Issue Trying to Edit Lykaios Hair Mesh(PyNifly)

[xTosca]

So, I'm attempting to edit the "lion mane" hair for the Lykaios Race to make it a bit slimmer and more "fitting" around the neck. The problem is, no matter what I do, whenever I export it back into the game, it's either:

- Untextured and just white
- Un-weighted, just floating
- Distorts wildly depending on view angle
- All of the above.

I have no idea what I'm supposed to do here to fix this. I thought editing hair would be fairly straightforward- import it with the import tool, edit it, re-export. Apparently not.

At one point it "worked", but the alphas on the texture were off(which I realized probably had something to do with the fact that hair mesh actually uses two nifs with slightly altered materials)

However even following the EXACT same steps again, suddenly it just breaks again and I can't even get THAT result again.

Even if I import a base, unedited nif of the hair, then IMMEDIATELY re-export it with zero changes, it imports into the game broken, unweighted and untextured. I have no clue what's causing it or how to fix it.

Help??

(specific hair in question I'm trying to edit is lionmane_hl_m and lionmane_m)

[traison]

I only just started editing meshes with Blender and PyNifly yesterday so I really don't know what I'm talking about here, but:

1. I've already found a mesh that imported incorrectly into Blender. Wrong orientation, thus built-in animation animates wrong (or the animation is oriented wrong).
2. My understanding is that back in the day with earlier Blender import/export plugins, people used to have to build or copy part of the Nif data in post using NifSkope.

With that said, I would thus assume:

1. The import/export is not perfect.
2. Expect to do work in NifSkope after the export to restore some aspects of the Nif.
   1. Keep the vertex changes made in Blender, but copy other nodes from the pre-edit Nif. This could restore textures and weight paint.
   2. Keep in mind that editing the vertex count may un-align arrays that contain data related to vertices. This could for instance cause that distortion issue you mentioned.

I'm curious to find out what someone more knowledgeable in this matter has to say as well. Would be happy to be proven wrong in some or all of these issues.

[xTosca]

19 minutes ago, traison said:

I only just started editing meshes with Blender and PyNifly yesterday so I really don't know what I'm talking about here, but:

1. I've already found a mesh that imported incorrectly into Blender. Wrong orientation, thus built-in animation animates wrong (or the animation is oriented wrong).
2. My understanding is that back in the day with earlier Blender import/export plugins, people used to have to build or copy part of the Nif data in post using NifSkope.

With that said, I would thus assume:

1. The import/export is not perfect.
2. Expect to do work in NifSkope after the export to restore some aspects of the Nif.
   1. Keep the vertex changes made in Blender, but copy other nodes from the pre-edit Nif. This could restore textures and weight paint.
   2. Keep in mind that editing the vertex count may un-align arrays that contain data related to vertices. This could for instance cause that distortion issue you mentioned.

I'm curious to find out what someone more knowledgeable in this matter has to say as well. Would be happy to be proven wrong in some or all of these issues.

...Okay, so, how exactly do you do literally any of that? |D

I have zero experience with NifSkope whatsoever so I have no clue what to even do with that.

[traison]

I would go by trial-n-error here. I would start by locating the node that contains vertex position data, leave that alone and copy-paste everything else from the original nif. Another method would be to just compare the 2 (original vs edited nif) to find changes and then determine per-instance whether or not it may be related to the issues I'm seeing (be it missing textures or whatever). Copy branch and Paste branch context menu options will be your tools here.

Edited October 15, 2023 by traison