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Posted by: throttlekitty May 30 2006, 05:01 AM

A guide on Skinning in blender, by throttlekitty.


In this guide, I will roughly go over the steps needed to get custom armor or clothing rigged up for animation in Oblivon using Blender. I will not be covering how to model anything. There are plenty of tutorials out there, as well as manuals and other mini guides on the topics of various types and methods of modelling, please do not ask about that in this thread, as there are also other threads on that topic.

ps, I'm tired and I suck at writing these things, please point out errors


First up, get blender if you haven't. http://blender3d.org/cms/Home.2.0.html
And the Blender .nif Export Scripts: http://niftools.sourceforge.net/
And Niftools. http://niftools.sourceforge.net/

Secondly, CuteUnit and m4444x have created a working skeleton/bodymesh .nif file ready for use in Blender. Get that here http://www.filefactory.com/?ce9e55

here is another guide on the topic: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Advanced_Tutorials/Advanced_Animation/Guided_tour/Mesh/vg

The skeleton and bodies are Bethesda's, and are the stock Oblivion race. They're already linked and weighted, so you don't need to do that part

The body is present so that you can trim away unneeded sections, should you need to show skin underneath/alongside your custom clothing/armor. Say you modelled a shirt, and need the neck/chest area, and a portion of the forearms.
All that is neccessary here is to delete the body chunks your mesh doesn't need, and trim away clipping or hidden sections of the body.


In blender, import one of the appropriate skeleton files, as well as your new armor. Be sure that you are finished modelling, smoothing, tweaking, sizing, et cetera. This is the Last Stop, any further edits will hork up your vertex weighting.

- Round one, Fight! -

Let's first set up the bones. Right click a bone, In the Edit Panel (F9), Armature, Check X-ray, Stick, and Draw Names. This makes things easier to see.

Now Right click on your new armor and armor pieces (if you have it split), and then Shift-Click a bone, so your armor AND the bones are selected. To parent the bones to your armor, hit CTRL-P, select 'From Armature' and 'Name Groups'

This attaches your mesh to the skeleton, and sets up vertex groups for each bone in the scene, which is our next stop. Right click the mesh only, and enter Edit mode (tab), and look again in the Edit Panel (F9), under Links and materials. There's a slot for Vertex Groups, and it is now filled with bone names. The only thing to do here, is to rename a few.

Bip01 L UpperArmTwist, Bip01 R UpperarmTwist, Bip01 L ForearmTwist, Bip01 R ForearmTwist

These all get truncated, and need to be renamed in the vertex groups panel. Select one, and just edit the name. It may not be necessary if you aren't doing any upper body stuff, but nifskope might complain later on.


Time to weight. Figure out which bones you need. On average, a torso piece will use Pelvis, Spine, Spine1, Spine2, Neck1, and the Clavicles. In my little example, I'm going to set up Spine and Spine1's groups on an imaginary cuirass.

While we're in edit mode for the armor mesh, Select the Bip01 Spine Vertex Group from the list. Now select the vertexes you will need for the spine area, Or just select ALL vertexes, and clean it up later during weight painting. your choice. Now hit Assign. Do a similar process for Spine1.

Leave edit mode, and check that the bones are in pose mode. Select them, and CTRL-TAB if they aren't in pose mode. Then switch back to your mesh, and CTRL-TAB will put the mesh into Weight Paint mode.

Once in weight paint mode, you right click a bone to make it Active, any weight painting done for an active bone assigns weighting to that bone. We just only set up Spine and Spine1, so select one of those, and then select a bone we didn't assign yet. You will see as you cycle through bones, that the Vertex Group will change for bones that we have assigned groups to.

You will see blues fading up to reds. Blue=0, and Red=1 Blue vertexes are not influenced by that bone at all, and red ones are totally affected by that bone's influence. Any point in-between are partial blends. Your goal is to have good blends between bones, so that things will bend and move properly.


The paint menu is pretty straightforward.
Weight 0~1 - Are we erasing or painting?
Opacity 0~1 - well, opacity. good for control.
blahblahblah.

'All Faces' and 'Vertex Dist' may help out in trickier situtations, That part is up to you.

'Wire' is a good option to leave on, remember, we are Vertex painting, so we only paint where Vertexes are .

'Clear' does exactly that, good for when you've wrecked the whole thing and need to start a bone over.

In the 3d view, paint away. Like I've mentioned, getting good blends between most of your bones is paramount. You can always move the bones around temporarily by dragging the right mouse button on one, and clicking it again to cancel your movement. This allows you to see exactly how movement of the bone will be as applied to your mesh.

CuteUnit tells me that weighting to the Twist bones will cause weirdness in animations. I haven't had time to test this yet.

Note, at current, nifskope will complain if you have more than four bones assigned to a single vertex. You can right-click any vertex in the 3d view to see which bones are affecting it, so you can correct this.


Once you're satisfied, let's keep going.


Blender won't export the UVs to .nif if a texture isn't assigned, so do that now, quicklike. Blender in stock will not accept .dds format. Texture Panel (F6) Texture:Add new. Texture Type: Image. Image:Load Image.
Then: Material Panel (F5) Map Input: UV. -done.

If you haven't configured the blender .nif export scripts, do that now. Scripts View> System>Sripts Configuration editor. Select the 'Netimmerse/Gamebryo' from Export list, and edit "nif version" to read 20.0.0.4, then hit apply.


Now, we're ready to export from blender. Make sure all the pieces are in object mode, and select them all. File>Export>Netimmerse/Gamebryo, and save your file.



- Round two, Nifskope enters the match! -

Now we open the .nif into nifskope.

First thing to do, is to right click each trishape, and do Mesh>Update Tangent Space, and Mesh>Make Skin Partition. If your mesh goes wonky, there might be problems with the mesh, and you need to go back to modelling, and re-do the weights. I'm fuzzy on this part. (Don't forget the skin parts, if you included them)

Nifskope may complain that some vertexes have 5 or more weights assigned to a vertex. If this is the case, you'll need to go back to blender, and figure out which ones, and get on that! (remember, shift-click a vertex while in weight painting mode.)


I'm also fuzzy on how the Heirarchy set-up for files created this way. More experimentation is needed in this area, so I'm just offering ideas from this point on.

Blender outputs also set the NiSourceTexture a little funny. Official Meshes have the following set, going down from "Pixel Layout" "6,1,3,1,1" whereas Blender .nifs will use "5,3,2,1,0" The last 0 can cause problems if your texture doesn't have mipmaps, the others should generally be fine. Reset them if you're having problems. If you used the default material in blender, It assigns a NiSpecularProperty, which can be removed if you don't want it. Material will likely need tweaking, and for the Skin parts, change the material's name to Skin, to use the skinshader.

You'll notice that in official meshes, the bones are all free from each other, and connected to the scene root. For blender exports, we have a NiNode with the file name, with the Scene root NiNode attached to that. there are also a lot of extra bones that you probably don't need. Like for a cuirass, you generally don't need fingers or feet bones. Deleting them should be fine.

Personally, I like a clean, and optimized file to ensure that things are running smoothly. On the piece I made, I copied my trishapes over to an existing armor, that had the bones I required, and worked from there.

I'd like some feedback on other methods, and I will be making an attempt to clean up the bone structure from a blender created .nif, as-is. It may also be neccessary to edit the .nif version in the file. If you go View>Block List Options>List, you can access the header, where you can change the version to 20.0.0.5, which Oblivion uses.


Any extra setup here for tricks and effects is up to you.

DISCUSS!

Posted by: RuLZ May 30 2006, 05:38 AM

Your guides are always awesome, thanks for all the things you do !!

Posted by: Anviltonge May 30 2006, 05:39 AM

Excellent...another one bookmarked.

Folks who are just getting started (like me...) need to remember that the order that you click to form a parent-child relationship is child then parent. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on this.

Right click your armor, then shift right click the bone you want to link it to. Hit CTRL-P to link.

That's pretty much the only knowledgeable thing I have to add. Thanks for the wonderful guide, throttlekitty!

Posted by: Olchenna May 30 2006, 05:51 AM

I'm sorry I'm writing it here, but I'm too lazy to search for another thread...
It's about your NifScope Alchemy tutorial. I recently find out interesting thing: you don't need to add glow map to the model in Nifscope at all (and get annoying messages about texture absence) ... game does it all by itself if it can find _g.dds file(the same way as with normal map).

Posted by: CuteUnit May 30 2006, 07:41 AM

Hurray for throttle's documentation of niffy noodlework.


You can also assign verts to a bone by creating a vertex group with the same name as one of the bones in Edit mode on your mesh, then just highlight the verts you want to be assigned to that bone and click Assign. You can also do this in a sectional way to get rock-solid specific weight values on vertexes by adjusting the Weight value within that same vertex group's menu before you click assign.

Remember, weight 1.0 = I'm a happy, mobile vertex and I go where the bone goes! weight 0.1 = "I'em eh lazy vertax I almost dunt move and I talk liek this lolololol buffy is cool"

Like real life, it takes both kinds of vertex and everything in between to make a smoothly bending joint.

If your only interest in this is armor, you're in luck! Since armor is a solid thing, not like meat or cloth, you can usually get away with having the default max weight (1.0) on most of your mesh parts! Around the elbows or knees you can get clean bending by setting your hard armor pieces to 1.0 weight, then making a small band of say 0.8, a small band of 0.5, etc. It's easy enough to do on roughly cylindrical things like elbows and knees.

Cloth can be more picky since you want it to move and stretch rather than stay starchy like one of J-Lo's low cut dresses. Using soft weights for areas works well, try and figure out where your clothing is actually resting ( on females, the weight of the dress is on the shoulders and bosom with things under it being more dangly, in most cases). On those parts you might want to do 1.0 weight to the nearest spine bone.

Try not to weight things in lazy ways, like ... setting a whole shirt or cuirass to the spine bone right between the shoulders. Doing that might look OK when the player or npc is standing still, but if they try to move, your mesh will be crazy with clipping and starch.

A GREAT thing to do is look at how the bodies themselves in my riggable nifs are set up. In weight paint mode if you select a vertex group on the bodies, you can see in a nice rainbow exactly how much that bone influences that piece of the mesh. Think of it like your real skeleton, they're not too differrent! Red = "I am totally with this bone" blue is "this bone is not my scene, I'm either not weighted or I'm weighted to another bone instead"

REMEMBER that vertexes can be part of more than one group! My happy vertex moves with both my shoulder bone, and my upper arm bone. You mostly get this when you're making smooth bends on your player/npc's joints, as always I reccomend looking at how the bethesda nifs do this. It's all in Living Color, and like they said in that song, you ain't no loverboy, you're fierce. Ultimately you should rarely ever have a vertex being moved by more than maybe three bones, and usually not more than two.

Posted by: Aventhorn May 30 2006, 09:07 AM

Copied the tutorial onto a wordpad doc so i can read it when my eyes are less fried lol, btw cuteunit you remind me of someone i talk to in chatrooms with the lolololololol stuff.

She also uses the term dandy as candy *ick*

EDIT: P.S thanks throttlekitty for the tutorial.

Posted by: CuteUnit May 30 2006, 09:37 AM

That's awesome. I usually say "Cool Beans" or "Neato Keen"
I also say " Cool, dude".

Yes I grew up on ninja turtles and the 80s/early 90s.

Posted by: throttlekitty May 30 2006, 10:20 AM

I picked up "Cool Beans" from my mother who, incedentally, can kick your mothers ass.

I also played my first AD&D campaign with my parents!

So, did ANYONE get any sleep this weekend?


I second the motion to check out how other meshes are rigged. It will give you wonderous insight to the nature of the vertex.

Posted by: Mac W May 30 2006, 11:16 AM

Sorry, no can do.

Anyway, this guide will probably be helpful. Looks good.

Posted by: Darknel May 30 2006, 07:06 PM

Great tutorial Throttle. When I eventually get done messing around with morph controllers and other Havok nonsense this'll definately save me some time working all this stuff out for myself.

I was thinking.
I still haven't been able to get Blender to treat an armature as an armature (still just the solid linked objects thing). If Cute, or someone else who knows how to do this would care to spill on the technique then maybe the three of us, and any of the other resident insomniacs around here, could knock up armature nifs for all the rest of the creatures and release them as a modders resource. I think a lot of modders would appreciate riggable horses and some of the other creatures.


- Olchenna -
The thing about glow maps was probably my fault. Sorry. I advised M'Aiq months ago on getting glow to work, but subsequently realised the error and while I've posted before to explain it I didn't really want to change Throttle's wiki entry because it's not mine to change.

Posted by: throttlekitty May 30 2006, 11:13 PM

It's a wiki, and free for all to change. Maybe this week I'll get around to an update to it.

Getting other skeletons sounds like a good idea!

Posted by: Darknel May 30 2006, 11:57 PM

Cool. Don't suppose you've sussed out the technique yet. Over at Niftools Shon suggested flipping all the bone flags to skin affected but it didn't seem to work. Putzed around with a few other possibilities but still a no go.

As to the wiki, I'm always a bit cautious to edit other people's stuff because I know that whilst it's techncally allowed, folk sometimes have their own wierd etiquette about these things. I was actually thinking about trying to pool together all the stuff up there the same way the official tutorials do with an index at the start so people could move from BSA unpacking, to retexturing, to meshing and so forth. I'll have a look at the weekend and try to work out how that's done.

Posted by: Winter May 31 2006, 01:35 AM

Thanks for the guide...looks like I will be going back to blender after all.

Posted by: CuteUnit May 31 2006, 03:07 AM

Process is as follows. Not complex, but it is somewhat labor intensive.

Open relevant skeleton.nif
manually delete all transformcontroller and havok related blocks. The whole thing should turn into just a bunch of NiNodes parented to eachother. Save often because skope liked to crash on me every 5th bone or so.

Open new window in nifskope, open some geometry that references all the bones in that skeleton, copy the nitrishape and it's property blocks with copy branch into the de-havok'd skeleton, parent the geometry to the root node of the skeleton. Probably easy to do this step for creatures.

Save that, try importing it into blender.

Posted by: Darknel May 31 2006, 03:16 AM

Cheers muchly Cute.
I'll give it a go and start working my way through the creatures later this week. If anyone else wants to help with this could you post up here and we can try to work out a scheme for the division of labour and then we'll get all our skellies hosted somewhere.

- edit - just opened the fire atronach skeleton to have a quick look over it. NiTextKey block?! Have a look at some of the string values. Certainly looks like the beginnings of a solution to some of the things I've been trying to work out.

- edit 2 - oh my. And the ghost skeleton too. Gravity and Drag NiNodes (not Havok blocks?)

Posted by: CuteUnit May 31 2006, 03:36 AM

Delete them.

Posted by: eddwills May 31 2006, 04:22 AM

Nice work! Cheers for the tutorial .

Posted by: Darknel May 31 2006, 04:28 AM

Oh yeah. I was deleting them for import to Blender purposes. But then I'm going to play around with them

Posted by: CuteUnit May 31 2006, 04:38 AM

gravity and drag nodes are used for transformcontrollers on some meshes and particles. I'd imagine for the ghost they're used for the smish into a puddle on death thing.

Posted by: Darknel May 31 2006, 05:32 AM

Damn.
So, it turns out that most (all?) creature's heads aren't actually skinned. I tried tricking it by throwing in a human head but I still get a python script error. Anyone got any thoughts?

Posted by: 7hir7een Jun 1 2006, 06:26 AM

Okay, I want to do this for one of Ren's hairs.... And it won't work in game at all, like it just doesn't show up. Any ideas on what to do?

Posted by: Darknel Jun 1 2006, 06:52 AM

Hair meshes aren't skinned.

Posted by: Kyne Jun 1 2006, 07:03 AM

Alright - I'm not exactly up on my 3d modelling jargon

In laymens' terms, does this translate into the capability to turn existing creature meshes into equippable armor/clothing?

If so, perhaps I need to dig around a bit more. Just tried installing nifSkope, though, and it doesn't seem to want to run

KT

Posted by: throttlekitty Jun 1 2006, 10:04 AM

yes, that is one thing you can do

Posted by: Cheeseness Jun 1 2006, 01:46 PM

Bookmarked for later.
If this is as good as it seems, I'm going to be over the moon!

Posted by: eddwills Jun 2 2006, 08:38 AM

Haha, that's one of my quests! I haven't really given away any info on my current project but it's only a sidequest so it wont spoil anything. You get a spell that disguises you as a zombie, and then you have to go and scare some people. I haven't really done the CS work yet, I'm almost finished up in 3dmax and photoshop and then I can finally start sticking everything together .

Posted by: someone1074 Jun 2 2006, 02:45 PM

hm...nope couldn't get this working...everything seemed to go perfectly too, never got an error message or anything. NifSkope read it well enough as well...

there is one thing though, I can't change the version. Even when selecting header in the list view, double clicking the version doesn't let me change it. Now I can change the 'name' above the version to 20.0.0.5 and that works, but not without errors in the CS. (although it still allows it to appear, it shouldn't come up with errors)

anyway when I equip the helmet in oblivion, nothing appears. Just empty space.

Since I hadn't recieved any errors and moving the bones in Blender made the mesh move and warp correctly...I really don't know what happened...I assume it must be the version then.

Can you explain in more detail how to change the actual version from header? since there are technically three blocks that have 20.0.0.4 there.

thanks for the awesome guide though.

Posted by: Sezyrrith Jun 2 2006, 02:53 PM

Instead of changing that .nif into a 20.0.0.5(formats are different in a few blocks, parts you can't change manually as far as I know) load up yours, click File > New Window, and load up a standard bethesda helm. Right click your NiTrishape block and choose 'Copy Branch', then paste the new branch into the bethesda helm .nif. Remember the number assigned to the new trishape block you just pasted in, and go to the NiNode, in the Block Details window choose Children, expand it, and find the old trishape block. In this case it should be extremely easy lol...click the number twice to change it, set it to your new block, then go to the old one and right click, choose 'Remove Branch' and save.

At least, that's how I remember it working...zomg I haven't messed with that in a while! Mighta missed a step or 2 I suppose.

[Edit] Replace 'helm' with whatever type of mesh you're importing. Remember, if you're doing a skinned mesh, it has to have all the bones you're using listed - you can't paste a full body armor into a torso-only piece etc. Unless something's changed, you can't add 3 mesh blocks to a .nif that only had 2, but you can remove one or more.

Posted by: throttlekitty Jun 2 2006, 03:33 PM

A little update from progress today. Partial credit to slavedriver CuteUnit!

Copied a few bones from the Flame Atronach to the human skeleton. mainly the Ponytail, which is used in the FA's wavy Super-Sayajin hair.

Then i copied all the animation .kf files to the human race folder, and renamed the FA's mesh to femaleupperbody.

The plan was a success! My character animated like a flame atronach (for all animations that shared the same name, this was a real quick and lazy job) And had the upper body of one, with my face poking out.

Furthermore, the ponytail animated. There was question as to the idea of all human bones being hard-coded, and only needed references from the .nif files. This is not true But the base human bones do need to be there, but do not have to be in their default locations as defined from the offical skeleton.nif.


In short: With a bit of rigging, we can play non-human races, and rig creatures to play!

w00t

Posted by: someone1074 Jun 2 2006, 04:07 PM

Wow, don't know how I didn't think to try and go over an old helmet after rigging it this way...and I've placed so many editted meshes into the game this way .

still get an error though.

hm...when pasting the new block I get a warning that the version of the file I'm pasting into is different that the file I copied the branch from but I try it anyway.

The new mesh remains at the base of the skeleton, despite the fact that I associated it through the children, as normal.

hm...something that bugs me though...ABOVE the scene root of my new mesh is an unfamiliar ninode with the name of the file I saved the exported .nif with (wolfheadexperiment incidentally)

when I tried placing the trishape into the other mesh, obviously it didn't find this wolfheadexperiment ninode, so I just renamed it to Scene Root (thus having two ni nodes with the name scene roots)

this time I was successful in pasting the branch...but as mentioned above, the new mesh is at the base of the skeleton.

I'll try to mess with a few things...thanks for the help so far though, and kudos for rigging the torso of a monster mesh already.

Posted by: throttlekitty Jun 2 2006, 04:11 PM

All you need to do is link your mesh to the origihnal scene root ninode, and then delete the other ninode that was present for the import.

Posted by: someone1074 Jun 2 2006, 04:19 PM

found another way before I checked back to this topic. I changed the name of the first scene root in the helm I was going to go over to wolfheadexperiment and it popped right into place on import. Afterwards I removed the old helms block and changed the name of wolfheadexperiment to Scene Root just so it would look similar to the other nif files in the game.

but for what u mentioned last, when I import the trishape block only there are no new ninodes imported. Having already linked my mesh to the original scene root ninode what ninode would I have had to delete? I thought I only I had to import the trishape data?

Still I suppose I could use my work around but I was wondering what you meant by that.

EDIT: huh...well...that annoys me...I could have sworn I saved it...in fact I was certain I did...

Well...I can't find the file, and after checking the one the game checks, it is the unaltered .nif...dammit...I had it too...[censored]...

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 2 2006, 07:31 PM

There's nothing stopping you from doing it though. Several hair-anchored items are skinned, Hoods being the cleanest example. The bottom weights to the clavicles and spine.

I rigged one of Ren's hairs imperfectly. Ren's hairs have some strange usage of triangles, and if you imagine trying to bend something all jaggy versus something uniform then that's the exact problem that comes with rigging them.


Still, I got some pretty clean deforms by creating vertex groups for head, neck1, spine1, and spine1 then giving them a little bit of overlapping effect for smoothless.

I got an eyeless male porn star out of it.
http://img301.imageshack.us/my.php?image=eyelessmansaysvidalsassoon6gg.jpg

Posted by: someone1074 Jun 3 2006, 02:59 AM

hm, think I know where I F'ed up. when making parents I must have clicked in the wrong order OR clicked on the wrong bone (I think I may have clicked on scene root instead of the one bone I was supposed to, which would be head).

I'll retry it later I guess, appreciate the help nonetheless.

Posted by: JJMax7 Jun 3 2006, 06:00 AM

Okay, I've messed around with modeling, and finally got something good, IMO, going. I configured the script, and exported the file fine. But I can't do anything with it in NifScope. I tried copying, but it says the data is from 4.0.0.2, even though I changed the version name. The paste always fails. If nothing else, would someone like to help someone new out and texture a file for my mod release (I want to make an alternative to the cowl, that works similarly)

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 3 2006, 08:56 AM

You can PM me your working files if you want, JJmax and I'll take a look. I won't do the work for you ( I want to raise people's bars) but I can tell you what step you're missing and give guidance.

Great place to host files is filefactory.com. Beats rapidshare all to hell.

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 3 2006, 07:33 PM

Crosspost for relevance.

I've created a tutorial documenting every step involved in getting TDA's Witch King helmet out of the modeler and into the game. This tutorial will hopefully clarify the concepts and methods behind good rigging and making meshes that are good FOR rigging. Every step is accompanied by images, and god I hope it helps, because writing tutorials is less fun than doing taxes and takes three times as long

The CS wiki is downright cruel and cumbersome, so if someone else want's to add this data there you're my hero, but for now I've uploaded the entire thing as a gallery on one of my best friend's websites.

http://www.alys.org/gallery/CuteUnits-Rigging-Guide-for-Oblivion

Note that some of the instructions I passed down in this tutorial may directly contradict Throttle's tutorial, but that is because they are birthed out of further experimentation than was possible when TK's tutorial first came out. TK's way also works, I simply feel my way saves more time and is less prone to difficulties and confusion.

Posted by: mmmpld Jun 3 2006, 07:35 PM

The links coming up as is (...s and all).

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 3 2006, 07:54 PM

Fixed it mmmpld. I just noticed that too... dirty link truncation. It should actually go to the guide now.

Posted by: tda Jun 4 2006, 02:50 AM

Bump because people need to see this and get working on their own new armours!

Posted by: periplaneta Jun 4 2006, 06:03 AM

Greetings all!

This is really addressed to Ms. CuteUnit, author of the excellent (and amusing) "Rigging Cutely" tutorial. But if anyone else knows the answer, please feel free!

What is the function of the tiny Bip01 NonAccum bone in the import-ready nifs? (It's a child of Bip01 and parent of Bip01 Pelvis).

It's not present in the regular nif files so can it be deleted safely? (after Bip01 Pelvis is made child of Bip01 of course) Or does it have some essential function? And if so, how do we deal with it when following the tutorial?

Thanks for all your efforts and for your help.

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 4 2006, 07:19 AM

You can safely ignore it. I believe it's there as an animation helper, NonAccum likely indicating that it's not subject ti inverse kinesthetics from other bones, or perhaps doesn't impact those bones when it's moved. You'll never weight to it, and if you follow my rigging method you'll never run the risk of weighting to it by accident.

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 4 2006, 08:28 PM

Crosspost for relevance.

I spent some time working on Rigging one of Ren's hairs (Hair9.nif) and took a video mini-tutorial to help clarify things.. I don't know, I generally comprehend things better when I see them in motion myself, so I thought maybe others would too.

Link can be found here
http://media.putfile.com/CuteUnit-Rigs-Ren

Posted by: Triarii Jun 5 2006, 04:03 AM

*nvm, i answered my own question.

Posted by: periplaneta Jun 6 2006, 11:50 AM

Have any of you Illustrious Ones managed to use this method to successfully export a skinned chest piece? I am having problems with shoulder vertices that are weighted to UpperArmTwist bones; their position is distorted after parenting in Nifskope, and also in the game.

For all body parts I find that the NiTrishape translation needs to be edited to equal that of the original block. This works fine for lowerbody parts. With the chest piece, however, it looks alright in Nifskope (apart from the weird vertices) but in the CS the chest piece moves up and down vertically if the NPC is rotated! In game the chest piece is displaced below the body.

Anyone had similar problems?

Posted by: Marseo Jun 6 2006, 01:00 PM

This is coming along pretty well, alot faster than I was expecting since even simple texture replacing in Oblivion requires a phd in Archaism compaired to morrowind.

Posted by: Lithis Jun 7 2006, 12:49 AM

How can I change my mesh to version 20.0.0.5? I went to the NIHeader, but it won't let me update the version. When I right click it, it gives me the option to "update" it, but that doesn't even seem to do anything. And when I left click it, it won't let me select it so that I can change it from 20.0.0.4 to 20.0.0.5.

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 7 2006, 03:38 AM

I've found that to be the case as well on some meshes. Thing is, if the rigging is working properly you shouldn't have to manually punch in any translation values at all. When you pase the trishape into a nif that has all the same bones , it should snap-to those bones even if it's not parented to the scene root. The bones can only be 1 level deep in the tree, so if it's like NiNode Scene Root>NiNode Bip01>bones it doesn't seem to like working. properly. Bit of a hair puller for me a few days ago.. trying to troubleshoot this one.


You don't. Follow my image tutorial that I linked a page or two back.

Posted by: periplaneta Jun 7 2006, 06:58 AM

Dear CuteUnit,
If you are having problems, then I don't feel so bad!
Something is definitely weird with way the rigging is exported. I thought I had made a mistake relabeling the UpperArmTwi(st) bones but I checked and they are OK in Blender. The 20.0.0.4 nif version looks fine, but when the chest NiTrishape block is pasted in to a 20.0.0.5 file it doesn't snap to the bones properly. And it's as though the position of the UpperArmTwist bones is flipped so vertices weighted to them become distorted.

Posted by: Necron28290 Jun 7 2006, 07:10 AM

throttlekitty i wanted to ask could you please make a tut on how to import custom effects into the game like on cuteunits darkcute blade the scrolling text and the skeleton
thanx in advance

Posted by: periplaneta Jun 7 2006, 07:13 AM

Sorry CuteUnit, I'm being a bit thick here! I reread your post more carefully, but I don't understand how we can get an exported file with NiNode Scene Root > Bones?

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 7 2006, 08:04 AM

I'm almost positive at this point it's some sort of Nifskope problem, Peri, but I don't want to bring it up with the developers until I know more and can be sure.

I'll fiddle some tonight. don't hesitate to experiment with things yourself either. It's probably something we're doing that we wouldn't even notice normally.

Posted by: throttlekitty Jun 7 2006, 09:53 AM

lol which custom effects? There are quite a number that you can pull off in Nifskope/modelling/texturing. The scrolling texture bit is fairly easy. I guess I could write that up.

In the meantime, Check out meshes\landscape\somethingsomethingwaterfall.nif

Posted by: CuteUnit Jun 7 2006, 10:35 AM

New Nifskope version on the Niftools download page ( Official announcement not written up by Shon yet) that fixes an internal data structure M4444x referred to as "Vertex Maps". This is what was causing the crashes on some Nvidia cards on our user-rigged meshes. Go download! If you rigged a mesh with the previous Nifskope, delete the NiSkinPartition block and tell nifskope to regenerate it in the new version (right cilck your mesh's trishape or tristrips>Make SkinPartition)

Posted by: raziel23x Jun 7 2006, 11:37 PM

Using Python version 2.4
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 303, in import_nif
RuntimeError: Unknown block type encountered during file read: BSXFlags
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 303, in import_nif
RuntimeError: Unknown block type encountered during file read: BSXFlags


I am trying to import a nif file into blender to look at it to use as a example and i get this every time i try to import a nif file into belnder iam using V2.41


I just downloaded them all today so it is the updated version of blender adn the import/export script as well as i updated nifskope from 0.8.6 to 0.8.7

Posted by: Triarii Jun 8 2006, 01:38 AM

I think it's because Blenders .Nif scripts can only read files 20.0.0.4 whereas Oblivions get saved as 20.0.0.5. I think NifSkope exports them as that aswell.

And thats great news about the new release CuteUnit.

Posted by: N-TranceD Jun 24 2006, 08:03 PM

Cute Unit, ive been going through your helmet rigging tutorial and seem to be stuck, im also useing a helmet, i export the nif, select the tri shape, block- copy branch and then new window, open the mythic dawn helm model, but whenever i try to paste it in i get this error

failed to map parent link "NiNode|customhelm"
and the model does not apear

i swear the 2nd time i tried it it pasted fine, i deleted the beth model but soon had a crash before i could get much farther, i know i must be doing a small somthing wrong but i cant figure it out, anyone know? do i need to paste into a specific atribute or branch?

Posted by: Darknel Jun 24 2006, 08:46 PM

The Blender import scripts don't read Havok collision data (i.e. the BSX flags you see in that error message). You have to "clean" the nif file in Nifskope first by deleting all of the BSX flags and take out the bhkcollisionobject branch too. Strictly speaking all you really need to be importing as a nif is the Scene Root node with the NiTristrips/shapes branches within that (aka the tristrip/shape geomtry blocks).

Of course this means that your exported nifs won't have any collision data in them either. At that point you either have to paste the tristrip/shape geom of your exported nif back into an official mesh or paste the Havok blocks back into your newly exported mesh. By preference I would recommend the latter because the 20.0.0.4 nif file format doesn't seem to support Havok in quite the same way as the 20.0.0.5 nifs do.

N-TranceD

Your attempts to paste don't work because the scene root node of the mythic dawn hood isn't called customhelm. All you should have to do is rename the scene root node of your newly created nif to the same name as the mythic dawn hood and it should paste across fine. It's essentially the same problem as when for instance you can't paste because bone names between newly exported and original bones are different (although I believe this doesn't happen now since Brandano updated the Blender export scripts).

Posted by: N-TranceD Jun 25 2006, 04:13 AM

thanks thats what it was, knew it was somthing relativly simple i overlooked.

Posted by: Adanorcil Jun 25 2006, 06:47 AM

I am a complete layman when it comes to doing this, but i tried my hand at making something with a future project in mind. I tried using a mesh in the CS, but it gives me a message saying "insertmeshnamehere contains old skin info and needs to be re-exported."

Re-exporting from Blender doesn't change anything though. Does anyone know what is the cause of this? (Probably some big mistake on my behalf. )

Posted by: Adanorcil Jun 26 2006, 01:15 AM

I think this topic deserves a little bump. (Granted, that bump was also out of self-interest. )

Posted by: throttlekitty Jun 26 2006, 02:02 AM

After you export from blender, you'll wanting to be copying your TriShape into a v20.0.0.5 .nif, it just makes life a little easier. There are still things that need to be cleaned up. Don't forget the Make Skin Partition spell

Posted by: Adanorcil Jun 26 2006, 02:29 AM

I did the make skin partition, but how exactly do you update the file type? It's not really described extensively.

Posted by: Darknel Jun 26 2006, 02:37 AM

You don't really update the file type so much as paste the relevant parts into an already updated file type.
It's a case of copying and pasting over all the NiTristrip/shape geom blocks into a v.0.5 nif with all the right bones in it and then using the Make Skin Partition Spell.

And there are many guides that cover this extensivly going back as far as RedFeather's "Custom Armour with Cut and Paste." At this point the principles are identical whether you're switching blocks from your own meshes or official ones (except of course that for your own you need to make the Skin Partition).

EDIT http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=394408 to the aforementioned tutorial.

Posted by: Hekate Aug 11 2006, 06:10 PM

This is vaulable information. I have it saved before it is lost forever.

Thanks for the information!

Posted by: Sir Drake Aug 14 2006, 05:53 AM

Im still all messed up :3
I have my model (mesh) of a new npc but there he is just an obj.
Any tut for how to get him in niff or ingame
Because its nor armor its a whole new npc