Skyrim hates my textures... why?

[TentakelnBitte]

I'm converting some monsters from FFXII, and everything is going great... except Skyrim doesn't like the textures for some reason. They are dds and the same format as every working dds (I always overwrite an existing one), but they show up black in game. I've already checked the normals and transparency; the normals are NOT flipped (the ones that are, are invisible) and the transparency is working properly in Nifskope. 

 

I've attached the mesh and textures; just throw the texture folder directly into data\textures.

 

StupidLeekboi.zip

[Vader666]

Vertex colors maybe ?

 

I know there was a time when people said you need to delete the BsLightingShaders block in nifscope and copy over one from a vanilla .nif,

because the exporters weren't quite right, however no idea how much truth lies in that statement.

 

Edit:

 

Without textures installed its comletely black even in nifscope, once the vertex colors flag in Shader flags 2 gets unticked it turns to the "no texture purple".

So it indeed seems to be vertex colors.

[Imperfection]

Spoiler

 

11 minutes ago, Vader666 said:

Vertex colors maybe ?

 

Agree with what Vader666 said, even with correct support paths in nifskope v2.0 dev7 your textures are black, remove vertex colors from shader flag 2 they look as expected. Also not sure why your using skin shader type? I would expect it to be "default" instead. You can also add "double sided" to shader flag 2 to fix the leaves on his head from being transparent from underside.

 

[TentakelnBitte]

On 7/31/2021 at 7:11 PM, Imperfection said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Agree with what Vader666 said, even with correct support paths in nifskope v2.0 dev7 your textures are black, remove vertex colors from shader flag 2 they look as expected. Also not sure why your using skin shader type? I would expect it to be "default" instead. You can also add "double sided" to shader flag 2 to fix the leaves on his head from being transparent from underside.

 

Weird, it shouldn't have had either... I must have used a bad reference mesh. Thanks for taking a look, it was super late and I missed that completely.

 

Thanks for the tip about double siding, too, I've been disabling that out of habit since half my programs don't support it! >.<

[TentakelnBitte]

On 7/31/2021 at 7:11 PM, Imperfection said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Agree with what Vader666 said, even with correct support paths in nifskope v2.0 dev7 your textures are black, remove vertex colors from shader flag 2 they look as expected. Also not sure why your using skin shader type? I would expect it to be "default" instead. You can also add "double sided" to shader flag 2 to fix the leaves on his head from being transparent from underside.

 

 

Thanks again for the flag fixes! I've done a ton of porting since then and my game has so many neat features now. :3

 

I didn't want to open a new thread, and don't know where better to post this, but am I right in thinking this is a lost cause (without splitting it into a million more layers)?:

 

Looks good from some angles, but not others...

Spoiler

 

Without transparency, it obviously looks worse in general, but it drives me 1000% less crazy than looking at all those holes. :T
 

Spoiler

 

[Andy14]

11 minutes ago, TentakelnBitte said:

 

Thanks again for the flag fixes! I've done a ton of porting since then and my game has so many neat features now. :3

 

I didn't want to open a new thread, and don't know where better to post this, but am I right in thinking this is a lost cause (without splitting it into a million more layers)?:

 

Looks good from some angles, but not others...

  Hide contents

 

Without transparency, it obviously looks worse in general, but it drives me 1000% less crazy than looking at all those holes. :T
 

  Hide contents

 

 

Alpha blending in Creation Engine works only partially or very poorly with several meshes or even just polygons that lie on top of each other.

Disabling Blending at Alpha Properties in Nifskope (4845 -> 4844) fixes the issue. However, it doesn't look particularly good.

 

In addition, in NitriShapeData the Consistency Flag can be set to CT_MUTABLE - has some influence on blending.

 

[Dorabella]

Missing MipMap ??

[Imperfection]

20 hours ago, TentakelnBitte said:

 

Thanks again for the flag fixes! I've done a ton of porting since then and my game has so many neat features now. :3

 

 

Cool, glad you are making progress, that ride looks cool.

 

19 hours ago, Andy14 said:

 

Alpha blending in Creation Engine works only partially or very poorly with several meshes or even just polygons that lie on top of each other.

Disabling Blending at Alpha Properties in Nifskope (4845 -> 4844) fixes the issue. However, it doesn't look particularly good.

 

In addition, in NitriShapeData the Consistency Flag can be set to CT_MUTABLE - has some influence on blending.

 

 

What Andy14 said has been my experience as well, sometimes meshes layered both with flag 4845 will almost "blink" in and out depending on viewing angle. I've tried a lot of flags like 4333, 4846 and 237 and its totally hit or miss as to being able to fix at all. Some of it does come down to mesh construction as well. The hole in the head you might be able to mitigate some by having a more solid shape there, if you look at some of the hair models for example, they have several layers to sort of fill in the "gaps" and create a layered effect.

 

The screen below is the back of a fur coat with flag 4844/64 flag and it's a high poly mesh in combination with the texture that makes it look pretty good, (4 sections 41k verts), so the mesh can influence the end look, but more poly can have performance cost. I would be tempted to duplicate the individual tail feather meshes and scale a little to create a layered effect but as Andy said, that might not look so hot either. You could do that in nifskope, blender, or even outfit studio depending on how the mesh is constructed.

 

You could also try "double sided" and "assume shadow mask" to see if those have a positive effect with 4844 or 4845. Both are shader flag 2.

You could also try and drop the alpha property and adjust the alpha on the BSLightingShaderProperty node to see if that looks better, again hit or miss. Default is 1, try set to .7 or .5 etc to test. This might let you see too far into the mesh though.