  ISTR the two things you need to define in the NIF are the material file (the one with the bgsm suffix: just use an existing file as a template in the material editor and substitute your own textures) and something to define the wetness effect.  I apologise for the vagueness, I'm tired and have terrible motion sickness after too much gaming so I'm going to bed and will get back on it tomorrow!

No worries! Thank you so much for the help so far, Honestly TES Alliance has been the only place I've ever been able to get help with modding, I've asked in other modding places like reddit and the nexus and either everyone doesnt know or they just dont seem to want to help. Except here! With my first mod for Skyrim Grond and Hainaisse where invaluable and helped me so much so I really do appreciate you taking the time to help.

 

Also poking around in nifskope for a bit comparing my suit to the vault suit my suit does not seem to have bones attached to it correctly, BUT I think* I might know why that is.

 

Thank you again! and I hope you feel better soon!

[Horkerkiiin]

I DID IT!

I mean some of my weights are screwed up and the textures didnt work. But I did it. No idea what happened with the textures, I applied a wet material, added the diffuse, normal and specular in nifskope (I just stole the vault suit ones for now) but at least it works, I can weight adjust so that shouldnt be too bad (he says considering weights can be some of the most fickle things going.

 

 

Oh. Also I have no Shadow for some reason.

[vometia]

Yay, awesome!  Congratulations on getting this far.   If you haven't already done so we'll figure out the textures tomorrow but this is really great progress.

[Horkerkiiin]

Not sure how available I will be after work tomorrow, but Im then off Sunday and Monday I want to make a lot of progress this weekend hopefully!

 

My preffered sort of work flow is get it all working in game so that I'm happy with it with weights etc using placeholder textures and then working on my textures so by the end of the weekend I hope to get it to the stage where I'm ready to move on to making my textures.

 

Thanks again so much for your help Vom!

[vometia]

Oh, yeah, I'm much the same: I find it much easier to work interactively than to do all the preparation behind the scenes and have it "just work"!  I've known people who can work effectively like that but I'm not one of them.

And seriously, reviewing your progress, this is all your work: all I've done is provide a little encouragement and moral support but really credit goes to you for figuring out how to get things together.  I agree with you about this site though, I've found people here to be most helpful where others often aren't, and I've been pointed in the right direction and given useful hints and tips several times now, including FO4 modelling itself.

[vometia]

Just had a look at one of my NIFs, and these are the bits you need to be looking at:

Other bits are the Shader Flags: the ones I have set here are Specular, Skinned, Cast Shadows, Own Emit and ZBuffer Test.  "Skyrim Shader Type" I'm not totally sure about, I normally have it set to Environment Map for this type of model.  The flags are different for e.g. human skin but as your model doesn't seem to require that I wouldn't worry about it right now (though I'm happy to go into detail if you want!)  I'm not actually that convinced how important the flags are anyway and I mostly just use them to make sure that stuff shows up properly in NifSkope itself: I think FO4 normally uses the bgsm files for all those settings, at least as I recall.  Apologies for the vagueness, it's been a while since I've experimented!

Things to not bother with: alpha settings, unless your model specifically needs them, and BSShaderTextureSet which you can leave empty: I think it's better not to set this because it can get out of sync with changes to the bgsm file which is just confusing...