[Alpha]Empire Coat (Formerly some random shitty Test)

[Yoo]

Description:

This mod serves as a proof of concept / test about how to emulate cloth physics using the amazing HDTPhysics Extension plugin.
The dress is based on Camilla Welton's Empire Coat design.

 
Craft it at any Tanning Rack.
REMEMBER TO MAKE A BACK UP OF YOUR SAVEGAME, I WONT TAKE RESPONSABILITY OF ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER/CHARACTER
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FIRST TEST.

 
SECOND TEST.

 
THIRD TEST. (FINAL, alpha release)
 

Grab it here!

 

http://www.loverslab.com/files/file/813-empire-coat-a-hdt-test/

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Reqs: 
UNP Body (if you use Calientes body you wont notice major texture issues)
SKSE
Latests version of HDTPhysicsExtension (tested on 12.29)
HDTHighHeels System for the boots addon.
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Compatibility:
REMEMBER TO MAKE A BACK UP OF YOUR SAVEGAME, I WONT TAKE RESPONSABILITY OF ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER/CHARACTER
That being said... 
I think It should be compatible with almost everything. But Im not really sure, thats why im uploading it for testing...

If you use the XP32 hair, be sure to use the compatibility patch. It wont change anything, but will just put his collision objects at a layer different than 0 (10)

(Collision filters at layer 0 collides with everything on Havok engine, so it will also fix possible incompatibilities with other mods that adds rigid bodies at the chest/arms area)

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Troubleshooting:

 

"When I restart a saved game, sometimes the lower part of the coat seems to clip trough legs"

Unequip and reequip the coat so havok can realign the rigid bodies.

 

"The lower part is warped and is at the other side of the body"

Unequip and reequip, or just move around a bit, the collision objects should do the rest.

 

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FAQ:

 

"How do I get this dress?"

Read the description...

 

"Why UNP Slim?"

Because is the body I use...

 

"Are you going to create versions for other bodies?"

Not at the moment, Im bussy with another project.

 

"My breasts dont move even when I equip the Havok Object thing"

There are no weights on the breasts, the model was rigged using the vanilla skeleton.

 

"I changed the shape of your mesh using X tool to fit my body but now the skirt has a lot of clipping"

You have to reshape the collision objects of the XML, since they are fitted to the UNP slim body.

 

"This dress sucks..."

I agree.

 

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PERMISION NOTES

You are free to retexture it, convert it to other bodies and dissasemble it to understand how it works, I even encourage you to do it and if you have any questions, feel free to ask, I would be glad to answer.

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CREDITS: 

HydrogenSaysHDT 

for creating this amazing plugin. I should build a monument on your name.

LL community

 for sharing their interest and not being silent 

cl

icks like the "N" guys.

Canderes 

for his "Bone to Nub" and "HCT Preview Caps" scripts that I used as a base for mine, for his tutorials and well, for just being amazing.

XP32: 

For creating that ponytail. I wouldn't know about this plugin without his upload.

and finally...

Bethsoft:

 For giving us a crippled toolset. And creating such a nice game.

[canderes]

What constraints are you using? It looks really nice. Every time I see something like this I wonder why they didn't include the cloth dynamics in the vanilla game.

[Kaz Aanh]

What constraints are you using? It looks really nice. Every time I see something like this I wonder why they didn't include the cloth dynamics in the vanilla game.

 

Becouse of Engine Limitations.

[Yoo]

All of them are just ragdolls but their angular velocity is quite limitated (between 10 and 20 depending on how far they are from the body) and some heavy angular and lineal damping (0.8 at the end of the chain).

The front rigid bodies have a high friction value (1) and a low restitution value (0.1)

The legs have a rigid body with a Convex Hull shape which is rounded at the sides and almost flat at the front (and they have a low friction value). So when the rigid bodies of the front of the coat touches the leg, they just stick to it and by having a flat shape the chances of sliding are reduced.

And at the sides, there is another group of ragdolls intended to work as a blending between the front and back (which is just a single ragdoll).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Becouse of Engine Limitations."

 

Actually is not the engine. The problem was the consoles and their poor CPUs. A huge game like skyrim with dinamic cloth would be a pain for an Xbox 360 and we know how shitty are Beth devs at PS3.

But to give you an example, just look at Dragon's Dogma, it has some REALLY basic cloth but not all the characters have that kind of dynamic and even then, the meshes had a low polycount.

So, with their insane hitscan mechanics, the climbing, the graphics and the cloth, the devs had to use the "letterbox" trick to decrease the hardware load. And we are talking about CAPCOM, they have A LOT more experience with consoles than Beth.

 

Anyway, blame consoles, The engine is not great, I agree, but it was able to do that stuff. Remember the cloth objects at oblivion?

[Lovely Rose]

very nice ;D

[b00marrows]

oh ho ho, verry nice!

Most of the issues i see are due to snappy animation (AKA not your fault) and only a bit of clipping!

 

looks like it only needs a bit of tweaking, but im no expert.

[judge0]

Very nice, we can expect a mod soon????

 

[Yoo]

Well, the base model is almost done, I just have to add some extra details (like the zipper), the UVW map is done (I hope that TES6 will support PTex but I doubt it xD), the difuse, specular and normal maps are done (pretty basic, but this is just a dress to learn how to use HDT Physics) so I just need to do a good rig, add the details, add more collition objects and solve some issues with the chains at the sides of the coat.

Ahh, I almost forgot the _1 version and the first person mesh. So well, I cant give you a date, but maybe a couple weeks. I've a full time job and I can only dedicate a couple hours to this per day.

But look at the good side, I just started to mess with the HDT plugin and skyrim around two weeks ago. (I should give a cookie to Canderes for his tutorials and scripts).

[Uriel]

Damn, instantaneous transitions between animations are no good. Is it possible to make skyrim interpolate a little between them.

[remois]

Oooh, i will definitely follow this one. On a side note, it would be great to put it on a slot that is not the torso, so that you can wear it on another piece of armor (I know it's prone to clipping depending on the armor but I really don't mind that).

 

Great work anyway! Keep going ♥

[Yoo]

Damn, instantaneous transitions between animations are no good. Is it possible to make skyrim interpolate a little between them.

 

Well, the game does it, try a pose mod, switch between poses and you will see that the your character will move its arms and legs to fit the new pose. Unless there is a HUGE difference between them.

 

To give you a quick example, look at my character at 0:28 she stops walking and makes a small transition to the idle which is a bit different from the "end loop" of the moving animation (I dont know the name of the keynotes of this game, so Im guessing) ,Such transition is not animated, its the game blending the walk animation with the idle.

 

But, at the rest of the video, the character makes such sudden moves because of the 360 walk and run. In one frame the character is running forward, and at the next frame you force your character to make a 360° rotation, so the game is forced to change the anim without that blending.

 

So, short answer, the game does it but its no long enough for the a 360 run and walk mod. Although, with vanilla animations you cant make such sudden moves. Well... you can do it with the broken dual wield anims, and the ultra broken turns for combat. Twelve years after Morrowind and they still fail at that...*facepalm*

[Uriel]

I know skyrim has blending between the anims, but is this blending being set in the animations(like it was in oblivion, you just leave a special text mark where you want the blend to a next animation to start) or where? I found some settings in Skyrim's ini's, but they either don't affect anything or i don't know how to tune them properly.

Also, i think i had this instant turns with vanilla anims too.

[Yoo]

Gosh, I forgot that u can just turn the camera and walk and your character will make an instaturn *facepalm* its 6.36AM I should get some sleep xD

And about the keynotes, I dont really know, I've little to none experience with skyrim. Most of my knowledge comes from morrowind (I skipped oblivion modding) but at MW the keynotes that tell when a loop starts and when it ends were done at Max. Were u just had to add a keynote at the animation bar to let the game know what to do or even what kind of sounds it should play but I bet it should be something like that for skyrim too.

 

Anyway, I should go to sleep. Thanks everybody for the feedback! I'll try to get it working a bit better next time. ^^

[J Di]

That's awesome man!! Me likey! I wouldn't mind the butt clipping. Though I'm kinda wondering about the flapping when she quickly turned from right to left, nonetheless, this is amazing job!

[HydrogensaysHDT]

I know skyrim has blending between the anims, but is this blending being set in the animations(like it was in oblivion, you just leave a special text mark where you want the blend to a next animation to start) or where? I found some settings in Skyrim's ini's, but they either don't affect anything or i don't know how to tune them properly.

Also, i think i had this instant turns with vanilla anims too.

 

It's in behavior.hkx.

IK animations are also in behavior.hkx (LookAt IK, DirectAt IK etc. there're stored as a modifier)

 

Havok behavior is not inside the free havok package so I know little about that(The only thing I'm sure is it's a state machine). But I think BSCyclicBlendTransitionGenerator.fTransitionDuration should be what you want.

 

btw, use hkxcmd to convert behavior.hkx to xml first.

[HydrogensaysHDT]

4 bones can affect a vertex

another suggestion : set number of bones per partition to 60 while exporting to nif.

and .... Good Job!!!!!!!

[Kaz Aanh]

That looks really amazing but it seems like hella of work. Damn consoles they've stopped any kind of game advancing.

 

I just can imagine a new TES game with a fully physicable clothing/hair that don't clip through your body 

 

[parzysty]

Where can I get HDT hair?

[dobmc]

Becouse of Engine Limitations.

Would instead say that the studio responsible for Skyrim was incompetent buuuutt, prolly the budget is what limited the implementation of these features. Although Skyrim is using an engine that basically is named for its real-time collision & physic feature. So lol.

 

I just can imagine a 

 with a fully physicable clothing/hair that don't clip through your body

Well, lets see how much improvements TESO has made since Skyrim and then brainstorm what TES '6' will be like. I heard rumors that TESO still doesn't have spears. I wonder what they would add instead…

I'm just really astonished at the decision of making a MMO version of the TES universe, with Skyrim-like combat and controls, and unmoddable. So much disappointment. I could imagine a large group of people playing Skyrim even after the release of the game.

 

Just wanted to point out that even though that its not always engine limitation. There's always a way around, and it happens that your imagination is what ultimately limits you.

 

Anyways good start. I'm really digging these collision enabled mods.

[canderes]

What are you using for the shape type on the legs? Are those shapes bound to the thigh bones or did you add new ones for them? Convex is the only thing I can get to work apart from box/capsule. Mesh seems to always cause a crash. I'm trying to get working chains and necklaces but the shape types are limiting.

[Yoo]

What are you using for the shape type on the legs? Are those shapes bound to the thigh bones or did you add new ones for them? Convex is the only thing I can get to work apart from box/capsule. Mesh seems to always cause a crash. I'm trying to get working chains and necklaces but the shape types are limiting.

 

They are just some edited boxes and yes, Im using Convex shapes for them, but they are not "optimized" (optimizing the shapes causes some weird issues with the colition detection) and yes, I had the same problem with meshed objects, At the begining I tried using "C" shaped boxes for the rigid bodies at the side of the skirt (to allow the hands to interact with the skirt) being forced to use meshed objects for colition because convex hull doesnt support that type of shape. But each time I tried to use it in game I had an instacrash.

And they are bound to the the thigh bones and their quality is "fixed" so havok ingores the mass parameter and the bone doesnt fall.

 

 

BTW, each time I tried to bound a shape to the pelvis bone (and even spine 0), I had some issues with the colitions, maybe its the idle animation that moves that bone. But I had the same problem with vanilla idle.

 

Anyway, I should do another test with a skinned version of the rigid bodies to see what happens with the pelvis. But at the moment, Im working on a rig putting some weight on the tights and leaving the skirt front bones for secondary motion (using low weight values on them) because the "friction" approach relies too much on havok colition detection and the location of the bones when you sneak. So sometimes u see clipping, and some other times it works perfectly. Being too random for my taste.

[canderes]

I avoid binding spine and pelvis too. Keeping the names the same and default physics system is usually enough to get it to work anyway. I found that adding constraints to the vanilla ragdoll (thighs feet arms spines com neck and head) caused a ton of issues so all I do is just create the capsules and leave them as keyframe since they just follow the actors bone anyway. I guess the most you could do if you wanted the arms to interact would be to add a sphere or box body at the hands. COM acts as the default rb for the ragdolls pelvis and yeah the skeleton itself not the idles I think cause some slight offset issues. The giant skeleton with the rb had all of the original bones included some weird ones for footsteps aside from NPC root and it caused the rbs to move out almost a foot ingame. I try to keep root and only the siblings required so animobjecta/b and whatever else goes in the trash.

[Yoo]

Well, I was thinking about using the NCP Root bone.

It would be a nice start to create some "floor" collisions. The Root bone stays always at the floor. Except when you jump, at that moment, the bone goes up, but when you sneak, it stays at the floor, so it would be a nice workaround to create floor collisions.

I also thought about using two extra bones, and link the chain to the NPC root. The last bone will hold the Rigid Body and the second bone would have some "bone lag" to create a slight delay at the jump animation, so the "floor collision" could stay a bit lower than the "NPC Root" at the middle of the jump.

Although, I've not tested that yet, I was thinking about that at work and I've a shitload of stuff to do xD

 

Btw, tests using a box rigged to the "NPC Root" shows that it follows the character and stays back a bit when you walk/run/sprint so it could be a useful bone.

[canderes]

Yeah I thought about that for flapping books and actors that don't have a ragdoll. It wouldn't be perfect but you could use it to rig an actor with no ragdoll and get some dynamics out of it. The centaur on nexus doesn't have any nifskope rigid bodies or constraints and I thought that would be a way to get it die and flop around correctly ingame. NPC root stays at the same height at all times even if you jump COM is the one doing the movement.

[Yoo]

Then the anim I had used the NPC root to elevate the character, because I rigged a box to the NPC root and saw it go up (and then go down a bit when the character landed)

Well, if I create a long dress in the future, I will surely use the NPC Root for ground colitions, it wont be accurate, but its the best we got... for now. ^^

Also, if the NPC Pelvis cant be used for coltions around the pelvis, I would have to extrude a bit the upper part of my leg colition to create a false pelvis xD

I'll post an updated version in a couple days and if I'm happy with the result, I will add it textures and release it as an alpha.