What is the easiest (and latest) process to modify existing meshes (vertex position only)

[kurikinton]

I bought a great program called a few years ago called Quidam which (though the maker is now out of business) was kind of a competitor to Poser. Unlike the latter program, it is primarily a "sculpt" modeler along the lines of ZBrush, and the toolset for that is quite powerful and intuitive.

The program has a great feature where it can import .obj files, which you can edit with all the available tools such as sculpting, and then export the edited .obj file by updating vertex changes only, so nothing else is altered. That means it is the perfect tool for adjusting meshes slightly (or greatly, as the case may be) so it is ideal for creating morphs and that sort of thing.

 

The ease of, say, exporting a figure from Poser, sculpting it in Quidam, and reimporting is such that I am daunted by most of the tutorials describing how to alter existing meshes for Skyrim. I get the impression that without 3DS, you typically have to manually recopy weight mapping even just to move a few vertexes.

I was wondering what the easiest process was to taking an existing character related mesh (body, armor, etc.) and just altering vertex position, then getting it back in game.

 

I'd love to hear from people who do this regularly regarding what their process is. There are tons of tutorials out there, but it is hard to sift through them to find the latest greatest one without wasting a considerable amount of time with false positives.

[blabba]

Well, the control scheme for Outfit Studio is finicky at best and any pro out there would laugh at it or be utterly frustrated with it.

 

But if you don't/can't get the hang of Blender/3DSMax/Any proffesional 3-d Modeling app

 

And all you need to do are 'general' adjustments to a body, then Outfit Studio is pretty good/easy to use.

 

I mean, it was my gateway drug into 3D modelling in the first place, I still use it for a lot of things but for better controls and such, I switch to 3DSMax (or ask a pro to help me )

[canderes]

Lightest thing is probably blender or gmax. If you want to use a body from the program you'll need to save the skin pose for the skeleton how it is when you import it-you know how it has the arms slightly bent-and you can use one of two methods to get the skeleton inside the model: refine the bones so they fit inside the model-you'll be altering the length of the links between the joints-or the alternate method is to select all the bones/nodes in skeleton and make sure they are set to bone mode, so it doesn't stretch the links between joints and rotate the skeletons joints so it fits inside the mesh. I don't know how altering the length of the links inbetween will affect the animations in the game, but I would recommend you just rotate the joints until they fit in the mesh and when you are ready to export reset the skin pose so that the character is posed how it was when you originally imported the skeleton. If quidam is anything like makehuman it shouldn't be too difficult to weight meshes because everything is quads. Try not to rescale bones either because when animations play it will apply any scale keys in the animation to the bones in the skeleton.

 

Oh and when you do have one mesh weighted already all you'll likely have to do is paste the weights. If you use gmax/3dsmax in the skin modifier turn off "affected by bone scale".

[kurikinton]

 

And all you need to do are 'general' adjustments to a body, then Outfit Studio is pretty good/easy to use.

 

 

Thanks, I certainly need to look into that then (it's been downloaded, just not actually looked at).

I'm actually perfectly familiar with basic modeling (been doing it since before Lightwave version 1 on the Amiga), I'm just seriously intimidated by all of the non directly modeling related tasks that working with Nifs seems to involve, such as replacing headers or the aforementioned manually replacing weight maps that already exist.

Ideally, if Nifskope just had a working feature to export an obj from a mesh block, and then reimport the vertices without changing anything else, that would be the most ideal solution. I guess the latest version of Nifskope no longer even exports .obj files, unfortunately.

[blabba]

O.o

 

Just did a quick test, and I can confirm latest nifskope (1.1.3) does indeed export .OBJ fine (at least for 3DS Max)

[kurikinton]

If you want to use a body from the program you'll need to save the skin pose for the skeleton how it is when you import it-you know how it has the arms slightly bent-and you can use one of two methods to get the skeleton inside the model: refine the bones so they fit inside ....

 

You see, that's the thing. My question (to whomever) is why do I even have to have anything to do with the skeleton when all I want to do is to move (transform) some vertices on an existing mesh and get that transformation into the game? I'm not going to change the length or size of of bones, nor am I going to change the weighting. I'd like to keep the existing weighting and bones and just move a vertex here and there, which is what typically needs to be done for, say, a slightly different shape to the stomach or breasts or what have you.

 

My past experience in (non game related) modeling says I should be able to just get the mesh (only) into whatever modeling program, sculpt it, export it without changing vertex order within the file, and then replace the original mesh with the new one, and the relationship with the skeleton and weighting will be as it was at the start.

 

Edit: the obvious thing is that when reimporting the sculpted mesh, *only the vertices should be changed*, so the skeleton/weight data is not overwritten. Something tells me there is no such import feature available, so that is why everyone goes through all those extra steps?

[kurikinton]

O.o

 

Just did a quick test, and I can confirm latest nifskope (1.1.3) does indeed export .OBJ fine (at least for 3DS Max)

 

Ah, great, I need to update then. Thanks!

 

Edit: er no actually that's the version I have. I just need to try it then, as the Nifskope site lists ".obj files not exporting correctly" as a known issue for the version.

[canderes]

We'll you are going to have to do it if the hierarchy for the skeleton in quidam is different than skyrim-if that's the case then just pose the character in that program the way the skyrim skeleton is setup and just export a static model. Once you export your first version of the mesh all you need to do is go edit poly and move your points around after weighting it the first time. I guess if you want to try to transfer quidam weights over to the skyrim skeleton you can export a file type that carries both the skeleton and model over to max, and then using the "save animation" tool you can try to map the weights from quidam bones to the skyrim ones in max.

[myuhinny]

I have tried blender before but never seemed to get it to work right. But I have found that depending on what you have to do that tweaking certain vertice in nifskope can get the job done if they are minor. I use this when I add a body to armors using nifskope and use it to remove any clipping there is. Some things it just won't work on like anything that is a full body suit or things that are connected at different areas on the body. While the top might look good the bottom will not be and the same with the bottom looking good but not the top and by the time you get the bottom looking good the player now looks like the pillsbury dough boy. 

[canderes]

Ok I understand what you mean now-I thought you were trying to take quidam generated models to nif. What you'll want to do is import the mesh in quidam, make your changes, go back to max or whatever, export and export your model as a nif. If all you did was move vertex positions then just copy the nitrishape branch in nifskope and paste it over the original nitrishape branch in the file you got it from. If you didn't change the order of the vertex list then everything should work.

[kurikinton]

We'll you are going to have to do it if the hierarchy for the skeleton in quidam is different than skyrim-if that's the case then just pose the character in that program the way the skyrim skeleton is setup and just export a static model. Once you export your first version of the mesh all you need to do is go edit poly and move your points around after weighting it the first time. I guess if you want to try to transfer quidam weights over to the skyrim skeleton you can export a file type that carries both the skeleton and model over to max, and then using the "save animation" tool you can try to map the weights quidam bones to the skyrim ones in max.

 

In the case of Quidam, no skeleton or weights are involved, and none would be required for straight mesh sculpting. If I want to pose or animate the whole character, then yes I would need the skeleton and weight map, but the skeleton and mesh are two different entities that are linked, so if I only want to move a vertex or two on the mesh *without* posing anything, then I don't need the skeleton or weightmap.

 

When I import an .obj file into Quidam, the program just sees it as some random mesh, not as "part of a character". The benefit of Quidam is just the nifty sculpting tools, but the same rule should apply to any other modeling program. To edit a mesh, you shouldn't have to worry about the rigging. Rigging is for posing and animation.

 

The only exception to that is when the sculpting you do to the mesh is so great that it introduces distortion *under certain poses* if you don't also update the weight map. For instance, if through sculpting you significantly change hip shape, then the but will look funny when the legs are bent at extreme angles (compared to a non sculpted character), which is just an example from the Poser <> Quidam workflow.

[kurikinton]

Ok I understand what you mean now-I thought you were trying to take quidam generated models to nif. What you'll want to do is import the mesh in quidam, make your changes, go back to max or whatever, export and export your model as a nif. If all you did was move vertex positions then just copy the nitrishape branch in nifskope and paste it over the original nitrishape branch in the file you got it from. If you didn't change the order of the vertex list then everything should work.

 

Ah, OK, thanks. So it is possible then! Unfortunately, I don't have 3DS, so I guess I still have to deal with the changing IDs and other alchemy when dealing with blender (not to mention the awful interface of 2.49 which I never managed to figure out.... But beggars can't be choosers.

 

So I just need to try that out then.