An introduction to 3ds Max and Skyrim

[delilah]

but it is the exact same files used by the original version of the armor...

 

are these settings found in nifskope? or will i have to edit the dds files?

 

[canderes]

Hey the normals for your top are flipped backwards (I looked at _0). You have to flip the normals then edit mesh - > element -> surface properties -> normals -> flip

 

That would explain the shadow thing from before; the slider is making the armor go inside out when it morphs.

 

Both have the normals for the top flipped.

[delilah]

Hey the normals for your top are flipped backwards ...  edit mesh - > element -> surface properties -> normals -> flip

 

 

Ok...  did that, didnt work, and now my top is green.  i mighta missed something in nifskope, as i was kind of rushing it.  i'll try again in a minute, but i wanted to ask this...

 

how do i tell if my normals are right?  when i went back into max, i noticed that when i selected the normals for the bottoms, the element highlighted bright pink.  same for the top, but then i flipped them and they turned a darker shade of pink.

 

[canderes]

Only the top was inverted. If you apply a default material (just gray or whatever) and render then you get a dark mesh where the normals are inverted. If you right click on a model in the viewport go to object properties and then check backface cull. Usually turning that on will show the mesh completely black if it is wrong, and work correct only when the faces are pointing outward; this will hide the inside part of the polygon. If you go to the bslightingshaderproperty and look at the shader flags 2 there is a checkbox labeled slsf2_double_sided that you can turn on to make the model render on both sides; this keeps you from having to go and add polygons to the otherside of the mesh. The texture will render on both sides. It is probably green because it is missing bslightingshader.

 

[canderes]

Flipping the normal's shouldn't affect anything else, but if you have some faces pointing inward and others outward then when you plan on welding the polygons edges won't fuse.

 

[delilah]

i really dont understand what is wrong here.  everything is as you say it should be.

 

in max with backface cull on, texture is visible from the "outside" of the armor, but it is transparent when looking from the inside out. mesh is black on the inside, textured on the outside.  element highlight bright pink/red (just like the botoms) but goes darker if i flip normals.  in nifskope slsf2_double_sided is set...  as well as all the earlier settings you mentioned.  but once i get the armor in-game, the armor shines in the shadows and and is dark and dull in the light.

[canderes]

I looked at it and tweaked it abit. The file from post 49 has the _1 or _0 body twice; _0 and _1 are the identical, so the slider does not work. I flipped the polygons for cuirass001 in max, went back and got the bslightingshader from the wolf armor base body and pasted it over the body mesh; it was green because of the color it emitted, puke green or something I don't recall exactly. I went and copied the bslightingshaders from the wolf armor peice over the ones already attached; the texture clamp mode was CLAMP_S_CLAMP_T, I noticed the one in the wolf armor uses WRAP_S_WRAP_T and it corrected the shadowing issues I think. I get shine in lit areas when I view it in game, but it seems like the glossiness may be too high and is causing the shine to be small and sharp, but it does not shine in the dark.

 

nifdel.zip

[delilah]

thanks, canderes, i'll look into your changes in the morning.

 

the first versions i did, i mace the 0 and 1 weights the same just so i could make sure i could get the thing into the game before i spent all that effort tweaking the top to fit the bigger boobs. once the armor showed up in game i did the second weight.  i am exporting them to a common folder, making the nidskope tweaks then copying them to the games wolf folder.  i didnt think i could get any thing mixed up that way but maybe i did.

 

also...  not regarding textures...  is there some setting in max that is preventing me from completely removing a weight paint on several verts?    whats happenning is once i skin an armor, i save the file and load an animation to make sure it moves right.  big problem i had with the xenocite was that one pixel from a gem on each side was getting painted to the breast.  so when i walked, these 2 spikes kept jabbing at my boobs.  i went to skin>edit envelopes and scrolled the bone list looking for every bone that was coloring those 2 verts.  when i found one, i selected the verts and set them to 0 absolute, save and load an animation...  and see the verts poking at my boobs again.  im having the same issue with the spikes on the H11 armor.  its like as soon as i zero the verts for the clavicle, the upper arm twist picks them up, and vice versa.

[canderes]

Eh the only thing I can say about that is use the weight table and make sure that they aren't set for more than 3+ bones. I would weight on the two primary bones and then set the one you don't want to 0. I don't know what max does to normalize the weights but if you make two out of three bones heavy for a single vert it usually zeros the weight for that unwanted bone anyway.

[delilah]

i figured out how to fix that weight painting issue...  i just removed the bone  from the skin modifier.

[Kha]

 I'll look around some more and let you know if I figure out whats going on with that.

 

Thanks a lot!!

 

I have noticed, not sure if it is something related to the ride animation problem, that some animations like sneakbow_idledrawn and sneakbow_release  when you import in 3dMax they don't look the same as in Havok Preview, in max it seems like it is missing the pose only animating the arms for the release animation and for the idle one it doesn't even have a proper animation it is just the noise on the character.

 

So I thought it could have something to do with additive animations? While modding for dragon age the exporter had this additive animation option that would add the rotation of the animated bones to the pose the character was performing in game, and you could add this animation many times you wanted. And I see the Havok Exporter has an option to create additive animations too... do you have any idea how it works? Because I messed with it not knowing what I was doing and of course not working as I wanted....

[canderes]

The hct documentation doesn't say too much about it, but the hbt 6.6.0 mentions it in there quite a bit. I think what you have to do is animate only the parts that you want to keyframe while leaving the rest of the skeleton without any keyframe transformations, but if you want them to work correctly I think it might require custom behavior too. You want to ask VectorPlexus about it, I'm pretty sure he knows more about how it works.

[delilah]

i have another problem and i have no idea what is causing it...

 

im working on the corrupter armor to get it to fit my body.  took me all day to get all the pieces to fit.  after i skinned the lower leg parts, i imported an animation to see how it looked and the armor got squished flat.  see images below...

 

 

 

after i skinned it, i edited the envelopes; removing everything except the left and right calf bones.  without the animation, i can move the leg bones and the armor tracks the way it should.  but once i import an animation, it goes all flat on me.

[canderes]

I suggest using these when you are skinning: https://github.com/nexustheru/max_nif_plugin/downloads

 

It does that to me if I use the figment ones, but when I switch over to those, import the skeleton and skin my meshes everything behaves normally. I would use figment's plugin only for animation. I haven't had any issues with this for skinwrapping or vertex weighting. The envelopes and skinning go haywire because the translations for the bones aren't locked and the bones\pivots are improperly scaled\oriented. This happens more or less because the bone has almost no thickness to it.

[Teechan]

I've had to use Theru's older version for Max 2010 64x as the new one pops up with DLL: Error Code 127: "the specified procedure cannot be found". Both files are in the right folders. Someone mentioned it in the Niftools forums but never got around to responding back to the person trying to help troubleshoot. It works fine for my purposes.

[delilah]

i installed the plugin version canderes recommended, and while i havent had the flat armor thing happen again, it looks like the path to my texture files took a dump.  if i load a scene from before the new pluging, the textures show up.  but any new scenes and all nif imports end up with the random coloring.  i saw a line in the ini file for the plugin that reads:

 

  InstallPath=[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks\Skyrim]=@"Installed Path"

 

that entry shows the path to my skyrim folder, but no textures.

 

[canderes]

Yeah that's the bad thing about it. Each plugin has things the other doesn't, I think the texture portion of the new plugin was unfinished. It says something on the forum post about the alpha branch or transparency being fixed and bslightingshader being added as part of the material editor. If you have both the 64 and 32 bit versions of 3ds max installed you can have a different version of the plugin installed separately on each if you don't want to overwrite the plugins whenever you need to switch.

[delilah]

i have a 32 bit system so i cant use the 64 bit version of max...  but if im just gonna export nifs, i can use the max 2012 with the other plugin, right?

 

[canderes]

Yeah, but it looks like your going to have to swap between plugins when you need to. It's just the method I use for not having to replace plugins every time I open the app.

[delilah]

yay! i modified an armor and dont have the fucked up normals!!  i have only done the _0 weight atm, but it looks great in-game.  Tera H-11

 

 

 

 

[canderes]

I always wanted to port the models from lineage 2 but they all seem to be paper thin looking and don't really have anything other than specular maps. Sometimes when the models come with normal maps I find that remaking them from the diffuse texture with the nvidia plugin gives better results than the originals. I think it may have something to do with it being object space/tangent space/whatever space distorts the way it is shown in this game. The only thing I know for sure is that the body normals are mesh/object space, but I have never bothered looking at the alternatives.

[delilah]

I always wanted to port the models from lineage 2 but they all seem to be paper thin looking ...

 

if you can get me the nifs, or point me to where i can get them, i wouldnt mind toying around with them.  i DID try googleing them, but all i got were images, or links to where i could get the figurine type models.  some of them look really cool, and i like the cloaks.

 

 

edit, i installed lineage 2 and found a couple of extractors and plugins for it...  im trying to make heads or tails of all these files and their structure atm.

[delilah]

i have a tiny little problem that i dont know how to fix...

 

i accidentally saved my scene with the run forward animation loaded...  i didnt have a backup of the file.  i need to move a few verts to fix some clipping, but when i delete the skin modifier the armor piece moves into the position it was in during the animation when i saved,  this puts the armor at an odd angle and deforms it slightly.  how can i get the piece back into the bind pose position without restarting from scratch?

[canderes]

Import the skeleton in a new scene, select all the bones/cameras, then manually add key for everything as it is in the default state, and go animation -> save animation. Go into the scene with your meshes and select the bones/cameras, go animation -> delete selected animation, then animation -> load animation. After that just use animation -> delete selected animation to remove all the keys from the timeline.

 

Set your animation -> skin pose for the skeleton and cameras before you start doing anything next time. If you do that you can just go assume skin pose and it will be the way it was when you imported the skeleton.

[delilah]

sweet, thanks

 

 

EDIT:

i thought for sure that would work...  unfortunately, it didnt.  i still get the armor piece in the animation position when i delete the skin modifier.

 

EDIT (again):  NVM...  i fixed it.  tried exporting as a nif, then importing into a clean scene.  problem solved.